Latest Meeting Report:

Meeting Report of the Ipswich and District Historical Transport Society on October 29th 2025.

A total of 47 members and visitors attended our monthly meeting.

The subject of the talk at this meeting was “Life of an Auctioneer”, presented by Ed Crichton.

Ed is an auctioneer of antiques working for Lacy, Scott and Knight of Bury St Edmunds. The company was established back in 1869. They began as livestock auctioneers and then diversified into the area of auctioning furniture. In the early days they used their livestock pens for selling pigs and cattle for part of the week. On a Thursday the pens were thoroughly washed down and furniture was moved into them ready for their other auctioneering venture. The livestock side of the business reduced and eventually died out in 1998. They are one of the biggest auctioneers in East Anglia. They are also Chartered Surveyors and Estate Agents.

Ed joined the company as a young man after graduating in Media Studies. This did not promise him a great career and so he followed in his father’s footsteps. He began as a porter. This was a most fascinating job; going into houses with a view to valuing and clearing out the contents. The reasons for the clearances are covered in the five D’s: DEATH, DEBT, DIVORCE, DECLUTTERING AND DOWNSIZING.

He found that the learning curve was very steep because you needed to gain expertise in so many areas: furniture, ceramics, rugs, jewellery, books etc. In furniture valuing you needed to know about the different woods and the myriad of styles extant across the market and through time.

Ed said that he had dealt with some antique auction TV shows. The best of these by a large margin is Antiques Roadshow. One of the best of their experts, in his opinion, is a Scot by the name of Paul Laidlaw. Ed remembered an early French field camera coming into their auction house bought for £70 in Margate. This was a remarkable piece of kit because you had all you needed in the field to take pictures and develop them on to glass slides. He consulted Laidlaw, who said that they can make big money. It went into auction and the bidding reached £20,000.

He also remembers going to a very large house in Newmarket owned by an eccentric lady. He had dealt with the lady before and she enjoyed a good argument. The house, however, was in a terrible state. You had to be careful where you trod because the floor boards were rotten and she also owned six cats which had a free run of the house. Ed and colleagues filled three large skips in clearing the house but made a total of £180,000 from auctioning some of the contents. He remembers, particularly, being directed by the lady into one of the bedrooms where, she said, was a nice brooch on a coat in a wardrobe. It was, in fact, a beautiful sapphire brooch which later fetched a thousand pounds. The job is made interesting not only because of the artefacts you discover but also the characters you meet.

Ed left the company for a while to run a small auctioneering firm in Great Dunmow but later returned to Lacy, Scott and Knight. He is now a partner and auction centre manager in Bury. They hold quarterly fine sales selling porcelain, high-end jewellery. They also hold home and interiors sales every three weeks. There largest area of sales is in the field of toys and collectors’ models. Auctions are held for these items every two months.

The latter started with Corgi and Dinky vehicles and the market took off. Ed has found that people tend to have avid interests in items they came across in childhood and they will pay big money to indulge those nostalgic memories. Toy trains, O and OO gauge, were big at one time but these have faded somewhat. Now those born in the sixties and seventies have changed the market to include, for example, Star Wars figures. Rare figures from this genre can fetch £1,500 and more.

Ed ended by taking questions from the audience and received thanks from our Chairman and warm applause for a fascinating talk.

We ended the evening with a You Tube film introducing the new station at Beaulieu Park on the Ipswich to London Ex GER mainline. It lays between Chelmsford, to the west and Hatfield Peverel to the east. It is the first newly built station on the line for a hundred years and opened on the 26th of this month.

.

Mervyn Russen

Ed Crighton, with his permission.