‘He Sold Anne Boleyn’s Clock To Victoria’
Olwyn Venn’s ancestor was a London auctioneer immortalised by Dickens and famous the world over for his sales patter, says Adam Rees
Whenever you hear an estate agent using highfalutin language to boast of the property they’re selling, there’s a chance that they’re indirectly influenced by the 19th-century auctioneer, George Robins.
Such was George’s renown for selling everything from houses to trinkets and bizarre personal effects that when Olwyn Venn (née Robins) started researching her ancestor she came up against a rare, and perhaps enviable, problem for a family historian: “The digitisation of newspapers over the past six years means that I am drowning in information! George used the press very widely to sell properties across England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, as well as abroad in France and Italy. Everywhere I search for his name, I find him.”
After working as a librarian in London for 30 years and helping others with their family history, it was only while attempting to prove family myths about a member of the Franklin Expedition, a Trafalgar sailor and a “famous auctioneer” that Olwyn was bitten by the family history bug. Although she discovered that all of these tales were indeed true, it was the effervescent George Robins who she found most intriguing.
Born in London in 1777, George followed in the footsteps of his father Henry and his uncle John – Olwyn’s 3x great grandfather – who took over a Covent Garden premises that had belonged to pioneering auctioneer Christopher Cock. After the brothers died George ran the business and proved to be a natural seller, putting out eye-catching flyers and adverts in newspapers with a mix of fonts, italics and hyperbole.
However, it was George’s flamboyant performances with the gavel and flair for poetic licence that made him known as a real entertainer of the age. “He went to South Wales – this was before the railways, so he travelled everywhere by coach – and people came to see him from miles around, just to watch him talk and perform,” says Olwyn.
George handled pictures by Rembrandt and Napoleon Bonaparte’s hair, oversaw the sale of Anne Boleyn’s clock to Queen Victoria, and wrote the sales catalogue for the house that Shakespeare had been born in. He rubbed shoulders with the actors of the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, where he was on a committee with Lord Byron, and Charles Dickens purchased Tavistock House from the Robins family. He was lampooned in the British and Australian press, and Dickens even wrote in the short story
The Boarding House that a “Mr Robins has been applied to, to conduct the sale”.
Perhaps the biggest auction of his career took place in 1842, when objects from a collection at Strawberry Hill House, a villa in Twickenham owned by art historian, politician and novelist Horace Walpole, went under the hammer. Tens of thousands viewed the items up for sale and attended George’s performances, who claimed that “I gave to this sale a degree of publicity that is without any parallel case”.
While he was often ridiculed for such boasts, this particular auction attracted an unusual amount of vitriol for what many viewed as a collection of cheap trinkets. Olwyn says, “The Times was very stuffy about how George had puffed up all the adverts, and ran disparaging articles.”
However, 177 years later, the trustees of Strawberry Hill are providing George’s claims with a level of vindication, by reuniting some of the most important items that he sold for an exhibition. Lost Treasures of Strawberry Hill: Masterpieces from Horace Walpole’s Collection runs until 24 February 2019: strawberryhill house.org.uk/losttreasures.
‘People came to see him from miles around, just to watch him talk and perform’