The former home of John Lennon and his first car come to the market
After passing their driving test, most young people start with a clapped out Mini or a bashed up Beetle. John Lennon, though, began as he meant to go on and bought a Ferrari.
When The Beatles singer-songwriter passed his test in February 1965, it made the headlines in Britain and within hours, a queue of motor dealers had congregated outside the security gates to his home, Kenwood in St George’s Hill, Surrey.
£1.8 million Alfa Romeo to be auctioned at the Bonhams Goodwood Festival of Speed sale
The Bonhams auction that coincides with the Goodwood Festival of Speed always features rare and impressive vehicles, but a 1934 Alfa Romeo 8C-2300 ‘Le Mans’ tourer that will be sold there is truly spectacular.
An auction of 78 of the last Saabs to be made
Jeremy Clarkson once commented: “Buying a Saab is like turning down Cindy Crawford for a Labrador” and in turn as consumers followed his lead, the company went bust in 2011.
The collapse of this Swedish company attracted much press attention as it was considered by many to be one of the “strangest and most unique car companies that ever engaged in mass production”. Now, with an auction of 78 of the last Saabs built by the firm, Saab lovers can cast a final die for one of these vehicles “born from jets”.
A 1954 Pegaso Z-102 fails to sell at Amelia Island
Earlier this week we reported that a one-off Spanish supercar, a Pegaso Z-102 Series II cabriolet by Saoutchik, was to go to auction at the RM Auctions sale at Amelia Island today, Saturday 9th March 2013.
A rare Spanish made supercar heads to auction at Amelia Island
Spain is not a country that one naturally associates with supercars but between 1951 and 1958, Pegaso, a company known for producing buses, trucks and tractors, manufactured approximately 84 state-of-the-art sports cars. One of these rarities, a one-off 1954 Z-102 Series II cabriolet with bespoke bodywork by the renowned French firm Saoutchik, goes to auction at Amelia Island this Saturday, 9th March.
An opportunity to buy 110 books that previously belonged to Bernard and Ruth Madoff
An ebay seller with a 99.1% rating is selling a collection of books and stationery that they claim was previously owned by the Ponzi schemer Bernard L. Madoff and his wife, Ruth. A price of $1,250 is sought including shipping.
Previously auctioned in the US marshal’s seizure sale of the possessions of the couple, the titles of the 110 books give a unique insight into the psyche of this monstrous pair. Amongst them are:
If only someone had studied Bernie’s bookshelf when his activities were first questioned in the 1990s. Perhaps then he would have been brought to book a little more speedily.
Whilst this sale concludes on 30th January 2013, other books are also available as single lots at prices starting at $50. Even more bizarrely, other listings include the Madoff’s hand initialed bathroom scales ($50), two carbon monoxide detectors owned by the couple ($50) and their Sony DVD player ($175).
The truth, as they say, is often stranger than fiction.
To bid on the books, go to: http://www.ebay.com/itm/BERNARD-BERNIE-MADOFF-RUTH-PERSONAL-110-BOOK-LIBRARY-COLLECTION-/261149254961?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item3ccdb56531
Andreas Kirchberger captures guests and performers at the Champions in the Community fundraising dinner
On Thursday 10th November 2012, Gina and Alan Miller and The Rt. Hon. Iain Duncan Smith MP hosted a dinner at London’s Hurlingham Club to raise funds for the charities supported by Miller Philanthropy and The Centre for Social Justice.
Guests at the event numbered Aliona Adrianova, Carlos Bey Fisher, Jackie Branston, Bridget Convey, Karen Cummings Palmer, Diane Henry Lepart, Katie Gerrard, Hannah Gerrard, Iain Gibbs, Mariana Haseldine, Christian Huhnt, Francesca Mathieu, Ferdinand Miller, Georgina Moffat, Charles Mitford Cust, Claire Rubinstein, June Sarpong, Angelo Valentino, Timo Weber and Haydn Williams.
Performances by Antony Costa, Beverley Craven, the Magpie Dance group and Derek Paravacini were interspersed with speeches from Gina Miller and The Rt. Hon. Iain Duncan Smith MP and items sold in the auction numbered a couture dress by Ralph & Russo, a long weekend on a country estate in Devon and a Rolls-Royce experience.
Of the success of the night, Gina Miller commented:
“The Champions in the Community dinner acknowledged the underappreciated individuals involved in charity in the UK. The evening was a great success in terms of raising funds and awareness for these unsung heroes and we thank all who attended and supported our efforts for those working at the coalface of the negative trends in our society.”
For more details about The Centre for Social Justice, go to: http://www.centreforsocialjustice.org.uk
For more information about Miller Philanthropy, go to: http://www.millerphilanthropy.com
All images © Andreas Kirchberger/Photography-Factory 2012
The story of a 1929 bi-plane with a truly fascinating pedigree
Britain’s best-known wartime Prime Minister piloted a Gipsy Moth aeroplane that will be sold by auctioneers Bonhams in February 2013 at a guide of £120,000. The same craft was also featured in an iconic 1980s film and was also supposedly flown by a member of the Fiennes family who mysteriously disappeared in 1998.
Piloted several times by Sir Winston Churchill (1874 – 1965) and used in the Oscar award winning Out of Africa, this 1929 De Havilland Gipsy Moth bi-plane is 24-foot long and has a 30-foot wingspan. It is capable of a maximum speed of 105mph and “wears” a yellow and black livery. It’s registration is G-AAMY in homage to the pioneering English aviatrix Amy Johnson (1903 – 1941).
In the film, the plane was flown by Robert Redford but though the life of the big game hunter Denys Finch Hatton he played is intriguing; the exploits of Redford’s aviator double are just as fascinating a story.
Few outside of the aviation world will have heard of Tom Danaher (1929 – ) but aside from Out of Africa, he’s pretty much done it all. After graduating from a high school in Dallas in 1941, he became a Marine Corps fighter pilot. Stationed on Okiwana in August 1945, he shot down the last Japanese bomber on the final night of the Second World War and also made history, aged 21, for downing three other Japanese “Betty” bombers in the eight nights before the ceasefire.
Recalled to active service in 1951, Danaher flew one of the earliest jets, the F3D Skynight, with the Marines in Korea on night combat patrols and then was part of the last combat mission on a high altitude bombing strike over Pyongyang, North Korea in July 1953.
Danaher’s passion for flying continued after the war and in 1954 he flew his own plane, a 1948 Bonanza, to England to visit friends he’d made from the RAF whilst in Korea. To make the journey, he built a 109-gallon auxiliary fuel tank so that he could fly straight across the Atlantic. On the way home he called in for an audience with Pope Pius XII in Rome.
Danaher’s visits to England led to him becoming involved in a pirate radio station in from 1944 to 1967 named Wonderful Radio London. Like many others, Danaher was not impressed by the BBC’s monopolistic attitude to radio programming and so helped build a 17,000-watt station on a surplus Second World War minesweeper. It was anchored three and a half miles off the English coast and outside of Britain’s territorial limit. Of the experience, Danaher told Airport Journals:
“We had someone in Dallas who would record KLIF, a top 40 station, and we put it right on the air… The Englishmen over there just ate it up… The station programmed news and top 40 music and was very successful. It had the largest listening audience of any of any commercial broadcast station at the time.”
Back in America, Danaher owned three car dealerships in Wichita Falls, Texas but sold them in 1972 to open his own airport, the Tom Danaher Airport. Lake Wichita Airport (7TXO), as it was also known, kept the aviator busy but he has also piloted in films numbering Empire of the Sun, Sky Bandits, Air America, Bad Medicine, The Pleasure of Love, White Hunter Black Heart, Cliffhanger and Goldeneye.
In 1985, Danaher was recruited to fly Gipsy Moth G-AAMY by Sydney Pollack (1934 – 2008), the American director of Out of Africa. He recounted his six week experience on set in Masai Mara, Kenya in an interview for his local Texan newspaper, the TimesRecordNews, in 2008. Here, he highlighted the problems of trying to film with a vintage plane that “has no brakes and is difficult to steer”:
“Robert Redford couldn’t make the thing turn. It took considerable finesse to turn it on the ground… The third time, he gave it full throttle… The left wing contacted a thick thorn bush and it tore some of the fabric off the lower left wing of the plane. We couldn’t fly it the rest of the day.”
Other dramas arose with G-AAMY in terms of Meryl Streep’s body double refusing to fly in it and the craft struggling to reach the high altitudes necessary to film a sweeping shot of the plane flying past a waterfall. Danaher took charge stating: “If I can get a piece of string and a ruler, I can fix this.” He found just such, cleverly installed them and Pollack: “got every single shot he wanted.”
Another person to have piloted the Gipsy Moth G-AAMY, according to a comment left in the PPRuNe Professional Pilots Rumour Network forum, was a man named Roger Fiennes. Whether this “rumour” is true or not, the cousin of the actor Ralph Fiennes and the explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes, is another character with a flying history as fascinating as his true family name – which turns out to be “Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes” when presented in full. Of why he did not use this lengthy and historic surname, Fiennes is said to have once commented:
“You try writing that signature on a 6 foot long cheque book.”
Fiennes flew many hours in a variety of planes and one of the best documented was an expedition supported by the Daily Mail from White Waltham Airfield in Berkshire to Sheremetyevo Airport in the Soviet Union in April 1989 and back. He flew one of three Tiger Moth bi-planes with a Russian navigator named Alexy Zaitov. The journey took three weeks to complete, involved 33 perilous stops and covered 5,000 miles.
On 19th April 1998, Fiennes was piloting a 1941 DH82A Tiger Moth, G-BALX, from Dieppe to Headcorn Aerodrome in Kent but he failed to reach his destination. The Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) report into the disappearance concluded:
“Although the pilot contacted Paris Information by radio, in the absence of a specific request, the flight plan was not activated. Lashenden was therefore unaware of the flight’s departure and ETA. When the aircraft was reported missing overdue action, and the subsequent Search and Rescue operation, which was activated on the morning of 21 April 1998. Since then there has been no sign of the aircraft or pilot.”
Articles at the time and forums since are sparse in detail but several forum posters and articles suggest that Mr Fiennes had “mounting debts and a string of business collapses.” Whilst some go as far as to suggest a “Lord Lucan” style disappearance and make references to “paddling canoes” and “check[ing] the Panamanian register,” others remember a “nice guy, sadly missed.” Whatever really happened that fateful day, though, will probably never be solved.
G-AAMY, which was marked G-AAMT for the filming of Out of Africa, is a plane with a remarkable past. We suspect there’ll be a few more dramas for this craft yet.
The 1929 De Havilland DH 60 GMW Gipsy Moth bi-plane G-AAMY will be sold by Bonhams at the Grand Palais in Paris, France sale during Rétromobile week (6th to 7th February 2013). For more information telephone +33 1 42 61 10 11 or go to: http://www.bonhams.com
To learn more about Tom Danaher’s experience flying G-AAMY in Out of Africa, read the full TimesRecordNews report by Lara K. Richards at: http://www.timesrecordnews.com/news/2008/jun/08/fly/?print=1
To read the AAIB account of the disappearance of Roger Fiennes and DH82A Tiger Moth, G-BALX, go to: http://www.aaib.gov.uk/cms_resources.cfm?file=/dft_avsafety_pdf_502449.pdf
The ultimate souvenir of the 2012 Olympics?
On Friday 27th July, a boat sped up the Thames that was watched by an estimated 900 million people across the globe. That craft, a Bladerunner BR RIB 35, was piloted by David Beckham and also carried Bladerunner’s managing director Jeremy Watts and the Olympic torch.
The boat’s journey under Tower Bridge was accompanied by a crescendo of pyrotechnics and complete with gadgets that numbered four smoke emitting dummy rockets, a high pressure waterjet bar and dozens of LED lights, it formed a significant part of the Danny Boyle orchestrated display that opened the London 2012 Olympic Games.
Now, the very same “heavily customised” boat is available for sale and will be auctioned on the 3rd December by at Mercedes-Benz World Brooklands. A price guide of £250,000 has been set for what Bonhams call the “ultimate Olympic souvenir.”
For more details on the 3rd December 2012 Bonhams Collectors’ Motor Cars and Automobilia auction telephone +44 (0) 20 7447 7447 or go to: http://www.bonhams.com/auctions/20148/
As Fred Dibnah’s former home comes to the market, Matthew Steeples is reminded of a true BBC legend
As the nation continues to cringe in horror every time the name “Savile” is mentioned, memories of another BBC relic of the 1980s resurfaced when it was revealed that Fred Dibnah’s former home is for sale.
For those of our readers who weren’t fortunate enough to be alive when Dibnah graced our screens, he, unlike Savile, was a legend who truly deserves the accolade of such a title. This thrice-married Lancastrian was a steeplejack who became a television personality just as his breed died out. He didn’t understand why he’d become famous and of it commented:
“It’s a funny thing, this celebrity. If you don’t wave back you’re a miserable bugger, if you do wave back you’re a big-headed bugger. I don’t know.”
Fred Dibnah preferred to think of himself as “just a bum who climbs chimneys” but he ought instead be remembered for his forthright manner. Amongst the legendary comments this “chimney feller” came out with were remarks like:
“The modern world stinks… We’ve become a nation of con men, living by selling double-glazing to each other… Teaching boys to bake cakes? That’s no way to maintain an industrial empire… Them fancy London types don’t know the pleasure of eating chips with fingers… I prefer the past to the present. Because life today, with all its modern technology, isn’t very good, is it? And the future looks even worse.”
Dibnah bought 121 Radcliffe Road in Bolton in 1967 for £5,000. A Grade II listed former park keeper’s lodge, the building is known as “Two Cats” locally because of the coat of arms of the Earl of Bradford on one of the gables features two leopards and is said to have been built in 1854.
The cottage was the setting of the filming of many scenes from Dibnah’s shows and it was here also in 2003, whilst undergoing chemotherapy, that Dibnah decided to embark on the construction of a replica coal mine with his friend Alf Molyneux. His rationale for this was simple: “It’s not everyone who has a coal mine in their back garden.”
Leon and Jeanette Powsney purchased the derelict property in 2009 for £185,000 and set about turning part of it into a 5-bedroomed home for themselves and the remainder into The Fred Dibnah Heritage Centre.
Visitors, who come by the coachload, are able to tour the yard and see Dibnah’s machinery. Amongst that on show are steam-powered workshop with a circular saw, a band saw and a hydraulic hammer. The 70ft mine shaft remains and in addition there is a 50ft chimney, a gift shop and a small tearoom. The venture turns over about £100,000 per annum and is now for sale through agents Intelligent Business Transfer.
Mr Powsney, who is planning to move abroad, commented:
“We’re selling it as a going concern. It was a business set up against all the odds, we saved it from being flattened and from being redeveloped. We have worked hard to make the centre what it is, and have invested a lot of money in it. We think there’s potential for a buyer to make a tidy profit from it, but we’re looking to relax a bit more now.”
If the asking price of £1,250,000 sought by Mr & Mrs Powsney is achieved, I’m sure the legendary steeplejack wouldn’t disagree that here is a case of: “Where there’s muck, there’s brass.”
For further details about 121 Radcliffe Road, The Haulgh, Bolton, Lancashire, BL2 1NU contact Intelligent Business Transfer on +44 800 612 7718 or go to: http://www.intelligentbusinesstransfer.com/index.php/heritage-centre-meseum.html
To visit the museum contact Leon Pownsey on +44 (0) 1204 531303 or via email at: [email protected]
Watch a video of Fred Dibnah in his garden: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFJq2zayy1s