Long before the era of the celebrity auctioneer, when figures such as Lord Archer could, through sheer personality, 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.
A day spent at Sotheby’s in New York when Peregrine Pollen was presiding over a sale was rarely uneventful, writes Richard Kay
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 lobes 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 cowboy boots, together with the semi-permanent cigarette that dangled from the corner of his mouth.
Then there was the family heirloom, an old coat that had belonged to his grandfather, with a moth-eaten fur collar.
The coat came in handy during a business trip to Argentina when he 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.
With his love for people, places and things, as well as a sense of curiosity, Pollen, whose daughter Bella (pictured with Pollen) is the fashion designer turned best-selling author, was perfectly poised to embrace the new post-War era with money to spend
The cultured Old Etonian was instinctively drawn to the beauty of the art world. An insatiable collector, 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 arboretum created by his great-grand-father Robert Holford, and would travel the globe collecting, propagating 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 8,000 trees to transform the parkland of Norton Hall, the family home in Gloucestershire.
After the excitement of his quarter of a century at Sotheby’s when he travelled more than 100,000 miles a year, he might have found life there a little slow.
Far from it — it became the centre 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.
Pictured: James Dugdale, assistant to Peregrine Pollen
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 collection, belonging to a great uncle Sir George Holford, which included four Rembrandts, had ended up in the U.S.
After Eton, where his contemporaries 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.
For two years from 1955 he served as aide-de-camp to Sir Evelyn Baring, governor of Kenya at the time of the 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 caterer and organist in a Chicago nightclub.
Before joining Sotheby’s he had applied 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 years he had tripled their 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, Susannah, who is an art adviser, Marcus, who runs a steelworks, and Bella, who famously dressed Princess Diana in the early years of her marriage 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.