Mahatma Gandhi’s personal belongings, including his sandals, along with his last will written in Gujarati and a slide with his blood sample were sold at an auction on Tuesday afternoon by specialist auctioneer Mullock’s in Ludlow, Shropshire.
The auction house, which last year had auctioned Gandhi’s distinctive round steel rimmed spectacles, wooden charkha and soil with blood from the spot of his 1948 assassination, had more than 50 lots of items connected with the Indian independence leader on sale as part of its auction of historical documents and ephemera. The Gandhi lot was auctioned for £287,000.
The top selling item in the Tuesday sale was the Mahatma’s will, a two-page document written in Gujarati and signed by him. The will, written in a neat secretarial hand, was sold on phone for £55,000. It had been expected to sell for £30,000-£40,000. The auction of Gandhi items on Tuesday did not reach the stratospheric heights of the auction in February this year in which Mullock’s sold a letter written by Mahatma Gandhi for £115,000. Explaining the reason, Richard Westwood Brookes, historical documents expert for Mullock’s, said in a telephone interview, “The letter in February auction was one-off item and the price for an item goes up when two people are keen to buy it. This time, we had a lot of items so a lot of bidders dropped out of bidding for some items fairly early knowing they would get something else instead.”
Mr Brookes refused to reveal the identity of the buyers of the Gandhi items, but said that most of the items were sold on phone bidding from India. “The Indian government had got in touch with us before the auction, but I don’t know whether any of the bidders were buying on behalf of the government,” he said, adding that the person who bought the will for £55,000 had spent more than £100,000 in the auction.
Mahatma Gandhi’s “Three Monkeys,” excited a lot of interest while bidding and delicately carved miniature figures in a white wood originally attached to a small wooden tray sold for more than double the high estimate at £36,000.
A half-tone photograph signed by Gandhi in Hindi, sold for £40,000, four times its estimated price of £8,000-£10,000. The photograph was inscribed to the reverse by the author and poet John Gawsworth, “To John Platt / I give this autographed / portrait of Mahatmaji / because I fully believe / he is worthy of it. / John Gawsworth / Calcutta / 7.X11.45.”
A power of attorney, signed by Mahatma Gandhi, who was born in Porbander in Gujarat in 1869, sold for £25,000 to a phone bidder. The four-page folio document in Gujarati was expected to fetch £30,000-£40,000.