TradeNamesDavid Herman found his vocation early in life and has remained true to a life of auctioneering ever since. Rose Doyle reports

If a life well lived means enjoying what you do, and what in David Herman's case came naturally, then Rathmines', if not the city's, best known antiques/furniture/fine arts auctioneer is on the right track. He lives and breathes what he does and he's never, even as a child, wanted to do anything else.

The way he tells it he was a five-year-old fascinated by stamps, stones and seashells, a nine-year-old into archaeology and, by the time he was hitting his teen years, thoroughly sold on what would be his life's work.

"Everything I have, including my wife, I have through auctions," he says, cheerfully.

With his partner, Raymond Wilkinson, he's been running the Herman Wilkinson Auction Rooms at 116 Lower Rathmines Road since 1978, the year they took over the auction rooms which had been there since 1928.

Already steeped in the business, the pair knew everyone and everyone knew them. Raymond Wilkinson had worked for James Adams & Son, on St Stephen's Green. David Herman, from the age of 16, had worked across the board, honing skills and boundlessly learning.

He remembers it well; the detail, the names, the times that were in it. His life is a well told history of fine arts and furniture auctioneering over the last 45 years.

"I was always into antiques and old buildings," he says. "I went in one jump from reading Noddy to junior archaeology. My grandfather was a bit of a hoarder, too, and my mother fostered my love of old things in me.

"There was so much around by way of collectables then. I've been very lucky. A neighbour took me to meet Dr Little, the founder of either the Old Dublin or Georgian Society, and I came away with three flintlock pistols, a penny black on an envelope and a sword. Those things were ten-a-penny at the time.

"My mother's godmother was Lizzie Lawrence, of the Lawrence collection family, and photos and things came to my mother which further hooked me."

There was also the fact that "the last Mr Jim Adam, of James Adam & Son, and who passed away last year, was married to my father's sister. Through them I came to know auction rooms and sales and how it worked. I was 12 or 13 when I went to my first auction and decided I wanted to go into auctioneering, through furniture, when I was 14."

He recalls, counting on his fingers and with more than a little nostalgia, the auction houses on the quays in the 1960s.

"There was the Arcade Auction Rooms and Sheerins, Scallys, Lawlor Briscoe, Cox & Co, Tormeys and Garlands. People brought stuff in to the weekly sales. Antique dealing went on big time, serious stuff in places like Naylors of Liffey Street, and Cohens. There was little Mr Haughton on Aston Quay and the Dublin Smelting Co, run by Kevin O'Kelly who dealt in silver and metals. All sorts of things used turn up there.

"On Saturday morning you'd have Joe Clark running a book stall at the corner of O'Connell Bridge and Burgh Quay. Calf bound books cost 3d. to 1/-. I remember paying 1/- for a book dated 1684. I bought it for the autograph. Those were all mostly old family businesses and just died out. Plus property on the quays became so valuable it didn't pay them so they sold up."

He left the High School in Harcourt Street when he was 16 and got a job in August 1961 in Marshalls Antique Shop in South King Street. He was paid 2.10.0d per week and stayed until November when he left to work in "the auctioneering furniture business" for Anthony M Sherry & Co (now part of Sherry FitzGerald) at 48-50 Lower Baggot Street.

He's more than a little proud of the reference Marshall (Marty) Siev wrote him. Impeccably to the point, it tells the world that the young Herman was "a very capable youth, well mannered, intelligent and of honest character".

He recalls other players on the furniture and fine art auction scene in the 1960s. Places like "Norths on Grafton Street, Battersbys on Westmoreland Street, Hamilton & Hamilton on Molesworth Street, James Adam & Son on St Stephen's Green and Allen Townsend, who held huge auctions in the Mansion House, selling 4,000 lots over three days. Keane Mahony Smith came in the 1970s. Then there was Mrs Black on Parnell Square who did house clearances. Her auction room was upstairs so everything had to be carried up and down.

"Moore Street was full of characters, Bridie Byrne and Lizzie O'Brien and others. And here, in Rathmines where we are now, you had the McMullan Bros. Auctions have been going on in this building for 77 years, on a weekly basis! The mind boggles at what must have been sold here! Where the Swan shopping centre is you had Morgan Scales. Thing was, there were no large furniture shops around the country so the dealers would come up with cattle, sell them and fill up with furniture for the journey back."

His salary dropped to 35/- when he went into the furniture auction business but he considered himself lucky not to have to pay for an apprenticeship. He subsidised his pay with the 10/- he got for helping at fortnightly auctions and remembers Brendan Behan coming to a Sherry auction, a "big, big man" who wanted a Jacobean carved oak bishop chair and sat in it and bid on it until he got it. The young Herman "moved on swiftly" to work for Lisney, where he organised a six-month run of furniture auctions, before going to Allen and Townsend from 1963 to 1970.

"The clerk died and by the time I was 19 I'd become the clerk for the auctions in the Mansion House," he explains. "John Boland, the auctioneer, was terrific. I sat and listened to him for years and learned. I still hear myself, 40 years later when I'm selling, repeating things he used to say. We'd move stuff into the Mansion House on Monday, have viewing on Tuesday, sell on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, and use every furniture can in the city to have everything out by 5pm on Saturday."

The time came, in 1978, to "get something decent together". So, with Raymond Wilkinson, he bought the Rathmines auction rooms from Louis and Fran McMullan.

Accidental treasures do turn up. In the 1970s he found a silver sauce boat by the 18th silversmith Paul de Lamerie in a kitchen drawer in a damp gatelodge. Sold for £6,500 it "went off to London".

Recently he found paintings by Douglas Alexander and Percy French "covered in dust in an attic in Kenilworth Park. We just never know what we'll come across."

He holds about 90 auctions a year, weekly furniture ones on Thursday mornings, fine arts/antique sales about every six weeks, and a pawnbroker/jewellery sale once a month.

"We do collector auctions, too, as well as rugs, books and, periodically, run OPW auctions. Plus we do house contents on-site, like the huge one we had last year in University Hall and, more recently, Orwell Lodge Hotel. I thrive on it! I'm incredibly lucky my tunnel vision as a child was so complete! When I was a boy I'd cycle past here and stop to look. I arrived home once with a pair of buffalo horns tied to the bike."

He laments the passing of characters in the business, the Lizzie Byrnes and Bridie O'Briens who fed auction room repartee. People, he reckons, are more inhibited these days, "more conscious of themselves".

He pays tribute to those working the auctions with him, to Stephen McGory, "a young fella who's taken a shine to the business" and Ben Simpson, "my head porter". Things will be changing in Rathmines, if all goes to plan. "We've applied for permission to develop the place," David Herman says. "When it's finished we'll have the most up-to-date auction rooms in the country. Continuity will be maintained but we do need to modernise the place. We'll have everything - even ladies and gents loos. Hopefully we'll keep going, indefinitely."