Toybox Cost £20 Turned Out To Be A Royal Gem
Thea's 19th century brooch features 27 diamonds and a near flawless topaz weighing 20 carats
My daughter, Imogen, four, loved to wear my pretty brooch on the bodice of her Disney Princess dress or tied with a ribbon in her hair. The pretty orangey-pink stone, surrounded by faux diamonds, sparkled and the gold-coloured setting almost looked real. I had bought it from a junk shop for £20, so I knew it was just flashy old tat. Or so I thought. In a week’s time, this bauble will go on sale at Bonhams fine jewellery sale in London — with a conservative guide price of £3,000 to £4,000. It could fetch much, much more.
All that sparkles: Four-year-old Imogen with the junk shop brooch
It has travelled to New York and Hong Kong for exclusive viewings by potential buyers and bids are expected from all over the world. My humble knick-knack has turned out to be a magnificent example of early 19th century jewellery, possibly part of a tiara or necklace that may have graced the neck of a Russian Czarina. What scares me is that Imogen’s insistence on wearing it on the most inappropriate occasions — to the post office, at the school play — means she could easily have lost it countless times. Worse, I probably wouldn’t have noticed. ‘People don’t realise they have a treasure among their possessions,’ says jewellery historian John Benjamin, who regularly appears on The Antiques Roadshow. ‘But somewhere in a drawer is a trinket they inherited that may be worth a fortune.’ Dr Jack Ogden, chief executive of the Gemmological Association of Great Britain, the world’s oldest provider of jewellery education, agrees that superb gems can go unrecognised.
‘Years ago, a young woman came to see me and asked if it was worth getting her ring re-sized,’ he says. ‘She’d inherited it from her grandmother and thought it was green glass. In fact, it was the finest emerald I’d ever seen — and worth many, many thousands of pounds.’ When I first set eyes on my brooch five years ago, I was browsing in a second-hand book shop in London. There it was, laying in a box mixed up with beaded bracelets and Mexican silver rings of, covered in a layer of dust.
Thea first set eyes on the brooch five years ago, while she was in a second-hand book shop
‘I’ll put money on it being glass,’ she said. ‘It’s not the right colour to be a real gem and it’s far too clean. A real stone would have some flaws.’On the off chance, I emailed a photo to the jewellery department at Bonhams. To my surprise, I got an instant reply, asking me to bring it in for an evaluation.Even without knowing what the stone was, it was estimated at being worth between £1,500 and £2,000 — 100 times what I had paid for it. The stone was a near flawless topaz weighing 20 carats. And the colour was the most desirable for a topaz — a rare fiery pink known as Imperial, which was once exclusively preserved for Russian royalty. My brooch was re-valued at £3,000 to £4,000. But it could be worth a lot more — there have been some amazing results at auction for Imperial topaz jewellery. A pair of Imperial topaz earrings worn by the actress Ellen Barkin at the 2005 Oscars went under the hammer for just under £420,000 at a Christie’s sale in New York in 2010 — more than double the estimate. In October, a Victorian pink topaz and diamond pendant, with an estimate of £10,000 to £15,000, sold at Woolley & Wallis auctioneers in Salisbury for £37,000. Who knows what my brooch will fetch? As my discovery proves, you never know when you might stumble across a valuable gem. Natural pearls, even ones that are irregular and unmatched, can make astonishing prices at auction. ‘The price of natural pearls has surged dramatically over the past few years,’ says Benjamin.‘Modest, natural saltwater pearls can be worth £10,000 while a Twenties two-row pearl necklace can fetch well above £25,000.’ Gems are attracting new buyers.
‘Imperial topaz of good quality is rare and making high prices, but so are other coloured stones because the uncertainty of the financial markets has lead people to consider other avenues for investment,’ says Dr Ogden. Fine jade carvings can be worth millions, and even a piece suitable for a ring can fetch tens of thousands. But how do you tell a priceless gem from a trashy trinket? Glass imitations of gems, what jewellers term paste, are soft and scratch easily, which means the facets wear quickly and look dull. But good quality paste necklaces from earlier centuries can still reach high prices. ‘A fine-coloured paste necklace can be worth £4,000 to £5,000, while earrings and brooches can be worth well above £1,000,’ says Benjamin. ‘Newer jewellery may contain synthetic stones, which are man-made versions of natural gems, with the same properties and compositions — but, of course, the value is much lower.’ All sorts of tricks are used to make low-value stones appear to be the real thing. The vast majority of blue topaz on the market is produced by colour-treating relatively abundant colourless topaz with a combination of irradiation and heat. Modern rubies may be ‘filled’ with glass to mask cracks and give them a better hue and transparency — but the treatment is not durable and may last for only a few years. If you think you have something of value, Benjamin’s advice is to go to an expert. I didn’t have the faintest idea my daughter’s trinket had such an illustrious pedigree — and such a stupendous price tag. I’m a little sad Imogen is going to lose it, but we’ll put the money it raises into a trust fund for her education and buy her a few pearls of wisdom. A fair exchange, I think.
