We held our 16th Post Christmas Auction on Wednesday 29th January at the Grey Horse. 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 had a good amount of items donated this year, including some quality bike leathers, amongst other 'obscure' items LOL.
Chas kicked off the auctioneering at 8:15pm, 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 before 10:00pm.
Chas and Martin did a cracking job generating bidding wars. It's always difficult knowing what will be popular in the auction, some items that you think would be snapped up struggle to get any bids at all, then other items that you would never expect to generate any interest go for far higher prices than you would ever think possible ... 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 Gala Bike Show, the remaining biking related items we donated to Huddersfield MAG so they could 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 and most folks got multiple bargains.
Finally, it was time to do the sums and work out what we had raised. We are pleased to report that the auction raised £250, a further £17 from the open table sale, and £24 in the raffle, making a GRAND TOTAL of £291.
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 £300 (with £9 from branch funds), so the total was now nicely divisible by 3. The MAG Fighting Fund will receive £200 (2/3 of the proceeds), and the remaining 1/3 (£100), 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 Liz 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.