A PHOTOGRAPH signed by comedy greats Laurel and Hardy has been snapped up by a collector at auction.

The picture, dedicated to children in a North-east workhouse, sold for just £200 when it went under the hammer at Newcastle auctioneers Anderson and Garland.

Inscribed “To Lanchester Cottage Home, Kind Thoughts Always, Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy,” the photograph was put up for auction by Brian Snaith, who had kept it in the drawer of his Chester-le-Street home after it was given to his by his grandmother in 1945.

Lanchester Cottage Homes in County Durham was a workhouse and children’s guardian board-house, which became a hospital in 1939 and was closed and demolished in 1980.

The letter was bought by the same collector from Darlington who in a September sale at the same auction house paid £1400 for a letter from Stan Laurel, who went to school in Bishop Auckland, to a boyhood friend.

The sale saw frantic bidding from Chinese buyers which pushed prices up for a number of items throughout the three-day sale.

The top-priced item was a set of nine books of Chinese paintings on pith paper, which went under the hammer for £32,000 to a Chinese buyer based in the UK.

The books were entered into the sale by a vendor from Tynemouth, who also sold the second-highest priced lot, an early 20th Century Chinese shawl, which went for £18,000 to a Chinese buyer in the USA.

Anderson and Garland auctioneer, Fred Wyrley-Birch said: “This is very much the kind of pattern we have noticed with the Chinese market – if you put certain Chinese items into the sale, properly catalogued and with modest prices, buyers often bid them up way beyond their estimated value”.