Auctioneer’s hammer kept Elliott’s stammer in check for 28 years
Auctioneering is probably the last job in which you would expect someone with a stammer to end up, but after 28 years working for Brightwells, Andrew Elliott, one of the more colourful characters west of the Severn, has bid farewell to the profession.
In a career twist, the man who spent 10 years in hunt service, sought (but failed to find) his fortune in London and has since spent nearly three decades trying to extract money from those standing in front of his rostrum. But he is now to become general manager, a job made for him, at the famous watering hole and restaurant, Corse Lawn House Hotel, near Tewkesbury.
He was recruited to Brightwells in 1992 along with a youthful David Redvers, and Terry Biddlecombe, the former jump jockey just returned from Australia, when the auctioneering firm, which sold most things, wanted to expand into bloodstock as opposed to just horses and ponies.
During his time there, he sold a winner of the Gold Cup (Lord Windermere) and the Grand National (Tiger Roll), an Olympic show-jumping medallist, an eventing world champion and everything downwards to leading rein ponies.
Ironically, with a microphone in hand, he was always stutter free. “I’d drive all the way to Brighton races to auction the winner of the seller, which was two minutes’ work, and I’d be worrying all the way there if this was the day that I’d be stuck for words?” he said. “But, every time I stood up, the sun shone on me.”
When he was in hunt service, he was one of the liveried huntsmen escorting Pearlyman back to the winner’s enclosure after the 1987 Queen Mother Champion Chase at the Cheltenham Festival.
Following the race, he was taken to meet the Queen Mother in the Royal Box. He was quivering like a wreck and the colour of his scarlet coat as he tried to answer her question, but nothing came out.
“Don’t worry,” she said kindly. “I have plenty of experience of that.” (The King’s Speech.)
A year later, Pearlyman won his second Champion Chase and, after completing his ceremonial duties, Elliott was again taken to the Royal Box. On seeing Elliott, the Queen Mother marched up and said: “How is your stammer, young man?”
At one juncture in his life when potless, he needed a restorative drink and dropped into the Puesdown Inn on the A40 above Cheltenham.
He had forgotten his wallet and came to a mutual agreement with the landlord; he would use his skill, honed as a huntsman, at polishing leather to clean the publican’s shoes at the rate of a gin and tonic per pair.
The consequence was that he stayed three days and the landlord, who became a great friend, had shoes which were so highly buffed he could have shaved in the reflection for the next six months.
In 2004, Elliott was one of eight protesters to get into the chamber of the House of Commons, where the controversial bill to outlaw hunting was receiving its last reading. Outside, in Parliament Square, there was a full-on riot between country folk and police.
In order not to give their identities away and to distance themselves from the Barbour-clad rioters, the protesters were dressed as businessmen in pinstripe suits – with the exception of the always immaculately turned-out Elliott, who insisted on wearing his “lucky” tweed suit and looked like he had just hotfooted it from Countryside Day at Cheltenham races.
Besides that, he was wearing his five-year-old son George’s christening present, a priceless pair of silver cufflinks. When they got to the chamber, the plan was to rip off their shirts to reveal a pro-hunting slogan on their T-shirts.
Elliott, however, had not taken into consideration that a double-cuff shirt and cufflinks are not, it turns out, the most successful route to a swift disrobing on the hoof.
When he had been arrested and the police were still working out whether the eight were terrorists or fairly harmless country bumpkins – even the Met did not take too long to work that one out – Elliott’s only worry was a missing cufflink, which he had last seen flying through the air across the chamber.
The policewoman interrogating him gave this fairly short shrift, but noted it and, three months later, it arrived in the post. Slightly restores your faith in the police, doesn’t it?