Puppets and teddies go on sale at Special Auction Services

The 746 lot Doll and Teddy Bear sale at Special Auction Services in June made a grand total of £125,000, excluding buyer’s premium.

It included a tremendous variety of items, from mohair teddy bears to bisque dolls, and tinplate ships to wooden dolls’ houses. Each area included some exceptional prices: one of the smallest lots, 712, was a gorgeous and tiny Issmayer toy boat from around 1880 that made £980 and the largest was lot 529, a colossal and handsome Moritz Gottschalk wood and paper-covered dolls’ house from around 1895 that sold for £4,000. Steiff bears continued to sell well, such as lot 152, a rare white rod joint bear from 1904 that made £6,400. More unusual was an original 1940s Chiltern Home Guard bear that sold well over estimate at £1,700.

At the end of the sale was the fascinating Bob Bura Collection. Bob was a puppeteer, stop-frame film animator and actor, most famous for making Camberwick Green, Trumpton and Chigley for Gordon Murray and the BBC. The collection included large puppets, many archive photographs, including transparencies of the BBC programmes in production as well as props. One of the stars was lot 728, a puppet of Cassy, from the early BBC children’s programme Whirligig, which originally ran from 1950 to 1956. He sold for £680.