All Mod cons
A worn out old Vespa scooter has fetched a small fortune at auction. John Vincent reports.
Who’ll bid £100 for this vintage scooter? No? Fifty then? Anybody? That might be the anticipated response if the clapped out old machine pictured above turned up on the auction block. But no – its appearance prompted a fierce bidding battle at the National Motorcycle Museum in Birmingham, where the new owner had to shell out a record £10,925 for the unrestored 70-yearold Vespa, one of the earliest made in Britain.
Naturally, scooter enthusiasts would not have been in such a fuss about any old bike. But the 125cc Vespa – together with another Italian name, Lambretta – became a 20th century cultural phenomenon after first being introduced in the 1940s as a lowcost alternative to the car in war-ravaged Europe.
Scooters were the chosen mode of transport for Mods in their 60s and early 70s rivalry with Rockers. Fashionconscious Mods in their clean-cut gear and with a liking for “purple hearts” were fans of soul, rhythm and blues music and listened to British groups such as the Yardbirds, Small Faces and the Who.
Speed-hungry Rockers, also known as Ton-Up Boys, who preferred alcohol, wore black leather jackets, modelled themselves loosely on Marlon Brando in The Wild One, rode motorbikes such as Triumph, Norton,
BSA and Vincent, and favoured the rock ’n’ roll of Eddie Cochran, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and Gene Vincent.
The two conflicting British youth subcultures of the age clashed frequently, notably in 1964 when rival gangs ran amok and staged beachfront battles in south coast resorts including Brighton, Margate, Hastings, Southend, Bournemouth and Clacton.
The phenomenon came into sharp focus in 1979 with the release of the film Quadrophenia, a drama loosely based on the Who’s 1973 rock opera of the same name. Directed by Franc Roddam, it starred Phil Daniels as Jimmy, a young
60s London-based Mod who escapes from his dead-end job as a mailroom boy by dancing, partying, taking amphetamines, riding his scooter and brawling with the motorcycle-riding Rockers before his life spirals out of control.
A bit more about the actual scooter, which will, of course, need full restoration. The 1951 Vespa Douglas, assembled under licence in Bristol and sold through H&H Classics in Birmingham, was in the collection of a Cheshire man which raised a total of £1.2m. He had owned the Vespa since 1955, the year he rode it on a tour of Scandinavia.
Ian Cunningham, of the motorcycle department, said: “The family had no idea of the potential value of a small collection of bikes and scooters that their father had put together. Initially, they even asked me if the machines were worth anything at all!”
The Vespa (the name means wasp in Italian) was designed 75 years ago by Enrico Piaggio and the 1951 model famously featured in the 1953 film Roman Holiday, starring Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck, for which Hepburn won a Best Actress Oscar.
Initially, the family even asked me if the machines were worth anything at all!
Sealed bid: A pair of Leeds Fireclay Company garden fountains modelled as seals went for £1,680 at Catherine Southon’s auction house in Kent. A Leeds Fireclay jardiniere held aloft by a cherub realised £480.
PoW memories: Letters home to a sweetheart and photographs revealing aspects of life in a German prisoner of war camp in 1918 fetched £670 at Elstob & Elstob of Ripon. Second Lieutenant
Clarence Banyon Pickyard wrote to girlfriend Gwen Johnson in Hartlepool with moving accounts of how he was hospitalised after being shot through the hip on the battlefield.
On the ball:
A sculpture by Barnsley-born Graham Ibbeson of
William Webb Ellis, said to have invented Rugby Union while a schoolboy at Rugby, fetched £1,800 at Tennants. The bronze depicts Ellis running with the ball, just as he reputedly did in a school match in 1823. Ibbeson graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1978.
Death after Armistice: The British War and Victory Medals of Lance Corporal Harry Agar, who was born in Lockington, near Beverley, and was living in Kirby Grindalythe when he enlisted at Driffield, fetched £200 at Dix Noonan Webb in London. He was wounded in 1917, taken prisoner in May 1918 and died as a PoW a few days after the Armistice.
Springing a surprise: Lithographs, prints, iPad drawings and etchings made spectacular sums at a Bonhams Prints and Multiples auction in London, with each one far exceeding presale estimates. Pick of the bunch was David Hockney’s iPad coloured drawing The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011, which made £125,250 (est. £40,000£60,000).
Mighty mouse: The highlight of a 20th Century Design sale at Tennants was a 8cm oak mouse on a circular cheese, carved by Robert “Mouseman” Thompson (1876-1955), which fetched £7,200, against an estimate of £500-£700.