FH Ayres of London began life back in the late 1800’s producing various requisites for tennis, cricket, croquet, golf, football, ski, toboggans and sledges amongst many others. Interestingly, however, it is for rocking horses that they are better known in the antique world and as we write this in 2012 there is one for sale on the internet for £8500. The pair of skis we have here in our collection are probably worth a little less, but uniquely for us anyway, they are the only skis that we can properly identify as being manufactured in England – other than homemade ones. Some of our military ones could be of UK manufacture but we are not sure. The fact that we have 80+ pairs of skis and these are the only English made ones tells us that there were not many pairs made and therefore they are pretty rare. Though we can’t find any markings on them the bindings appear to be a type of the Norwegain Huitfeldt with a Høyer-Ellefsen strapping system. Whether or not these are the real thing, or a pirate version we are not sure, but they do date the skis roughly to the 1920’s. One way or another they are another fascinating set of skis to compliment our collection.