Under the hammer
With the end of the modern world – perhaps – nigh, our auction houses may offer the solutions to coping with everyday tasks post-apocalypse, as Roger Field explains
I’LL wager the only people wallowing in this dreary virus, saying “Told you so,” to anyone who will listen, are irritating fruitcakes with their ‘The End of the World is Nigh’ placards. Them and hardcore survivalists called Randy and Chuck (why do Americans have a near monopoly on the daftest names?) now hunkered down in their postapocalypse bunkers in deepest Wyoming and Montana, noshing through pallet loads of baked beans, pasta and powdered milk as they ponder ‘What next?’ by the light of a generator-driven lamp. True doomsters will be studying the world our ancestors were forced to live in and planning how to survive when the basics – the luxuries, more like – we all assume will always be there have run out; fearful of a bleak new world where nothing ‘works’ any longer.
First off, we humans need fire. No fire, no warmth, no coffee, no plates of steaming hot pasta or sizzling steaks… Whilst rubbing dry sticks together very fast indeed might have worked for countless millennia in the heat of the equator, that laborious method is far less effective in our damp northern climes. Archaeology teaches us that, from at least Roman times, we used a ‘firesteel’: a flat piece of iron/steel and an igniter stone, usually flint, to strike sparks onto something combustible – probably wood shavings in those earliest days but then char cloth (pretreated cloth that readily ignites and then smoulders when hit by sparks), making a firesteel the standard Zippo firelighter for at least 2,000 years. Not cheap and ubiquitous like a plastic BIC Lighter but valuable objects as they were so essential and iron, all worked iron, had a certain rarity value, at least up until the later Middle Ages. In fact, firesteels remained an essential part of a traveller/ explorer’s gear right up until the later 19th century and the invention, and then general availability, of matches and mechanical lighters. Even today, a ‘tinderbox’, complete with firesteel, flint and ‘char cloth’, makes for a useful emergency backup.
One modern hunting knife I wrote about in these pages, the TBS Boar Folding Lock Knife [Sharp Practice: the point of a pocket knife, November 2019 issue], comes with a ‘Ferrocerium’ (some sort of super-efficient, modern, spark-inducing metal) firesteel attached to it. In that article I made a shallow, ‘witty’ comment about preferring a corkscrew but, as I chucked a couple of extra boxes of matches into my shopping trolley recently, and then added some lighters for good measure, I reflected that a firesteel could, one day, be a lifesaver.
On 2 June, Timeline Auctions has an elaborate – most are very simple – ‘Viking’ (AD700-1100) firesteel on offer; estimate £120 to £170. The bronze handle has two holes formed as twin dragons biting their own tails. You put two fingers through the holes to hold it steady as you strike its iron bottom with a flint. An elaborate steel like this would have belonged to a wealthy man and been the snazzy, Dunhill, show-off lighter of its day.
Flintlock pistol technology (the flint strikes steel, igniting the black powder in the pan, which then ‘flashes’ down the touchhole into the barrel and fires the weapon)
was incorporated into an interim stage of fire lighting that preceded today’s mechanical lighters: the tinder lighter or table ‘strikea-light’. In 2018, Bonhams sold an elegant, circa 1800, example – a steel flintlock pistol mechanism mounted on two brass feet with a walnut pistol handle to hold it steady, with a brass attachment for a candle to one side – for £650. Pull the trigger, which fires the flint striker, which creates the sparks, which ignites the black powder which, probably, ignited a char cloth. Light the candle and then use it to light whatever else you want to.
Bonhams, on 27 November, had the ultimate gentleman’s travelling ensemble: a boxed pair of circa 1800, 50-bore flintlock, boxlock pistols by Ketland & Co, for personal protection/offensive action and, in the same fitted box, a flintlock tinder lighter of much simpler form than the previous one. It had a drawer at the bottom with a bullet mould, spare bullets and flints. All you need is the powder and you would be in action. It fetched a bang on mid estimate £2,500.
Then there is the importance of knowing the time. At its simplest – sun permitting, of course, and of zero use at night – is a sundial. Setting it so it faces due south at midday is easy, just so long as you have a timepiece that tells you when it is midday. Summers Place Auctions had a couple in its 25 March Garden & Natural History sale. Neither were antique, although they were still attractive as they have been weathered with time. On the day – although most items did sell well – they failed to find favour and, you never know, you could perhaps contact the auctioneers and try to snag one of two made of composite stone at or below their bottom estimated £200. That said, how you get them delivered I leave to you and the auctioneer.
Before we leave the myriad garden and other delights of Summers Place, how about the back-breaking solution when your swish washing machine deep-sixes itself: washing coppers. Folk once used these large copper tubs to wash their clothes in. Copper is easy to work and excellent for transferring heat from the fire over which you placed your copper and boiled your laundry. Coppers were also used for tenderising poultry before plucking them, softening reeds before using them for caning and, perhaps most important of all, heating water for a bath. You could have walked away with three large coppers of different designs, and therefore uses, for a just under mid-estimate £300; must-have accoutrements in a postapocalyptic age, I would suggest. Or, if you think I am being too gloomy, great-looking flower or vegetable pots.
Before leaving ‘time’, something I would love in my garden: a noon-day gun, a cross between a small signal cannon and a sundial. These are rare but extremely useful objects that became popular in the 18th century. Set up accurately, like a sundial – they also tell the time during the day – they have a magnifying glass that is trained to focus on the touchhole of a miniature cannon at midday. Sun shines (weather permitting); beam of intense heat ignites powder (think horrid children burning ants with magnifying glasses); cannon fires; sundry crows and pigeons scarper; and anyone with a watch or clock – sometimes a tad inaccurate 200 or 300 years ago – would check theirs was set to midday. In 2014, Bonhams sold a very fine, circa 1800, French example for £1,900.
And what about the day’s all-important weather forecast once there are no more weather people waving their hands in front of a map on our no longer working TVS? A good barometer is the answer. Marine barometers, says Charles Miller, who specialises in sales of marine items, are usually more robust than their domestic cousins; after all, they were designed for a harsh life at sea. As long as it is properly set up and has not been bashed about, a good barometer should last for hundreds of years. On 5 November he sold a functional, circular, marine pair, circa 1900, for £220. A larger one to hang on the wall or put on a shelf and a small, travelling version in a case; invaluable for checking if the pressure is rising or falling should we ever again be allowed to chase salmon. Or, if you prefer something more decorative and definitely for the wall, but equally precise, a circa 1850, made by Melling & Payne of Liverpool, ‘long’, woodcased, marine barometer that sold for £550.
However, mankind has been here before and this may still all go away leaving disconsolate ‘The End is Nighers’ and badly constipated Chucks and Randys, as this 1920 letter from a hacked off, and clearly near
permanently pissed, F Scott Fitzgerald (of The Great Gatsby fame) – quarantined in the South of France during the Spanish Flu epidemic, which, to put things in perspective, killed upwards of 50 million people worldwide – makes clear: “At this time, it seems very poignant to avoid all public spaces. Even the bars, as I told [Ernest] Hemingway, but to that he punched me in the stomach, to which I asked if he had washed his hands. He hadn’t. He is much the denier, that one... we have a month’s worth of necessities. Zelda and I have stocked up on red wine, whiskey, rum, vermouth, absinthe, white wine, sherry, gin, and lord, if we need it, brandy.”
So, with history firmly in my mind, and all this talk of us being ‘at war’ against the virus, how about a bottle of very special ‘war’ rum that Charles Miller sold on 5 November, which might, given the date, also help put matters in brutal perspective: a bottle of ‘ALFRED LAMB’S SPECIAL RESERVE RUM, 1939’ with a manuscript label inscribed saying it is numbered 21 of 60, ‘bottled at Dumbarton 6th June 1939’. It retains its lead foil and seal proving it remains unopened and comes in a ‘fitted pine box with securing clasp’. It fetched £320. Perfect. If the doomsters are right that box can double up as a container for an urn when they cremate us. Once it’s been drunk, of course. Sláinte!