Poet’s postcard bookmarks left at Oxfam shop

But on closer inspection they turned out to be from an important poet to a friend in Yorkshire and now they are expected to sell for up to £800 at an auction.

The cards were sent in 1930 by one of Britain’s finest First World War poets, Siegfried Sassoon to a friend named V.W.Garratt at St Clements Road, South, Harrogate. They were brought into the Oxfam shop in Herne Hill, London.

Gavin Monaghan, who runs the Oxfam shop in Herne Hill, said: “About a dozen boxes of books were brought in, possibly part of a house clearance, and the cards were found in a religious book and may have been used as a bookmark, The cards were almost thrown into the bin, as a young assistant didn’t realise at first what they were.”

The cards cost only two old pennies to send to Yorkshire in 1930, but now 81 later they are set to fetch between £600 and £800 at Bonhams in Oxford on June 28.

On one of the cards to his Harrogate friend, Mr Garratt, Sassoon writes about fellow poet, Robert Graves: “.....Graves’s book is rather inaccurate & misleading.I wasn’t quite such a mad hatter as he has chosen to suggest ! I prefer to be known as a fairly reasonable being who likes a quiet life. Have you read Undertones Of War?.That is a 1000 times better book than Graves’s.”

The cards were posted on January 1, 1930 and October 7, 1930, when Sassoon was in his mid forties. Decorated for bravery on the Western Front, he became one of the leading poets of the First World War, His poetry described, among other things, the horrors of the trenches. He later won acclaim for his three volume fictionalised autobiography, The Sherston Trilogy.

Robert Graves - mentioned on one of the Harrogate postcards - said Sassoon had engaged in suicidal acts of bravery during the First World War and Sassoon was recommended (unsuccessfully) for the Victoria Cross. On July 27, 1916, he was awarded the Military Cross.

He was eighty when he died in Wiltshire on September 1, 1967.

Sassoon’s Harrogate postcards are among thirty seven treasures, mostly rare books, from Oxfam shops all over Britain which are now expected to sell for around £20,000 at the forthcoming sale at Bonhams.

The Sassoon cards are not the only items in the sale with a Yorkshire link.

A rare 1903 book about archaelogical and geographical exploration in Chinese Turkestan - donated to the Oxfam shop in Low Petergate, York - could now sell for between £300 and £500, while a 1984 limited edition copy (number 242 of 250 copies) of Beatrix Potter’s Derwentwater Sketchbook - brought into the Oxfam shop in Newland Avenue, Hull - is valued at between £200 and £400.

Oxfam is now Europe’s biggest seller of secondhand books. Every month the charity sells around £1.7 millionworth of books at its shops and 140 specialist bookshops across Britain.T hat’s enough to buy 50,000 emergency shelters, build over 1,000 classrooms and provide safe water for over 2.1 million people.