Commoners Get Part of Windsor Estate

The commoners got their crack at the fabled Windsor collection Friday as books, medals, photos and other less expensive trinkets were auctioned at Sotheby’s.

“I’m just a working guy. It’s like owning a piece of history,” said Robert Murphy, a nurse who paid $750 for a medal given the Duke of Windsor.

Raymond Doherty, a history buff who paid $700 for a wedding picture of the duke’s sister, Princess Mary, said he would have settled for anything owned by Edward VIII and the woman for whom he gave up the throne, American divorcee Wallis Warfield Simpson.

“It was one of the few items under $1,000,” said Doherty, a Chicago physician who collects presidential and royal memorabilia.

Richard Flensted-Holder, a silver collector from Toronto, spent $3,750 on a book about a London goldsmith. It was a gift inscribed by Queen Mary and presented to the duke on Christmas Day in 1935.

Not that there weren’t a few pricier tidbits on the second day of the nine-day sale at Sotheby’s.

A gold medal the duke received to mark the maiden voyage of the Queen Mary in 1936 went for $52,250. The medal was only one of five known to exist and Sotheby’s had given it a presale estimate of $7,000 to $10,000.

A medal struck for the duke’s visit to the United States in 1919, when he was the Prince of Wales and heir to the British throne, brought $14,300. Another medal, for the diamond jubilee of Canada’s confederation, sold for $8,800.

The medal buyers were dealers or collectors who remained anonymous, said Sotheby’s spokesman Matthew Weigman.

Edward died in 1972; his widow 14 years later. She left the estate to charity and it was bought in 1986 by Mohamed Al-Fayed. The auction will benefit a charity in the name of Al-Fayed’s son, Dodi Fayed, who was killed with Princess Diana in a car crash in Paris in August.