Bottle Collecting in the UKby Steve Day Bottle Collecting really started in earnest in the United Kingdom in the early 1970s. Since then, it has become one of the fastest growing collecting hobbies, with Bottle Collecting Clubs all over the country mainly organised on a county basis. There are several quarterly magazines published, together with club newsletters, and an increasing number of new book available. Apart from the Avon perfume type bottles, collectors are usually only interested in pre-1920s containers, when glass examples were still at least partly hand-finished during manufacture. Most glass bottles after this date were machine made and do not have the same appeal as that of items with earlier, cruder appearance. Stoneware bottles, used mainly for ginger beer in late Victorian and Edwardian times, continued to be produced individually, by hand, for some time after 1920. In some parts of the country as late as the 1940s. Most of these stoneware bottles are obtained from digging on long forgotten Victorian and Edwardian rubbish dumps. Many of the larger U.K. city and town dumps have been discovered and well dug. (That is if they had not beeen built on by developers before bottle collecting took off.) Today smaller dumps in woods, countryside and on farmland can be explored with the same success, remember to obtaind permission before you start digging. As a beginner, finding your first dump could be the hardest part in starting a collection. Obtaining permission to dig someone's land is not difficult if you go about it the right way. Sometimes the 'rubbish' is just below the surface but at other locations it could be five or six feet down before you reach a seam old enough to be of interest. The most popular bottles collected are: Ginger Beers, Mineral Water bottles (glass Codd's, named after the inventor of the marble stoppered type; Hamilton's - glass, egg-shaped bottles which had cork stoppers), Poisons, Medicines, Cures, Inks and Beer bottles. There is also a variety of other items that turn up when digging old dumps. These include pot lids, cream pots, ointment pots, clay pipes and china dolls' heads. All of these items (and others) come under the general umbrella of bottle collecting. Older sealed wine bottles and stoneware containers are also popular but are much rarer and older. If you do not fancy hard digging you can still build up a collection by searching for bottles at flea markets, car boot sales, (usually cheaper) auctions, antique fairs (can be expensive) and Bottle Shows. The latter take place most weekends in the UK throughout the year. Bottles vary tremendously in price from a few pence for very common glass examples to several hundred or even thousand pounds depending on rarity and condition. Most collectors want pristine items on their shelves, so bottles have to be in mint condition - no cracks or chips and the glass sparkling. Generally speaking, glass bottles in unusual colours are usually rare,[Codds and Hamiltons in amber, green, cobalt blue or black] as are most coloured top ginger beers. Pictorial trade marks and strong embossing help with the price, and local rarities again push the price up. Watch out for a very famous rarity in the poisons field. It is called a Wasp-waist and is cobalt blue, flat in shape but with a narrowed waist in the centre part of the container. There are less than a dozen of these known and they usually reach £1000 at auction! The author, Steve Day, has been collecting since 1978 and specialises in ink and veterinary bottles, and ginger beer bottles from the Isle of Wight. He is a member of the Surrey Bottle Collectors' Club and is happy to answer any questions regarding bottle collecting. |
