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Chelsea Antiques Fair looks for new organiser
Caroline Penman was only 18 when she opened her first antiques shop in Lindfield.
Forty-five years on she has become one of the country's top organisers of antiques and art fairs, and next year hopes to put on her 400th fair.
In December she announced that – due to high losses – she will no longer be running one of her best-known events, the Chelsea Antiques Fair, but is still in charge of nine others around the country.
Caroline, who runs her business Penman Antiques Fairs from her home in Uckfield, told the Mid Sussex Times how she developed her lifelong passion for the business after moving to Lindfield at the tender age of nine.
She said: "My parents bought an old Tudor house there and wanted to furnish it with antiques. We went around auctions and I realised that I could remember and understand about the things we looked at better than my parents.
"At school when all the other girls wanted to be nurses or secretaries, I knew I wanted to be an antiques dealer."
During school holidays she worked at a Lindfield antiques shop run by Mrs Scott Symonds, and after leaving school she began buying with 2,000 left to her by her grandmother.
When she was 18 a shop was bought on the High Street and her career began in earnest. She said: "There I was, an 18-year-old girl with a shop. Every antiques dealer was trying to sell me duff goods and I found it quite exciting to see through it and try to avoid getting ripped off.
"Also, little old ladies in Lindfield who wanted to raise a bit of cash trusted a nice young girl more than they did the wheeler-dealers from Brighton."
From there Caroline moved into organising fairs, starting up the country's first ever village hall antiques fair in Lindfield, and then from 1968-71 she started another at the Martlets in Burgess Hill.
It was in 1972 that she struck on an idea that became an antiques-dealing phenomenon.
At one of her fairs at Ardingly Showground she began advertising for dealers to sell from their cars from 1 a day.
She said: "We had nine cars the first time in Ardingly, then 40, then 120, then 400.
"By 1984 there were four fairs a year, with April and September fairs having around 800 outside pitches and 200 indoor stands in four buildings. The price was put up to 3, and then 5.I spent many a happy but soaking wet morning standing at the gate taking fivers and stuffing them in a cardboard box in the car beside me. Why no-one mugged me heaven knows!"
She bought the Chelsea Antiques Fair in 1984, but in the years since she says the market has changed to favour larger fairs leaving the relatively small Chelsea unable to compete. She said: "It's desperately sad. It has been running for 50 years, I was its keeper and I have lost the battle.
"I couldn't make a profit because it was very small, and these days people want to see big fairs, they want to see hundreds of things. Charming though it is, Chelsea Town Hall isn't big enough. But we have nine other fairs we run, and we're an office of two and so those will keep us quite occupied."
Now at the age of 63, the thrill of clinching a good deal is still undimmed for Caroline: "It's the fun of the chase I love, and pitting your wits against the other dealers."
For information and dates of Penman-run antiques fairs, visit the website
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Thursday 09 February 2012
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