Miranda Goodbrey
Antiques dealer who fuelled the Biedermeier boom but fled when Princess Margaret came to visit
MIRANDA GOODBREY, who has died aged 81, was a schoolmistress and, with her husband Richard, the joint proprietor of one of the most enduring and successful antiques shops in Britain.
A Suffolk girl, she had spent an idyllic childhood on a farm near Framlingham, and subsequently taught English at the girls’ grammar school. She started her first small shop, in Wickham Market, with Richard Goodbrey, a former art student, soon after marrying him in 1963.
Deepest rural Suffolk in the mid-1960s meant crumbling farmsteads and cottages set in a sea of cow parsley and nettles. Getting there from London in those days could take six hours. Mandy, as she was known, was something of a pioneer at this time, filling the shop with rustic country things: beaten-up enamel wares, rag rugs, slipware pottery, old kitchen utensils and bread boards – what was to become the “country kitchen” look.
Later in the decade the Goodbreys bought the house in which they would live and the connected shop – a former Plymouth Brethren chapel – that would become the institution it remains.
Open only on Saturdays (at other times by appointment), Goodbreys Antiques became an unmissable excursion for hordes of avid collectors, interior decorators, and local celebrities with their weekend guests, all of whom had a liking for carefully restored goods which were not only affordable – prices ranged from hundreds of pounds to £2.50 – but also of high decorative potential. At the fashionable hour of 11 on a Saturday morning a salon atmosphere prevailed.
The shop’s extraordinary success story was the 1980s craze for Biedermeier furniture, which, while stocks endured, was imported in quantity from Eastern Europe and was expertly restored by Richard and his workshop staff to the highest perfection of finish and detail. During this time Macy’s of New York had a long-standing order with Goodbreys Antiques for the supply of Biedermeier goods, mostly genuine of the early 19th century, but with later revivals and some good reproductions, too.
The other stock included not only provincial French armoires, neoclassical commodes and Dutch marquetry cabinets, but also fine English furniture of the 18th and 19th centuries, and a plethora of small things, mostly brought in by Mandy. These included glass in many forms – cut, pressed, “slag”, and old rummers; rustic English and European pottery, Old Sheffield Plate, and whole dinner services of Spode, Mason’s and other distinguished makes.
Mandy Goodbrey also created a deal with a local estate to buy up discarded antlers, which were then transformed into sconces, display brackets and chandeliers.
The Goodbreys had an eye for the better pieces as well as an encyclopedic knowledge of their date, quality, and construction. One of Mandy’s special ploys was to place some interesting object so that the keen customer would have the thrill of discovering it as if by accident.
The shop opened up behind a charming two-storey house on the street, and though it gave the deceptive appearance of a modest cottage industry, Mandy Goodbrey kept the books assiduously and became an impressive and astute business-woman. Her great love was to be out buying, going to auctions and searching out the odd prize in a box of lesser goods.
Later on a Saturday visitors would be ushered through to the large country kitchen, part of a wing added at the back of the building, for tempting biscuits, cups of tea and perhaps a bottle of sparkling wine. From the compact galley cooking area, Mandy would conjure delicious suppers – beef Wellington on special occasions – though her hospitality was generous at any time.
One morning in the 1980s a call came from the lady-in-waiting Lady Penn, saying she was bringing Princess Margaret to visit. Richard pleaded that a large consignment of goods had to be dispatched and that an artist was busy marbling pillars in the shop, but remained sanguine when told: “Oh, she’ll love all that.”
Mandy, however, knowing that she could not cope, drove off on a buying spree to return some hours later. The princess came, and looked at a set of blue glasses, but did not buy anything.
The Goodbreys also helped the great cellist Rostropovich in furnishing his house at Aldeburgh, and another regular visitor, with entourage, was Angus Mcbean of the surreal photographs. Lord Snowdon was an occasional buyer. So many customers became good friends, their homes filled with endless Goodbrey acquisitions.
Miranda Ann Goodbrey was born on May 20 1937, the eldest of the four daughters of Meredith Abbott and his second wife Florence Matthews. Both her father and grandfather had farmed at the Cedars, Saxtead. Miranda was named after the heroine of The Tempest, and she maintained the story that she had been born during a thunder storm.
She attended the Mills Grammar School for Girls in Framlingham and was one of two pupils in her year to go to university, in her case to Leeds, where she read English. While there she received regular food parcels of fillet steak and sausages from her father, which made her a sought-after hostess, an attribute she was to enjoy throughout her life.
On graduating she returned to her old school, where she would become Head of English. Her reverence for Shakespeare made her teaching inspirational; that, and her flair for swimming and tennis, made her a popular role model. She also made a point of employing some of her pupils to work in the shop on Saturdays to improve their confidence and social skills.
With her blonde hair, wasp’s waist and outdoor complexion, Mandy Goodbrey was a Doris Day type.
Her husband survives her. Of their three children, two, Sophie and Ben, are in the antiques trade, and the other, Dan, is an academic.
Miranda Goodbrey, born May 20 1937, died September 13 2018