On his 14th birthday Jim Bischoff was given an 18th century French snuff box made of wood. Discovering that such snuff boxes had been made with different designs on the lid, he decided to collect all one hundred known designs. This led to a lifetime interest in antiques and collecting, and even eventually to Bude and District U3A’s September meeting where Jim spoke about his experiences and introduced the audience to mysterious objects which had been everyday household items in the Georgian and Victorian periods.
After taking part in the BBC’s Antique Masters competition in 2011, Jim, a retired teacher, became involved in valuing and cataloguing for sales at an auction house, manning a phone for telephone bidders during sales, and other aspects of the antiques trade. He still buys for others and collects for himself. He began his talk by answering the question he is asked most frequently – how to dispose of items when downsizing or clearing a house following a bereavement?
The family is the place to start, though often family members see no value in ancient furniture, in obsolete coins, or other things they’ve known all their lives. It is therefore important to get someone to look who knows what they are looking at. For example, gold sovereigns and half sovereigns are smaller than people expect, and are not necessarily recognised in a collection of old coins. Selling direct to a gold bullion dealer would avoid having to pay auction fees.
When it comes to auctions, the cost of selling on Ebay is approximately half of what it costs to sell through an auction house, but the seller has to do all the work of photographing, listing, and shipping the items. If dealing with an auction house, make sure they have a specialist – or can bring in a specialist – who can value your items and make sure they are catalogued correctly so that interested collectors can find them. Not all auction houses are so careful.
Jim then described how his French snuff box has been manufactured. Snuff boxes had previously been made of precious materials, often jewelled, and were associated with wealth. The French wooden ones manufactured between 1780 – 1840 used burl wood, heated in oil to make it pliable, then placed in a bronze press to add the design. The box would then be cut in half, hollowed out, and lined with tortoiseshell. Many of the bronze presses have been melted down but Jim has been fortunate to find one that exactly matches one of his boxes. He now has 332 wooden snuff boxes, all different designs. The book he consulted aged fourteen was inaccurate! Some boxes even have a second secret compartment.
There followed a discussion of the everyday items which U3A members had been examining and attempting to identify. Kitchen items included a marrow scoop, metal nips to cut pieces of sugar from the solid cone in which it was sold, and glass pestles to grind up the resulting lumps. Among the wooden items a pocket nutcracker and a pocket apple corer were apparently essential for country walks, and pounce pots contained ground cuttle fish bone for sprinkling onto documents to dry the ink. Go-to-beds were small pots containing matches, with a hole in the top to fix a lighted match. A page cutter/turner reminded us that often books came from the printers without the pages having been separated. There was a splitter to prepare straw for hat making, and a hat stretcher to keep your hat in shape as it dried from the rain. A skirt lifter attached to the hem of a dress was also useful on inclement days, and who could get their kid gloves on without powdering inside the fingers and using a glove stretcher?
Then it was time for Basic/Better/Best using three of Jim’s snuff boxes – one with a phrenology design, one with a picture of Napoleon in a second hidden compartment, and one with an image of George Washington on the lid. Very few people knew that snuff boxes with American images are rare, and only three or four are known showing George Washington. Needless to say, most of the audience got it all wrong but we all learnt a lot and greatly appreciated that Jim had shared part of his collection with us.
Other Bude U3A news: the next Open meeting is on 17th October, the Annual General Meeting. A second book group is forming, and the coffee morning on the third Wednesday of the month is now at the Brendan Arms. Full details of groups and activities are available at www.budeu3a.co.uk.
Following on from U3A member Tish Beamish’s talk last May on the Gideons Orphanage in Kenya, the director Newton Atela is visiting Bude and will be speaking about his work on Friday September 27th, 7.30pm, at the Oceans Church, The Venue, Bude EX23 8AR. Everyone welcome.