It's all in the delivery

An online auction bargain can swiftly turn into a burden if you don’t take postage and packaging charges into account before bidding, cautions Roger Field

- Roger Field

WE HAD a fine and frequently used saying in my regiment: ‘Nobody likes a smartarse.’ Well, I have recently been truly smartarsed. What happened was this. I much enjoy drifting auction catalogues that contain old military helmets across the nose of one of my ex-Army chums. And, much like any hungry trout, he occasionally snaps at one. There's nothing quite like the guilty pleasure of knowing that one of your friends is about to get it in the neck from his far better half because he’s ‘invested’ in another old hat. So imagine my delight when he announced he had just bought a ‘WWI Prussian Lancer Czapka [literally, cap] Uhlan Helmet’.

Uhlans were lancers and, in the early days of the First World War, the first a British soldier might suspect of a still-hidden German column advancing towards him was the shape of one of these square-shaped helmets bobbing along atop a forward-scouting horseman. Obviously, up against dug-in, well-trained infantry, those Uhlans didn’t tend to last that long, and their uniforms and tactics were soon phased out on the Western Front. Nevertheless, their helmets are certainly handsome-looking, and in my chum’s case will add a certain je ne sais quoi to his kitchen-diner.

There was, it turned out, a bluebottle in this happy purchase. He first informed me he'd snaffled it for £385 and, complete with its fancy parade plume and braid, it should be worth about £2,500. “How much to buy said plume and braid?” was my obvious question. But on that there has been silence. That, though, was not the infestation. It turned out he had bought it not from one of my British auctioneers but from Affiliated Auctions & Realty in the good old US of A. And surprise, surprise, they were not overly wild about all the hassle of shipping it across the pond.