Just before Christmas, I used this column to celebrate the unassailable greatness of the Rolex brand. Now, I want to reveal what, surprisingly, remains a little known fact about another magnificent brand – this time British: Bentley will be marking its centenary in about a fortnight.

As great a luxury marque as ever it was, this astonishing manufacturer started out in Cricklewood of all places, where its founder, W.O. Bentley, set up shop on January 18, 1919, a mere five years before his car won its first Le mans 24-hour race.

W.O. started as an apprentice railway engineer on the Great Northern, even working as fireman on the footplate, shovelling a total of seven tons of coal on one particularly long day.

What really got him started in the car business, though, was a bit of inspiration from a paperweight made of aluminium alloy, the metal he adapted fro use in making pistons for a modified camshaft. Sound too technical? Well it’s what helped him set a number of new records at Brooklands, and the rest is history.

The auction record for a Bentley? £5m paid for the 1929 Birkin Bentley at the Goodwood Festival of Speed in 2012.

Few possessions tell you more about the owner than a watch, and few watches tell you more about their wearer than a Rolex.

For a man, a watch is generally the one piece of acceptable jewellery whose appearance on the wrist says more about his status, wealth, masculinity and attitude than anything else. A Rolex is the closest most will ever get to owning the trophy boys’ toys of a Ferrari or top-of-the-range boat.

Women covet Rolex watches for just the same status reasons – all this on top of all that precision engineering. Among the top watch brands – Patek Philippe, Breguet, Cartier, Rolex, Bulgari, Longines, Omega… – something about Rolex stands out as the mark of ultimate luxury and achievement.

Because the company understands the power of brand so well, it has also mastered the long-term management and development of Rolex in as precise a manner as the scientific engineering of the watches themselves.

Limited editions are a potential attraction, as well as models with special associations. Can anyone think of any more desirable watch than Hollywood film star Paul Newman’s personal 1968 Rolex Daytona? A $17.75 million price tag for it in October 2017 shows that not many could.

A recent example in Fernhurst was the 1982 stainless steel Gentleman’s Rolex Oyster Perpetual GMT-Master we sold for £12,000, complete with the all-important original box and paperwork.

No wonder Rolex watches are seen as such a handy investment vehicle.

Our latest Antiquarian Books sale provided an excellent illustration of why proper research is essential for the best outcome in any saleroom.

An inscribed presentation copy of [Charles Dodgson] Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, from 1877 carried an inscription that read: “Mr & Mrs Dyer from the Author, Sep. 27/[18]77.”

The question was: who were the Dyers?

While the fact that this was a signed copy clearly added value and its inscription made it even more attractive, the burning question was: were the Dyers merely a casual acquaintance or significant figures in the author’s life? The answer, I’m delighted to say, proved to be the latter.

Our investigations revealed that the Dyers were the couple with whom Caroll took lodgings at 7 Lushington Road, Eastbourne, for his summer holidays. Remaining with them for July to October, 1877, his stay proved to be the first of many there that he undertook for the rest of his life.

Although nominally a vacation, the period provided him with the peace and quiet he needed to work, including on his new theory of voting used to develop a system of proportional representation, which still influences parliament today.

The estimate was £500-800, but this additional nugget of information led to a battle between a bidder on the phone from the USA and another in the room, with the hammer falling at £1100.

As I said, it pays to do your homework.

As we gear up for our latest set of busy sales in the run-up to Christmas, we are also getting to that time of year when – assuming there is time to stop and grab a breath – I like to take a moment to reflect a little on the past 12 months.

Looking at the auction industry today for fine art and chattels, it’s remarkable how far we have come in the past 20 years. From being a leading light of the local area and a little further afield, we now have a global reach when it comes to bidders, and an international reach when it comes to securing consignments, in great part thanks to the internet.

There’s simply no getting away from the importance of the Web and live online bidding, but what also strikes me is that when it comes to developing specialist knowledge for identifying objects and carrying out cataloguing and valuations, the old ways remain the best.

Speak to many of the managing directors of auction houses today, and they will say the same. Ask them how they started and, for the most part, you will find that they began as teenagers humping round furniture as humble porters before stepping on the first rung of the ladder as a junior cataloguer.

There is no substitute for handling things as they pass through – that’s the bit you simply can’t learn from a computer screen, even today.