Event Reports

15th Post Christmas Auction - Wednesday 3rd April March 2019

2019 Auction

We held our 15th Post Christmas Auction on Wednesday 3rd April at the Grey Horse (organised much later in the year than usual, as previous years events had been adversely hit by snow).

The idea behind the auctions is that you bring along all your unwanted Christmas presents, together with other stuff you no longer want, or have the room for, donate them to the branch, and we auction them off to the highest bidder. We then split the proceeds with 2/3 being donated to the MAG Fighting Fund, with the remaining 1/3 going to charities as voted on after the event.

Unfortunately, both the attendance and items donated were well down this year, as compared to previous years. That said, there were still lots of choice of items to bid on.

Just some of the auction items
Just some of the auction items

Chas kicked off the auctioneering at 8:10pm, and we had a break after an hour, where Sharon sold tickets for our raffle, with the lucky winner getting a tenner, then Martin kicked off 'Round 2' and we finally called it a day just after 10:00pm.

This year was very hard work for our auctoneers in terms of generating bidding wars, or even getting any bids on some items that obviously weren't popular (sometimes surprisingly). Other items that you simply wouldn't think would go, went for far higher prices than you would ever think ... just goes to show, you really can't predict an auction.

In the end however, we did manage to clear the majority of items, and what we had left on the table, we had a 'make us an offer' and made some additional sales via this route. For the remaining items, we kept some behind that were suitable tombola prizes for our forthcoming May Day Bike Show, the remaining biking related items we are donating to Huddersfield MAG so they can sell them at their forthcoming top box sale (with MAG benefitting from the proceeds !!!), and a few other unsold items we have donated to the Wakefield Hospice, a local charity we have supported for many years.

Everyone who attended did enjoy themselves though and most folks got multiple bargains.

Finally, it was time for 'Madame Treasurer' Justine to do the sums. With the reduced attendees and items in the auction, we knew we weren't going to break any records in this year's auction. That said however, we still raised a most respectable £201 in the auction itself, and a further £35 in the raffle.

We always run the auction so that the proceeds are split 2/3 to MAG and 1/3 to Charitable Causes. We took a vote to round the proceeds up to £240 (with £4 from branch funds), so the total was now nicely divisible by 3. The MAG Fighting Fund will receive £160 (2/3 of the proceeds), and the remaining 1/3 (£80), is split equally between:

Particular thanks have to go out to the following local dealers and traders for their most generous donations:

They are all heroes for supporting MAG and thoroughly deserve your business.

A huge thanks to our auctioneers, Chas & Martin, our raffle ticket seller Sharon, and to Justine and Sharon who kept track of all the bids all evening with the tallying skills of a seasoned accountant (turf, not financial ;-). Massive thanks to everyone who donated items and finally, thanks to everyone who attended and parted with their hard earned cash.