An archaistic spinach-green jade 'phoenix' vase and cover, Qing dynasty, 18th century

Collection of Harold Wesley Hall (1888-1974), label no. 30, and thence by descent.

Colonel Tom Hall (1928-2022) was Lieutenant of the Gentlemen at Arms, the sovereign’s ceremonial bodyguard, and an entrepreneur in the field of international language schools. He also played a prominent role in the development of the French Alpine resort of Méribel as a favoured destination for British skiers. As a young officer of the 11th Hussars, the cavalry regiment he would go on to command, Hall had skied for the Army in the early 1950s. He first visited Méribel in 1962 with an introduction to Major Peter Lindsay, the British pioneer who had spotted the potential of the slopes above the commune of Les Allues in the Savoie mountains in the 1930s and returned after the war to develop lifts and accommodation around the Méribel hamlet. Hall commissioned a family chalet beside the piste and in 1967 joined the board of the resort’s operating company, Méribel Alpina – succeeding Lindsay (who died in 1971) as a British voice in its affairs. Over the following three decades, he was engaged with the town’s leaders in a strategy which added more hotels and links across the vast Trois Vallées ski area while seeking to attract year-round visitors – and conserving a special Savoyard charm, to which a cohort of early British chalet-owners added a distinctive patina of Englishness. When Méribel hosted part of the 1992 Albertville Winter Olympics, Hall enlisted as a uniformed volunteer to look after visiting dignitaries.

Thomas Armitage Hall was born on 13th April 1928, the only child of Athelstan “Johnny” Hall and his wife Nancy, née Dyson – and a great-grandson of a Herefordshire miller who emigrated to Australia in the 1850s. After returning to England, the family acquired the Cricket St Thomas estate in Somerset — later the setting for the television comedy To The Manor Born — where Tom spent much of his childhood. Educated at Heatherdown prep school and Eton, he first skied with his parents at Wengen in Switzerland in 1938.

Commissioned into the 11th Hussars in 1947, Hall joined an armoured-car squadron in Berlin and was posted in 1952. He also served in Malaya during the Emergency as escort troop commander and extra ADC to the High Commissioner, General Sir Gerald Templer. Next, under the auspices of the British Council, Hall ventured to Japan to explore the possibility of launching English language schools there as a business. In partnership with a specialist teacher, John Haycraft, a contract was secured to train guides for the forthcoming World Expo 70 in Osaka, and in due course International Language Centres (ILC) were also established in Tokyo, Nagoya and Kobe. More schools followed in Paris, Rome, Bangkok and the Middle East as the business grew to employ some 200 teachers before its sale in 1988.