ANTIQUES
Remploy furniture now has real value at auction By Vivienne Milburn FRICS Independent Antiques Auctioneer & Valuer
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EMPLOY furniture was made by disabled workers to give them employment – and the products now have a collectable value. There is designer retro furniture and then there is mass-produced retro furniture. Top auction prices are for furniture by designers such as Gordon Russell. However, one of the most interesting developments at auction is for the furniture made by Remploy. In 1946, the doors of the first Remploy factory in Bridgend, south Wales, opened to welcome the company’s very first group of disabled workers. The concept, conceived towards the end of World War Two, meant that Remploy was established by the then government to provide ‘sheltered employment’ – a term used to denote workplaces dedicated to employing disabled people in an environment ‘sheltered’ from the competitive pressures of the open market – on a previously unknown scale. Prior to the war, such provision had been primarily by charitable groups, operating individual or small-scale networks of workshops. Remploy was created alongside other elements of the Welfare
State such as the NHS as a pioneering attempt to provide a national scheme of ‘sheltered employment’, financially backed by the Treasury and thereby able to provide meaningful and productive work for all those who wanted to work but were considered too ‘severely disabled’ to be able to gain and keep employment. With nothing like this attempted before, and with no clear plan to follow, it was up to the company itself to decide how best to provide useful employment for disabled people. It was decided that they should begin to open these factories in areas where there were known to be large numbers of potential employees. The first factory in Bridgend was followed by one in Salford and a further one in Birmingham. Remploy ended 1946 with four factories
Above: Two from a set of four Prince of Wales Investiture armchairs. The red plywood has upholstered seats and the Prince of Wales feathers embossed in gold to the backs. Designed by Lord Snowdon for the ceremony at Caernarvon Castle in 1969 and made by disabled workers at the Remploy factory in Bridgend, they made £2,860 in a recent specialist auction.
in operation, employing 160 men and 4 women. Further factories quickly followed as the company came under increasing pressure to open them across the country. By 1952, Remploy had more than ninety factories operating across the country. Rapid
expansion was not an easy task, however, as there was often a shortage of work to be done. In the aftermath of World War II, materials, equipment and large-scale production orders were in short supply. In order to reduce the amount of time employees spent waiting
Above: A Remploy retro teak sideboard, with three fitted drawers, over a central drop-down cocktail cabinet section flanked by cupboards. With its original label (inset left), it made £260 in a recent specialist auction.
94 Reflections May 2024
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