A Northland war medal was part of a record-breaking auction in Wellington at the weekend. Photos / Supplied
A Northland war medal was part of a record-breaking auction in Wellington at the weekend. Photos / Supplied
New Zealand’s rarest stamp – the Taupō invert – wasn’t the only standout sale at a record-breaking auction last weekend. A Northland medal also featured, fetching three times its estimated value.
The medal, awarded for service by Joseph Lacey during the New Zealand Wars, sold to a private buyer fora hammer price of $6750 (final price $8070) during the Friday session of Mowbray Collectables’ two-day auction in Wellington.
It was part of a Canterbury-based collection owned by Harry Robinson and one of 11 New Zealand Wars medals in the auction, which featured 911 lots in total. Coins, medals and banknotes went under the hammer, followed by stamps on Saturday.
According to Mowbray’s buyer information, Lacey was a sailor on the sloop HMS Hazard, which evacuated settlers from Russell (then known as Kororāreka) in March 1845, during unrest in which a British flagpole was famously felled four times by Hone Heke.
Lacey’s medal was one of just 35 awarded to the crew and had an estimated value of up to $2400.
Apart from some visible “edge knocks”, the auction house graded the medal gVF (good very fine).
Letters with Northland connections were also offered but didn’t sell.
One penned by the Anglican missionary Reverend WC Dudley, and sent from Kororāreka, described his part in an 1843 expedition in which he and Archdeacon W Williams walked from Paihia to the East Coast “to consolidate the Anglican presence”.
Dudley wrote of doing “many baptisms” on the way and suffering a near-fatal illness that curtailed the latter part of the trip.
The letter was stamped as having arrived in London on September 13, 1843, and was believed to have found its way back to New Zealand via a collector’s purchase.
Mowbray Collectables managing director David Galt said the other Northland letter, sent from Kororāreka in 1840, was of interest to collectors because the envelope showed the postmaster, having realised it was official OHMS mail, crossed off the postage cost and sent it for free.
Galt said total auction sales for the weekend reached $1,634,000 – 34% higher than any of the company’s previous similar auctions. He attributed the success to the high appeal of the lots on offer, strong local and overseas interest, and the current robust market for silver and gold.
An offical OHMS letter sent to Sydney from Northland during the 1840s was offered as a lot but didn't sell. Photo / Supplied
The star of the show – the 1903 Taupō invert stamp – is believed to be the only one remaining from an original sheet of 80 that featured a misprinted picture of an upside-down Lake Taupō. The single stamp, which cost four pence when first issued, was estimated to fetch between $225,000 and $250,000 but sold for a world-record $263,250 – blitzing the $185,000 previously paid for the most expensive stamp ever sold in New Zealand.
The stamp was used on a letter sent from Picton in 1904. It first surfaced in London in 1930, selling the following year at auction for £61.
It then vanished into a private French collection for half a century, only re-emerging on display in New Zealand at a 1982 exhibition.
John Mowbray, the founder of Mowbray Collectables, acquired the stamp for NZ Post in 1998 for $125,000.
Other highlights of interest in the auction were 302 Great British Penny Blacks – the world’s first postage stamp – sold as a single lot for a final price of about $27,000 (hammer price of $23,000).
Sarah Curtis is a news reporter for the Northern Advocate, focusing on a wide range of issues. She has nearly 20 years’ experience in journalism, most of which she spent reporting on the courts in Gisborne and the East Coast.
