We held our 14th Post Christmas Auction on Wednesday 7th March (hastily re-arranged from 28th February due to snow) at the Grey Horse and what a cracking auction it was !!!
The idea 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, due to the enforced last minute cancellation, we now clashed with the Huddersfield MAG Pie Night, so our usual well supported patronage from Huddersfield MAG (and others who had pre-bought their Pie Night Tickets) meant we missed these guys. However, we still had a very healthy turnout and the back room of the Grey Horse was rather busy. We also had a collosal number of items to auction off this year. There was masses of bike related gear donated, with lots of opportunities to kit yourself out with a complete full range of riding gear. We also had a number of hugely generous donations from local dealers and traders (see list below) plus a number of high value items, including a framed Wakefield Trinity Wildcats RLFC replica shirt, signed by the 2018 squad (these retail for serious money and highly sought after by Rugby fans).
Importantly, our eager audience had all visited the cashpoint beforehand, and were more than ready to part with their cash to grab some bargains !!!
Before they spent up on auction items, Sharon sold tickets for our raffle, with the lucky winner getting a tenner.
Chas kicked off the auctioneering at 8:10pm, handed over to Martin after an hour and a half and we finally called it a day at 11:00pm.
This year was quite hard work for our auctoneers in terms of generating bidding wars, but for several items there was particularly frenzied and competitive bidding, with many fetching really good sums. We were very pleased indeed that our high value items that we had to put a reserve on, all hit their reserve prices (and more), and the signed Wildcats replica shirt raised £65 alone. Other items went for ridiculously low prices, which obviously gave the winning bidder a fantastic bargain.
We managed to clear the vast majority of items, a quite amazing feat in itself. At the end of the auction, we had a 'make us an offer' for items left on the table and made quite a number of 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, and the remaining biking related items we have donated to Huddersfield MAG so they can sell them at their forthcoming top box sale (with MAG benefitting from the proceeds !!!). Everyone who attended thoroughly enjoy themselves and most folks got multiple bargains.
Finally, it was time for 'Madame Treasurer' Justine to do the sums. She ran out of fingers so it was off with the shoes and socks and she just kept on adding ... and adding. Last year's auction raised £449.50, with the raffle raising a further £46. I'm positively giddy to announce the 2018 Post christmas Auction raised .... wait for it .... cue drum roll .... Six Hundred and Thirty One Yorkshire pounds !!!!! (22 quid in the raffle and 609 in the auction itself) ..... a new branch record has been set !!!! (the previous record was 600 quid in 2012). Bearing in mind the bidding on a lot of items started at 50p, this is a staggering and truly impressive result !!!! Awesome, no other word for it.
We always run the auction so that the proceeds are split 2/3 to MAG and 1/3 to Charitable Causes, so the MAG Fighting Fund will receive £420 (2/3 of the proceeds), and the remaining 1/3 (£210), earmarked for Charitable causes. This year, as the Daft Way Up Challenge was looming (and we had 5 participants from Wakefield taking part), we decided to make a Wakefield MAG sponsorship donation of £200 to the Daft Way Up cause (which itself is split 50/50 between MAG & Macmillan Nurses). The remaining charities we voted to support this year were Marie Curie and the Yorkshire Air Ambulance.
The Auction proceeds (£630) were hence divided as follows:
There is a huge list this year of individuals and companies who we need to thank for their awesome contributions to making this the most successful auction night to date. 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 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 a number of these individuals weren't able to attend the actual auction on the night). We have to single out Simon for special thanks for the donation of the Wakefield Trinity Wilcats signed shirt (in presentation frame). Finally, thanks to everyone who attended and parted with their hard earned cash.
We will be holding our 15th Post Christmas Auction in a years time, so hope to see you there.