Sworders Auctioneers – The Warner Dailey Collection
London Viewing | 6 – 10 February
Stansted Viewing | 17-22 February (excluding 20 Feb)
auctions@sworder.co.uk
(+44) 01279 817778
www.sworder.co.uk

STANSTED MOUNTFITCHET, U.K. — Sworders Fine Art Auctioneers will sell the Warner Dailey Collection on February 22. For the Anglo-American art and antiques dealer Warner Dailey, the collecting habit began young. An only child born in New Jersey in 1945, he was trading badges in pre-school before graduating to stamps and shells. He had a curious obsession with saws. “I wouldn’t go to bed without one beside me. Other boys had teddy bears. I had my saws.”

He always loved stories. His parents and grandparents had all fought in the wars, and like many of their generation rarely talked of their experiences. So, he bought old photo albums to find out more about Twentieth Century warfare and imagined the subjects as his family members.
His holidays were always full. He found work as a pot washer, a stableboy, a cook in a trawler and ran errands for a local pharmaceutical millionaire, Russell J. Fosbinder. He was always on the lookout for something to buy. At just 14 he recognized the quality of a Hepplewhite sideboard he was offered for $400. He scraped the money together and then resold it to one of the foremost antique dealers in the country for $1,700. He later heard the dealer was asking $12,000 for it.

His first big break came at age 17 and an introduction to the Pierrepont family. With great chutzpah he had put on a 1920s tweed suit, rang the bell to the big house and was shown to the drawing room by a maid who had assumed he was a family friend. Mrs Pierrepont was charmed and for the next few years he worked with the family, tutoring their son and occasionally visiting the attics and storerooms where he would impress with his knowledge of “the amazing stuff in there and what it was worth.”
When he was 22, the family found him a job as an assistant curator of the New Jersey Historical Society where he was charged with cataloging items and running a program for underprivileged children. He stayed at the museum for a year but had itchy feet. Kicking in the traces against the provinciality of America, he was keen to travel having fallen in love with England around the age of 14.

Dailey moved to London with references from the Pierrepont family, $1,000 in savings and the promise of a job at Christie’s. The auction house only paid him £2 more than his rent so he slept in night lodgings and derelict houses in unfashionable parts of the city such as Wanstead and Walthamstow, but quickly landed on his feet again. Starting on the front counter at King Street, he was soon moved to the Russian works of art department. During his time at Christie’s, he reconnected with the American publishing magnate and Fabergé connoisseur Malcolm Forbes, who he had met through the Pierrepont family. Building his collections of historical documents, Harley-Davidson, model boats and Fabergé (he famously owned nine Imperial eggs) Forbes paid Dailey a retainer to find items for him. Life as a “runner” had begun.
In those “golden age” days of dealing before the advent of the internet search engine, Dailey found he could buy and sell anywhere. Every week it was the markets at Bermondsey and Portobello and rummage sales. Sometimes it was Sotheby’s and Christie’s. On other occasions it was the contents of a skip. “I’ve always believed that the boring place to travel was the middle of the road. It gives me a kick to dine with a lord one day and be picking dustbins the next.”
He was never interested in owning a shop and, like most dealers, hated paperwork. Instead, he had a Mercedes estate wagon that he drove around London and the South of England, filling it with objects that ranged from the best in Russian objet d’art to the weird and wonderful. He found a deep emotional connection to objects that came with a narrative: It was not just a Winchester carbine but a Winchester carbine from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show (estimate £400-600). Look closer at the skull of a boar and you will see it mounted with the bullet that killed it in 1943 (estimate £150/200).
His love of objects suited to the Kuntskammer or the Indian souk never diminished but he found he had an eye for “spotting really good items” and took great satisfaction when the pieces he sold for guineas and shillings at Greenwich Antique Market would appear in the shop windows on Bond Street or Pimlico Road.
There was the time he spotted a Fabergé silver urn that had been “missed” at Christie’s for £12,500 — way above its £80-120 estimate (fortunately, although he did not have the funds to pay for it, Malcolm Forbes had been happy to buy it from him). And a Russian imperial porcelain plate that he found for a few hundred and sold for £46,000. In the early 1990s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he visited Russia many times, buying Ukrainian and Russian art and selling it to galleries in London and Paris.
While in France he enjoyed buying at the flea markets. He learned that many Russians had moved to the Rivera after the Revolution and the local brocantes proved a happy hunting ground. He moved there for four years from 1993-97, living “off-grid” with his wife Fiona (the couple met when she was working at an auction house in Greenwich) and savings of around £1,200. Among his first purchases for £70 was an early Twentieth Century photo album — including beguiling images of a lady and her Bugatti. With some research he discovered she was Hellé Nice, the French dancer and motor racing driver who earned the name the Bugatti Queen.

Telling the stories of otherwise forgotten people has been an important part of Dailey’s life, and the lives of those he took under his wing. Fellow dealer Will Fisher credits a childhood meeting with Warner Dailey as the reason for his interest in interiors and the founding of the business, Jamb. “Down to his soul, Warner is a groundbreaking collector and pioneer. He not only collects the stories of so many that have lived but meticulously records his own life. In his home are drawers upon drawers of finds, each labeled to say what it is and where and when it was found.” It is all about preserving memories. Fisher’s favorite saying comes from Dailey: “I’m interested in things that look like they’ve grown roots on them,” he says.
He recalls, around 16 years old, being horrified to learn that Warner had chosen to abandon the country house aesthetic and instead collect and deal in midcentury furniture and objects he rescued from landfill. But that too was simply part of a sixth sense as to where the market might be headed. Many of the pieces Dailey assembled for the successful “Classic Plastic” exhibition were sold to a single gallery in Glasgow. A quarter of a century later they are much admired “icons” of Sixties and Seventies design.
“I’ve had a wonderful life. I’ve never worked a day in my life” he jests. His home in Lewisham groans under the weight of pictures, natural history specimens, tribal art, exotic textiles and objects that just demand to be picked up and studied. He is anxious that they are. Some 300 lots will be sold in a single-owner sale at Sworders in Stansted Mountfitchet on with February 22 with estimates ranging from £400/600 for the passport of a sailor who traveled with Shakleton to Antarctica to £16/20,000 for a pair of pistols with the crests of Lord Byron’s father.
More than anything else, he wants others to enjoy the stories behind his collection.

Sworders will preview the Warner Dailey Collection Saturday, February 17-Thursday, February 22 (9 to 10 am); the sale will begin at 10 am on February 22.
Sworders’ Stansted Auction Rooms are on Cambridge Road. For information, www.sworder.co.uk, auctions@sworder.co.uk or call +44 01279 817778.