The rush for Kildonan gold
A 19th-century wedding present of a locket makes a good price at Chorley’s and the Battersea Decorative Fair yields a late Christmas present
MRS CECIL FOLJAMBE was lucky in the timing of her wedding, July 22, 1869, which happened to coincide with the short-lived Kildonan Gold Rush. Small amounts of gold had long been found in the Strath of Kildonan, which runs west and north from Helmsdale in Sutherland, but, on returning from the Australian goldfields, Robert Nelson Gilchrist was authorised by the Duke to pan along the river, where he found worthwhile amounts, causing the rush. In April 1869, the Duke issued licences at £1 per month for 40sq ft claims and two shanty villages sprang up, with a saloon offering meals and bunk beds.
The Scotsman reported that gold ‘can now be got at £3 10s (about £444 today) per ounce, and when buyers are not plentiful, sales are being effected at £3 8s. At the start of the gold rush the going rate was as high as £4 10s (£571)’. Sales of 1½oz–2½oz per week were reckoned fair, and prospectors were able to wash eight or 10 shillings’ worth of gold each day. However, returns fell away and, facing complaints from tenant farmers and fishermen, the Duke stopped licensing miners at the year’s end. There was a further flurry of interest in the 1880s, when a dubious character calling himself John Peter Dunker claimed to have a new method of extracting minerals.
The former Miss Louisa Blanche Howard was impeccably connected even before her marriage to the future Earl of Liverpool, a nephew of the former Prime Minister. A cousin was Harriet, Duchess of Sutherland, who had died the previous October, so Louisa’s wedding present from a Sutherland daughter (Harriet’s sister-inlaw), Charlotte, Duchess of Norfolk, was a memorial photograph in a locket made of Kildonan gold (Fig 1). The history was recorded in a handwritten label in the fitted case sold with the locket at Chorley’s on January 25. It had four nuggets on the front cover.
Although the marriage was tragically short—louisa died in 1871, six weeks after giving birth to her second son, who had lived only a day—it was evidently happy. Her grieving widower not only had a splendid alabaster tomb carved for her in St Mary’s, Tickhill, Doncaster, in South Yorkshire, but commissioned 62 memorials in 38 churches associated with their families. All this accounts for the enthusiastic bidding that took the locket’s price to
£12,700 against an £800 estimate. It had come with a number of portraits and miniatures from the family of the present Lord Liverpool.
The highest price of the sale was for a 29½in-wide, 17th-century Mughal rosewood table cabinet (Fig 2), which reached £35,560. Made in Gujarat, the front flap and the interior arrangement of 21 drawers around a deep central drawer were profusely inlaid with ivory trees, lions and birds.
There were lions and birds aplenty at the Battersea Decorative Fair, as well as plenty of live, wellbehaved dogs. I suspect that this is one of the fairs at which journalists most often buy things. One of my colleagues came away with an elegant pair of Art Deco bookends and I was able to tick off a belated Christmas present. That was a set of Whitefriars glass water goblets and jug; I was particularly pleased when the dealer, Mimi Roberts, pulled out the original fitted cardboard box, containing the 1953 Viennese and Northampton newspaper scraps used for padding. As it is a present, I shall not mention the price, but I am happy.
Last week, I noted that two Victorian scrapwork draught screens had sold together for £715 at Lawrences of Crewkerne. I left unexpressed my thought that there could be little market interest in screens in today’s homes; had I done so, a good sale at the fair would have proved me wrong.
Chalet White, a business founded in Shropshire by a former director of Mallett Antiques, Giles Hutchinson Smith, and his wife, Lucy, specialises in mixing East and West. At Battersea they sold just such a mixture, an early-18th-century, four-fold gilded and lacquered leather screen (Fig 3), probably made in France or Flanders, but decorated with chinoiserie figures and landscapes, apparently based on the lakes at the Southern Song dynasty capital, Hangzhou. At £10,000, it went to a new buyer for their contemporary home.
Next week The Cotswolds go to Scotland