Just when you thought you'd heard it all I'm going to amaze you. A pair of Winston Churchill's wartime dentures have just sold for £15,200. They have been sold by Keys Auctioneers in Aylsham and as one specialist at one of Britain’s leading medical museums, “the teeth that saved the world." They were bought by an anonymous buyer for three times the pre-sale estimate. The same auctioneers recently sold one of Churchill’s half-smoked cigars for £4,500.
The dentures were sold by the family of Derek Cudlipp, the dental technician commissioned by Churchill to make them, and he had kept for years in a drawer of the family home. Mr. Cudlipp’s son Nigel said that his father had told him that Churchill would flick the dentures out and “throw them across the room” when he was angered by setbacks to the Allied cause, and that the prime minister tore up Mr. Cudlipp’s enlistment papers at Downing Street, telling him “he would be more important to the war effort if he stayed in London to repair his dentures.”
An ordinary girl with extraordinary talent, Clarice Cliff was one of eight children born (in 1899) into a working-class family in Tunstall, in the heart of the Staffordshire Potteries. You can read the rest of my article on Clarice Cliff's highly distinctive pottery in the Daily Telegraph by clicking
My Daily Telegraph article has not gone on line yet – I will link to it as soon as it does – but it concerns a fabulous sale at Bonhams this week. The Bond Street auction house is selling 800 lots of the legendary dealers Sampson & Horne. For years they have been aknowledged as the pre-eminent dealers in early British pottery and English country furniture but they are selling up as a result of Jonathan Horne's ill-health. You can find out more about the sale 
My Daily Telegraph article this weekend is all about buying antiques that have been rescued from Shipwrecks. You can read it 
The transatlantic trade in antiques has at times upset people in that things have left Britain and gone to America. However, yesterday I saw a story on the BBC Wales web site about a happy homecoming for a 250 year old dinner service. You can read more
