Daily Mail, Tuesday, March 3, 2020^ Page 17
L
ONG before the era of the
celebrity auctioneer, when
figures such as Lord Archer
could, through sheer person-
ality, cajole any gathering to
part with their money, salerooms
were often as hushed and stuffy as a
public library.
If any one person could have laid claim to
have single-handedly changed all that, it was
Peregrine Pollen.
Behind a facade of studied eccentricity, he
recognised that excitement and razzmatazz
could not only shake up the formality of the
auction house, but also do wonders for the
financial bottom line.
A day spent at Sotheby’s in New York when
Pollen was presiding over a sale was rarely
uneventful. On one occasion when he was
auctioning a haul of gold recovered from a
sunken galleon, he acquired a large scarlet
macaw called Julius to liven up the bidding.
Before a casket of gold coins was offered for
sale, the macaw screeched: ‘Pieces of eight!
Get your pieces of eight!’
To add to the atmosphere, Pollen, who has
died aged 89, dimmed the lights and images
of storm-tossed ships were projected on to a
screen behind the podium.
The sale concluded, Julius went back to the
Pollens’ Manhattan apartment where it
startled the auctioneer’s wife by squawking:
‘Lift up your skirt, lift up your skirt.’
Not long afterwards the parrot was retired
to a pet shop, but this was by no means the
end of Pollen’s fascination with exotica.
He returned from a business trip with
Papagoya, a South American caique (another
species of parrot) that he claimed to have
smuggled into America by sedating it with
vodka and hiding it in his coat pocket.
No wonder Papagoya became addicted to
alcohol. This, however, proved a trifling
diversion. The bird took to perching on
Pollen’s shoulder, chewing on his ear lobesTwo by two: Peregrine Pollen, with a 19th-century Noah’s Ark
What am I bid
for... Britain’s
most eccentric
auctioneer!
by Richard
Kay
EdiTor aT largE
He had a spell in a
Chilean jail, smuggled
paintings from South
America and turned
Sotheby’s sales into
riotous drama. The
irrepressible life of
Peregrine Pollen...
while the two took walks together
in Central Park.
This devotion to feathered
friends was by no means Pollen’s
only unconventional flourish. A
flamboyant dresser, he liked to
match his business suits with cow-
boy boots, together with the semi-
permanent cigarette that dangled
from the corner of his mouth.
Then there was the family heir-
loom, an old coat that had
belonged to his grandfather, with
a moth-eaten fur collar.T
He coat came in handy
during a business trip to
A r g e n t i n a w h e n h e
wanted to smuggle four
Impressionist paintings out of
Buenos Aires. He rolled them up
inside a poster of The Beatles and
hid them in its capacious folds.
During another excursion in
South America, he was said to
have ended up ‘serving time in a
Chilean prison for a crime nobody
ever quite got to the bottom of ’.
It all helped fuel the Pollen myth.
Bespectacled and fastidious, he
liked to sleep on his back with his
hands folded across his chest in a
priestly pose and he had a passion
for ‘white food’ — soft cheese,
Mother’s Pride bread, hot dogs
and shellfish.
The cultured Old etonian was
instinctively drawn to the beauty
of the art world. An insatiable col-
lector, his brilliant eye resulted in
a vast range of collections in fields
as diverse as minerals, shells and
natural history specimens.
He was a trustee of Westonbirt,
the world famous national arbore-tum created by his great-grand-
father Robert Holford, and would
travel the globe collecting, propa-
gating and planting seeds as well
as corresponding with experts.
One of his most vital tasks was
to establish woodlands of native
trees to replace the losses from
diseases such as ash dieback and
Dutch elm. Records show that he
planted between 6,000 and 8,
trees to transform the parkland of
Norton Hall, the family home in
Gloucestershire.
After the excitement of his quar-
ter of a century at Sotheby’s when
he travelled more than 100,
miles a year, he might have found
life there a little slow.
Far from it — it became the cen-
tre of his universe where he would
shoot pigeons, build towering
bonfires and trundle around the
estate at the wheel of a tractor.
With his love for people, places
and things, as well as a sense of
curiosity, Pollen, whose daughter
Bella is the fashion designer turned
best-selling author, was perfectly
poised to embrace the new post-
War era with money to spend.
Peregrine Pollen was born in
Oxford in 1931, the son of Captain
Sir Walter Pollen, an industrialist
who was awarded the Military
Cross during World War I. His
sister Pandora was headmistress
of Hatherop Castle school, near
Cirencester, from where years later
she expelled the teenage Bella.
In an interview three years ago,
Pollen recalled: ‘My sister was
quite right to expel her. Bella is so
independent, she rebelled — in
fact she rebelled at every age. She
was just so naughty, so disruptive,but I knew she’d be alright.
I was more worried about
my sister, who thought she’d
failed me.’
Of his childhood, he said:
‘We were very spoilt as a
family. My grandfather was
a banker and he had a
wonderful collection of
Italian paintings, which he
sold in the 1920s. It was
quite a serious collection.
The money ran out in the
1950s, but we still have
some nice pictures.’
Another family collec-
tion, belonging to a great
uncle Sir George Holford,
which included four Rembrandts,
had ended up in the U.S.
After eton, where his contempo-
raries included Antony Armstrong-
Jones, who later married Princess
Margaret, he did National Service
with the King’s Royal Rifle Corps,
and read classics at Oxford, where
he won a bet by running a mile,
riding a horse a mile and rowing a
mile in under 14 minutes.F
OR two years from 1955
he served as aide - de -
ca m p t o S i r e v e l y n
B a r i n g, g o v e r n o r o f
Ke n y a a t t h e t i m e o f t h e
Mau Mau insurgency.
By the time he arrived in the
auction world, his CV included
work as a petrol-pump attendant,
warehouseman, oddjob man in
a psychiatric hospital, ship’s
c a t e r e r a n d o r g a n i s t i n a
Chicago nightclub.
Before joining Sotheby’s he hadapplied for work at Christie’s
where a cousin was head of Old
Master paintings. ‘I got a hugely
pompous letter back... so I gave
up on them.’
He quickly became assistant to
Sotheby’s then chairman Peter
Wilson, but soon got bored and
attempted to launch a helicopter
commuter service. It failed to take
off and in 1960 Sotheby’s sent him
to New York to open an office.
When he learnt that the Parke-
Bernet galleries, the biggest
auctioneers in America, was for
sale, he convinced Sotheby’s to
buy. It gave the company its first
overseas saleroom and within five
y e a r s h e h a d t r i p l e d t h e i r
combined turnover.
Beanpole -tall Pollen married
Patricia Barry, who had worked for
the security services, in 1958. In
New York she became a teacher.
They had three children, Susan-
nah, who is an art adviser, Marcus,who runs a steelworks, and Bella,
who famously dressed Princess
Diana in the early years of her mar-
riage before becoming a writer.
The couple divorced in 1972, but
remarried six years later, by which
time he had two more children,
Josh and Lally with Amanda
Willis. Patricia died in 2016.
As executive vice-chairman of
Sotheby’s, he was widely tipped for
the top job, but after being passed
over for chairman in 1982 he quit.
In an interview before his death,
Bella, recalling the moment she
was expelled from school, said: ‘He
was there at the station. Instead of
giving me a hard time, he took me
off for a huge alcoholic drink.’
She added: ‘If I ever asked him
what I should do, he would think
for about three seconds, then
say: “You should do what makes
you happy.” ’
It was certainly a mantra he
lived by.