Collection of prime minsters' signatures sells for £16k

A collection featuring the signatures of all the UK's 55 prime ministers has gone under the hammer for £16,000.

Hamilton Bland, from Coventry, spent years compiling the collection which includes letters and rare manuscripts.

Spanning more than 300 years, it begins with Sir Robert Walpole in the 18th Century and ends with Boris Johnson.

Ahead of the sale in Cirencester, Mr Bland said the current prime minster had been interested to see how it did at auction.

In a letter to the collector, Mr Johnson had called the piece "remarkable" and said he was "really excited to see how it does," he said.

The collection had a guide price of between £10,000 and £15,000 when it went on sale at Dominic Winter Auctioneers earlier.

Mr Bland said the signatures of "more recent prime ministers were pretty easy to get hold of as there are quite a few on the market".

But ones from earlier prime ministers, especially those who did not serve for long, were "very difficult to find".

"None of them are prints - they were all signed properly by hand," he said.

The auctioneers said the collection was put together "painstakingly" and that the prime ministers represented "a broad range of significant characters, demonstrating the diversity of British politics throughout the course of the last three centuries".