Jul 5th 2022
A charity auction hosted and organised by Lord and Lady Pembroke with auctioneers Woolley and Wallis at Wilton House on Friday (1st July) raised over £100,000!
Guests were welcomed with a champagne reception in the Wilton House Cloisters where the Wilton House team and front-line hospital staff who volunteer as Stars Appeal Ambassadors, were on hand to greet them. This was followed by speeches in the Double Cube Room which included an address from Lord Pembroke detailing his reasons for being the charity’s president, a presentation about the work of the charity by Dave Cates and an incredibly moving speech from 12-year-old Florence Burgess who spoke about her treatment for a rare form of leukaemia and how the hospital, its staff and the charity had helped her.
Woolley and Wallis chairman, John Axford, took to the stage to sell seven lots including Wimbledon tickets for £1,800; a Stephen Pettifer bronze sculpture for £6,500; a Banksy copy of Paris Hilton’s CD for £5,000 and a Prada clutch bag belonging to Olivia Colman for £1,200. The live auction was preceded by an online auction which kicked off the evening’s total with over £23,000. Many guests made personal donations and towards the end of the evening a pledge was made by an anonymous donor to match the total raised, meaning the astonishing grand total stands at over £100,000.
Lord Pembroke has been President of the Stars Appeal, the NHS charity for Salisbury District Hospital, since its launch in 2007. Funds raised at the auction will support a wide range of Stars Appeal projects benefiting thousands of local patients, their families and the NHS staff who care for them. These include helping children and babies in hospital and offering accommodation to their parents, programmes of support for cancer patients, state-of-the-art monitoring equipment and the provision of free Wi-Fi.
Lord Pembroke said: “I am completely overwhelmed by the success of the evening, which far exceeded even my highest hopes. None of this could have been achieved without the tremendous support so generously offered by John Axford and his team at Woolley and Wallis, and of course all our benefactors who made the evening possible.”
Dave Cates of the Stars Appeal said: “We are hugely grateful to Lord and Lady Pembroke for their brilliant support in hosting this wonderful auction and to everyone who supported the event so generously. The huge sum raised will enable us to fund life-changing work helping thousands of local people at Salisbury District Hospital. To have both this event and our Walk for Wards taking place at Wilton House on the same weekend is quite incredible and we are humbled by this magnificent show of support for our Hospital and its charity.”
John Axford, Chairman of Woolley and Wallis, said: “It was a real honour for Woolley and Wallis to be involved in an event like this and I’m delighted that it has produced such an incredible result for a charity as important as Stars Appeal.”
On Sunday (3rd July) the annual Stars Appeal Walk for Wards took place in the grounds of Wilton House attracting some 1,700 participants and raising an estimated £90,000 –meaning the total raised at Wilton House over the weekend will likely be in excess of £200,000!