9 Victorian Marionettes Clowes Excelsior c.1890 — BBC Antiques Roadshow

A unique surviving set of nine Victorian travelling marionettes from Clowes & Sons' "Excelsior" troupe, c. 1885–1916, with the complete documentary archive that accompanies them. Featured on BBC Antiques Roadshow, 1 April 2012, valued by Bunny Campione at £2,000–£3,000. This is one of the most thoroughly documented sets of late-Victorian English marionettes in private hands.

Carved by the Clowes family workshop, attributed to William Clowes and his Excelsior troupe, c. 1894–1916, based at Southampton. Patronised by Sir Henry Irving and Dame Ellen Terry following a private command performance at Tenterden, Kent, August 1890 — endorsement printed on every bill thereafter. Acquired in 1936–41 by Florence Lillian Bartley Finn (née Stewart, 1908–1998), formerly of the Castello di Sterpeto, Assisi, who kept them for the rest of her life. Structurally restored by H. W. Whanslaw (1883–1965) in 1936 — founder of the British Puppet & Model Theatre Guild, the most significant figure in twentieth-century British puppetry. Further conservation by Ken Barnard (1921–2015), Vice-Chairman of the British Puppet Guild, 1988–1989.

Nine figures, ranging 61–72 cm in height: a stock villain, a male caricature, two clowns, two stock women, and three stock men. Carved wooden heads, arms and legs over a gesso ground, finished in oil paint. French hand-blown glass eyes. Two figures retain working articulated jaws — among the earliest examples of this construction in surviving British puppetry. Costumes hand-sewn from the 1960s onward by Florence Bartley Finn from her own research into nineteenth-century stage dress.

The puppets are sold with their full documentary archive comprising 30 catalogued items: the original four-colour Excelsior poster, c. August 1890, naming Sir Henry Irving and Miss Ellen Terry as patrons at Tenterden, Kent — the single most important object in the collection; typescript extract from Ellen Terry's The Story of My Life (1908), recording the Tenterden command performance in her own diary entry of 14 August 1890; original H. W. Whanslaw correspondence, 1939–1942, including the substantive letter of 4 February 1939 from Gunnersbury and the wartime letter of 24 October 1942 from Chalfont Heights; H. G. Bigg postcard of 26 April 1939 from Chatham — Whanslaw's brother-in-law, who had seen the troupe perform as a boy in 1890; Ken Barnard conservation correspondence, 1988–1989 with eight letters on his Stanion letterhead plus original invoices; BBC Antiques Roadshow confirmation letter from Lucy Tucker, 16 March 2012; email from Michael Clowes of Southampton, 24 April 2012 — grandson of John Goddard Clowes (b. Bodmin 1871, "in the Wagon of a Travelling Show"), great-grandson of William Clowes the Excelsior proprietor and his Romany common-law wife Belle Goddard; Whanslaw's typescript monograph The Clowes "Excelsior" Marionettes from the collection of John M. Blundall, with Blundall's signed introduction dated March 1988; Mother's Marionettes — the privately printed photographic memoir compiled by Florence's daughter Fiona Murray, illustrating the figures at the Castello di Sterpeto and the Antiques Roadshow; 1951 Festival of Britain leaflet, American East Lynne playbill, and further Victorian and mid-twentieth-century ephemera.

The lot is accompanied by a 25-page museum-grade catalogue document compiled with a full history of the troupe and inventory of all thirty archive items, drawing on the four primary sources: the Whanslaw monograph, Mother's Marionettes, the original archive itself, and the published Lyon & Turnbull catalogue note. Available to serious enquirers on request.

Condition is sound and stable. Restoration history fully documented. Inspection welcome by appointment. UK collection from London preferred. International shipping discussed with serious buyers.