WOMAN AUCTIONEER.

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 3, 4 January 1934, Page 12

WOMAN AUCTIONEER.

Sotheby's, one of London's most famous and conservative auction rooms, has for the last 15 years had on its staff a woman partner, print expert and auctioneer. She is Miss Evelyn Barlow, now at the end of an auctioneering career she was forced into by the war. The sale rooms of London lose a keon mind and gracious personality through her retirement. Daughter of a former Dean of Peterborough, and sister of Sir Montague Barlow, senior partner of Sotheby's, Mies Barlow became a partner and auctioneer in 1918, when the salesroom staff was temporarily depleted by the war. The conservative buyers liked her calm assurance and her voice, called her "Miss Auctioneer," and admitted she knew as much about prints and etchings as they did. Mies Barlow was never nervous. Twelve months' work in the rooms before mounting the rostrum had made her familiar with every feature of the sales. "One's only fear," she used to say, "is of making mistakes—missing a bid, overlooking a commission. One must have accuracy and quickness always." She became celebrated among connoisseurs for her dexterous handling of difficult auctions-—coins and Japanese medals and other unfamiliar antiquities. Of late years Mies Barlow has been in charge of Sotheby's large staff of women who arrange sale fixtures and dra-w up catalogues. Although she grew up in the years when a university career was considered "advanced" for a young woman, and, therefore, most desirable to girls with intellectual pretensions, Evelyn Barlow preTerred hot to go to college. Instead she travelled with her father in Palestine, Egypt, Russia, Canada and India, and learned how to speak in public while still a young girl through addressing Indian native women on educational reforms. With. Miss Barlow's retirement Sotheby's becomes once more the sanctuary of men experts and buyers it vras before "Sotheby's Miss Barlow" took the hammer.