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This article titled “Felix Dennis auction features kangaroo, cannons and yellow Rolls-Royce” was written by Maev Kennedy, for theguardian.com on Friday 25th September 2015 12.52 UTCThe late publisher Felix Dennis loved naked women. Also poetry, pinball machines, owls, fighter jet ejector seats, a kangaroo, antique barber chairs, Segways, hats, Persian rugs, wine, cannons, paintings, mahogany desks, stained glass, figureheads, a furnishing fabric printed with lemurs playing accordions, and pirates.
The evidence of the way he lived his life, the contents of his 12 houses in London, the Cotswolds, New York, Connecticut and Mauritius, has been heaped in a giant marquee in the grounds of his estate at Dorsington, near Stratford upon Avon, and will be sold at auction next week.
Dennis was famously jailed in 1971 with his two fellow publishers of the cult Oz magazine. They were prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act for The Schoolkids Issue, edited by teenagers and including an erotic fantasy about Rupert Bear. The episode is marked in the sale by a print of a David Hockney drawing of the three defendants naked, from an edition sold to help pay for their legal fees. Dennis, who left school at 15, got a shorter sentence because the judge said he was clearly less intelligent – possibly kindly meant but a slight that stung Dennis for the rest of his life. He went on to become the multimillionaire publisher of magazines including Viz and Maxim as well as IT and motoring titles.
Late in life, Dennis took up poetry and tree planting. He died of throat cancer in Dorsington last year, aged 67, but the millionth tree was recently planted in the new forest which will become his lasting memorial, funded by the auction proceeds: crates of wine left over from his epic poetry reading tours – a possible clue to their success in the title Did I Mention the Free Wine – were recycled for the private view.
Dennis also collected on a heroic scale. The chortles of a lifesize talking figure of Captain Hook and the “pieces of eight” squawks of the parrot on his shoulder now echo around the marquee, near a lifesize papier mache sculpture of a kangaroo he spotted in a closed gallery as he was driven past one night. The extraordinary assemblage opens to the public on Saturday before a three-day auction next week.
Many villagers have been in for a last look at objects, including Captain Hook, that are quite familiar to them. The pirate presided over a barn which became a homage to Robert Louis Stevenson and Treasure Island, with a lagoon swimming pool, boats, anchors, flying fish, binnacles, palm trees, and the figureheads of a busty mermaid and a pirate clutching a dagger in his teeth, which were specially commissioned and flown in from Bali. The barn, reached through gates topped with lifesize figures of naked women, became the scene of legendary parties and charity fundraising events.
The naked women are everywhere, in paint, pottery and bronze, perched on bookshelves and alarmingly lifesize and sprawled on the ground. But in such startling company, they barely register.
“Felix liked buying things,” his estate manager David Bliss said. Bliss struggled to persuade him to keep spending down to some reasonable level – say £5m a year. “When he liked things, he bought them, and when he bought things, he liked to have them for all of his houses.”
The lemur – and owl, badger and otter – printed furnishing fabric, used to startling effect on a wing armchair and footstool, was bought from Liberty department store in London, which Bliss says Dennis regarded as his corner shop. He worried the designers, House of Hackney, might discontinue it and so bought hundreds of metres to keep in store.
There’s a story in every object, including the yellow Rolls-Royce. When he earned his first million, he felt he deserved a present, so went to one of the most expensive motor dealers in the country, Jack Barclay’s in Berkeley Square, where a salesman told him he could not afford it. Dennis bought the car, and advised the owner to sack the salesman. The following day, he remembered he only had a moped licence – he never did get a full licence – so hired a chauffeur, sent him back to collect the car, and also asked him to request that the unfortunate salesman be reinstated. The vehicle, with its 9999 FD number plate, is estimated to fetch up to £15,000.
The shepherd’s hut on wheels was towed to the marquee from its place beside the thatched garden house overlooking his koi carp pond. Since the garden house had a wine fridge but no bathroom, Dennis had the shed fitted out as a lavatory. Now estimated at more than £800, he bought it from Gypsies who arrived one summer to the consternation of the villagers.
“There was absolute apoplexy in Dorsington, padlocks on every gate,” Bliss recalled. “Felix invited them all to a party. The women came first and when they saw it wasn’t a trick, they texted the lads and they all came down. It was a great night, went on into the small hours. When they left, Felix said ‘anything at all you want, any problems, just call David’ – and they did that, they certainly did”.
Dennis also bought Bliss, and his land agent Toby Fisher. Fisher was a local barman with a geography degree when he was asked to set up a bar for a party in the barn 17 years ago. He never left. Bliss was a Cumbrian dairy farmer who also worked for Cluttons property consultants and came for an afternoon to advise on the tangle of estates. By teatime, Dennis had persuaded him to give up the farm and move in with his young family. There would be no problem about accommodation, Dennis assured him, he could buy his mother’s house, and they would buy her another one in the village. “She had already moved 26 times; she wasn’t entirely pleased,” Bliss recalled.
Dennis had no children, but became part of Bliss’s family, visiting for Sunday lunch and bouncing on the trampoline with them afterwards. Emily Bliss recalls that his help with their homework, especially poems, was sometimes received with raised eyebrows in school. Bliss and Fisher are staying on to run the estate, including the Garden of Heroes and Villains and the forest.
The marquee is open for public viewing on Saturday, Sunday and Monday, and the auction will be held over three days from 29 September. “There’s something for everyone – and everything for somebody probably quite unusual,” Jeremy Lamond of Halls auctioneers said.
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