A signed Christmas card from the Prince and Princess of Wales, which includes a picture of the couple before their break-up posing in the grounds of Highgrove with Princes William and Harry, was snapped up by an anonymous telephone bidder for £950.

The same bidder also paid £1,300 for a signed photograph of the Royal couple standing with Lord Tonypandy.

Another telephone bidder paid £1,050 for a visitors' book signed by Charles and Diana, and bought a signed photo of former US President Ronald Reagan and his wife for £620 - more than six times its maximum expected price.

The 328 lots up for grabs were collected during a lifetime of public service.

More than 200 people attended the Phillips auction room in Cardiff which raised a total of £47,125 - much more than the expected £30,000.

All proceeds from the auction will go to two charities - the Cardiff-based George Thomas Centre for Hospice Care and The Friends of Ysbwty George Thomas.

They will also benefit from the sale of Lord Tonypandy's £150,000 bungalow in Cardiff

Two ministerial briefcases dating back to Lord Tonypandy's time as Secretary of State for Wales and Minister of State for Commonwealth Relations fetched a total of £930.

A telephone bidder paid more than three times the expected price for a signed copy of former US President Richard Nixon's volume The Real War, London 1980.

After the four-hour auction Jeffrey Muse, director of auctioneers Phillips, said: "We are very pleased. We have sold just about everything and it's better than we expected.

"It has the Tonypandy factor. It is the cult of personality."

Lord Tonypandy's family say the former speaker had planned the auction before his death last year in order to help the two charities.

The former speaker was born the second son of a coal miner in south Wales in 1909.

He entered Parliament in 1945 in Labour's post-war landslide and became speaker in 1976, a post he held until his retirement seven years later.

It was as speaker that Lord Tonypandy became the first person to be broadcast from the Commons in 1977 speaking the familiar phrase of "Order! Order!".

He died of cancer in September 1997, aged 88.