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Saturday 22 November 2008

Autograph hound

Bill Cashmore goes on a trip down memory lane

After the England rugby team returned from last year’s World Cup, a well-connected friend invited me to a celebratory dinner with the players. Afterwards, we were permitted to ask for autographs. Suddenly 50 or 60 middle-aged men clamoured around the players. There were cries of, ‘They’re not for me; they’re for my son,’ and ‘My nephew’s prep school is desperately keen on rugger’. But no one was fooled. We were there for ourselves and the goal was to get the autograph of every player.

This experience prompted me to find my old autograph book, untouched for over 30 years and, at the same time, discover a bit more about this strange fascination with the signatures of the great and the good.

My autograph book had its golden era in the early 1970s and featured principally tennis players. My hometown of Nottingham used to hold the John Player Tennis Tournament every year and I was delighted to find the signatures of Chris Evert, Evonne Goolagong and Graham Stilwell, who was Britain’s number four for a brief period.

Even more pleasingly, during my search, I rediscovered two more generations of autograph books. My Auntie Cherry’s from the 1940s and my grandfather’s from the turn of the century. Both of them are beautiful, leather-bound affairs (unlike mine; cardboard and inexplicably flowery). In addition, my grandfather’s is embossed ‘George Edward King — Life Member of the Notts. County Cricket Club.’ His autographs are of most of the county cricket teams from the summer of 1908.

Wondering if, perhaps, ‘H. Coxon, Notts County Scorer (40th season)’ was worth something, I decided to take my complete collection of autographs to Fraser’s, the most respected of the autograph auction houses. Fraser’s is on the Strand above Stanley Gibbons and has wonderful displays of autographed photographs, manuscripts, sporting programmes and film posters. It is a mini-museum and its experts are more than happy to assess your own collection as well as talk more widely about the world of autographs.

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