Sold! The bizarre auction items from Churchill's false teeth to Einstein's brain... and Marilyn Monroe's wonderbra

By LAURA FREEMAN and KATIE SILVER

Last updated at 9:08 AM on 24th December 2011

Marilyn's Wonderbra

The bra, incorporating extra supporting straps and four padded layers around each cup, appears to betray the secret of the star’s winningly curvilinear bosom.
It was sold at auction by International Autograph Auctions in July 2010 for £3,200.

Marilyn Munroe's wonderbra -perhaps the secret of her bosom - sold for £3,200 at an auction in July last year.

Einstein’s brain

X-ray, taken in 1945, showing the brain of Albert Einstein (1879–55).

The correlation between the size of the brain and intelligence has long been debated. Weighing in at 1,230 grams, Einstein’s brain (removed after his death and since cut into 240 pieces) was actually smaller than that of the average human.
A 1999 anatomical study, however, did reveal that the great physicist’s grey matter contained a number of unusual anomalies — most importantly that his parietal lobes (the area of the brain usually connected to spatial and visual recognition) were 15 per cent wider than average.
The exact significance of this irregularity is difficult to establish, owing to the infrequent availability of geniuses’ brains to examine.
The X-ray was sold by Julien’s Auctions in December 2010 for £24,730 ($38,750), 20 times the estimate.

Schindler’s list

Manuscript, dated April 18, 1945, detailing the names, birth dates and occupations of 801 male Jewish workers employed in the factory of Oskar Schindler (1908–74).

Typed on onion-skin paper, the 13-page document lists those who Schindler assured the Nazis were essential to the war effort, thus saving them from the death camps of the Holocaust.
Since the War, the manuscript had belonged to the family of Schindler’s accountant, Itzhak Stern, but was offered for sale by Momentsintime. com in March 2010 for £1,400,000 ($2.2 million).
It was bought by an anonymous bidder for an undisclosed sum.

Dickens’s inkwell

A brass inkwell once belonging to Charles Dickens (1812–70).

Used by the author at his home, Gad’s Hill, at Higham in Kent, to write his last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which remained unfinished on the author’s death from a stroke on June 9.
The inkwell was sold at auction by Dickins Auctioneers, Buckinghamshire, for £950 in April 2011.

The Trafalgar Union Jack

A 7ft by 11ft flag flown from HMS Spartiate during the Battle of Trafalgar, October 21, 1805.

Following the battle, the flag, bearing the shot and shell splinter scars of the conflict, was presented by the 640-strong crew of HMS Spartiate to Fife-born First Lieutenant James Clephan, the highest ranking officer on board.
The presentation of a flag is one of the highest honours to be bestowed on an officer by his men.
Owned for 204 years by Clephan’s descendants, the flag is the only surviving Union Jack from Nelson’s momentous victory.
It was sold at auction by Charles Miller in October 2009 for £384,000 — 20 times its estimated price.

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Churchill’s false teeth

Partial dentures made for Winston Churchill

Set of dentures once belonging to wartime prime minister Winston Churchill (1874–65).

Created by dental technician Derek Cudlipp, the dentures were specially designed to preserve Churchill’s distinctively slurred voice.
Cudlipp’s work was deemed so vital to the war effort that Churchill reportedly tore up the dentist’s enlistment papers, thus keeping him from the front line.
The teeth were sold at auction by Keys auctioneers in Aylsham, Norfolk, in July 2010, for £15,200.

Casanova’s memoirs

The History Of My Life, by Giacomo Girolamo Casanova de Seingalt (1725–98).

The yellowing 3,500-page manuscript, written by the Venetian poet, adventurer and lothario Casanova was censored until 1960, as it contains the details of his conquest of more than 100 women, including a nun.
The memoirs were bought by an anonymous donor on behalf of the Bibliothèque nationale — France’s equivalent of our British Library — in February 2011 for £4.4 million, making it the most expensive manuscript in history.

First photograph of a snowflake

One of ten snowflake photographs taken on January 15, 1885, by Vermont farmer and pioneer of photomicrography (photographs taken through a microscope), Wilson A. Bentley (1865–1931).

Aged 19, self-educated Bentley caught snowflakes on black velvet and, combining a camera and a microscope, quickly photographed them before they melted.
These are the first images of a snowflake ever recorded.
He wrote: ‘Under the microscope, I found that snowflakes were miracles of beauty. Every crystal was a masterpiece of design, and no one design was ever repeated. When a snowflake melted, that design was lost for ever.’
Offered for sale at the American Antiques Show in New York in January 2010 for £3,000 ($4,800.) The winning bid has not been disclosed.

Napoleon’s bed
Four-poster bed, complete with canopy, bronze fittings and eagle heads, which once belonging to Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821).

A silent witness to the age-old human link between power, libido and diminutive size, the bed was bought by disgraced former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in February 2010.
Ever the pragmatist, Berlusconi immediately requested that the bed be widened.
It was sold by Rome antiques dealer Anna Quattrini to Berlusconi for an undisclosed sum in February 2010.

Maggie’s handbag
Black Asprey handbag owned by Margaret Thatcher (1925–), during her time as Prime Minister.

A flaunted symbol of her premiership (‘The handbag is here,’ Cabinet Minister Nicholas Ridley was heard to say), this accessory witnessed some of the Iron Lady’s most important summit meetings with statesmen such as Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in the Eighties.
Donated by the Baroness for charity, the bag was sold by Christie’s in June 2011 for £25,000.

The Great Escape Diary
Diary written during the World War II by prisoner-of-war Private William MacDonald, containing pencil and watercolour sketches of the famous Allied escape tunnel from POW camp Stalag Luft III.

The escape operation, brought to wider public consciousness by the 1963 film The Great Escape, involved the excavation by over 600 Allied airmen of three separate tunnels, codenamed by the prisoners as ‘Tom’, ‘Dick’ and ‘Harry’.
Three were dug on the assumption that if German guards discovered one, they would never dream that others were being attempted.
In March 1944, 76 men crawled the 348 feet to freedom through ‘Harry’ — the single greatest escape of the war.
Unfortunately 73 of the escapees were soon recaptured, of whom 50 were later shot by the Nazis in one of the more notorious episodes of the war. The diary was sold at auction by Lyon and Turnbull, in February 2010, for £4,000.

Amelia's goggles

Goggles worn by Amelia Mary Earhart (1897–1937) during her historic flight in 1932, the first non-stop solo crossing ever made by a woman.

On the morning of May 20, Earhart and her single-engined Lockheed Vega 5b took off from Harbour Grace, Newfoundland, heading for Paris. After a flight lasting 14 hours and 56 minutes, during which she contended with strong northerly winds, icy conditions and mechanical problems, Earhart landed in a pasture at Culmore, north of Derry, Northern Ireland.
When a farmhand asked, ‘Have you flown far?’ Earhart replied, ‘From America.’
Five years later, during an attempt to make a circumnavigational flight of the globe in 1937 in a Lockheed Model 10 Electra, Earhart disappeared over the central Pacific Ocean near Howland Island, 1,700 nautical miles southwest of Honolulu.
Neither the aircraft nor her remains were ever found.
The goggles were sold at auction by Profiles in History, California, in October 2009 for £90,000 ($141,600).

Nazi £20 note

Counterfeit £20 note, backdated October 1937, manufactured during the World War II by Jewish prisoners for the Nazis’ Operation Bernhard.

Directed by SS Major Bernhard Krüger (after whom it was codenamed), the operation, documented in the Oscar-winning 2007 Austrian film The Counterfeiters, was devised by the SS to destabilise the British economy by flooding the country with forged notes.
Between 1942 and April 1945, 142 counterfeiters, drawn chiefly from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, produced 8,965,080 banknotes with a total value of £134,610,810. British intelligence, however, got wind of the scheme in 1939 and countered the plot so successfully (by stopping printing any notes with a greater denomination than £5) that the Bank of England recorded just one as having been cashed.
The £10 note was not re-introduced until the early Sixties, the £20 note until the Seventies and the £50 note until the Eighties. This note was sold by Mullock’s, in Shropshire, in September 2010 for £1,250.

Selena Gomez Bikini 2012

Sold! Marilyn's Wonderbra

Sold! The bizarre auction items from Churchill's false teeth to Einstein's brain... and Marilyn Monroe's wonderbra

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