I’ve been collecting antique bottles since I was knee-high to a shovel, having first caught the bug in the mid 1970s at the tender age of eleven. The rose-tinted spectacles of memory tell me that this was a time when Victorian and Edwardian dumps were found at every turn, littered with pontilled hamiltons, stoneware reform flasks, and two pint Warner’s just waiting to be lightly rinsed and placed, gleaming, on the shelf. I know this wasn't true, but it’s fun to think it might have been.

It's been a long and winding road from wide eyed pre-teen neophyte to wide-eyed middle aged old hand:

The early years.

Banished to Boarding School at an early age, the fields and woods became my refuge from the regime of thin gruel and flagellation.

Boarding school, circa 1975. A light burns in the punishment cell, late into the night.

(Thanks to Dan Montella for permission to use this image)

A consequence of the days spent in the woods around the school was my discovery, in an overgrown corner, of The Victorian Rubbish Dump. This proved to be a treasure trove of pots, bottles and jars from a bygone age. Digging with sticks, the excitement causing me to ignore the earthworms which in calmer times might have provided a valuable supplement to school meals, I unearthed fragment upon fragment of blue and white plate, salt glaze blacking jar, and GASP! almost half of a Codd bottle!

My earliest collection consisted of a white stone jam pot (slightly cracked), the broken codd bottle, several small glass inks, and a blue poison bottle, 2oz capacity, six-sided, embossed, and beautiful.

Being 11 years old at the time I was ripe for a DAI (Development Arresting Incident ), and this was it.

As seems to be the case with most collectors, my collecting interests have changed over time. At first , during Phase I, I carted home every piece of junk that would fit on my shelves, but by the second year this was beginning to irritate everyone around me. This led to ...

Phase II: Collecting Local Items. I decided to focus on items originating from my home town. Almost ten years of digging there meant I ended up with huge numbers of local items, from 4-gallon stoneware flagons of the 1850s to clear glass local chemists bottles from the 1920s. This, along with family stories of the experiences of one of my great grandfathers on the Western Front during the First World War, provided me with what has (so far) been a life-long interest in history, and in learning how we got into the large collection of fine messes we find ourselves in today.

But I digress. Moving away from home to start University in the south of England in the early 1980s the local collecting interest waned, and with it the bottle collection. This was:

Phase III: The Wilderness Years. Over a period of more than a decade, from the early 1980s to the early 90s, I moved to towns where I didn’t know other collectors, where I was unfamiliar with local history, and where I knew nothing of local Victorian dumps. Work, women, study and beer all got in the way of the more important things in life, until I moved to Lincoln in the early 1990s.

This was almost home ground, and for a few brief months the flame burned bright again. I was digging with a vengeance on sites including the huge Cow Paddle on the edge of town, the Scrapyard on Tritton Road, and one or two smaller sites that I found myself.

Moving again a couple of years later, only 80 miles north to York (a town with many large Victorian tips, all inaccessible under parks, industrial estates, supermarkets, and housing), I kept my Lincoln area digging going but it was half-hearted, sporadic and, frankly, a load of old rubbish.

Phase IV: Born Again (Hallelujah!). The Wilderness Years finally came to an end in 2004. I returned, disoriented and despairing, from a couple of years living in the Horn of Africa while working for a very large (dis)organisation , the will to live sapped by bureaucracy, politics, and obstructionism.

I sought to return to my roots.

At this point fate intervened in the form of Darren, a fellow digger and collector I had kind-of known for many years, but who I had never been digging with. He too found himself in need of weekends of fresh air, exercise, and small irritating cuts on his fingers. A digging partnership was born!

After three years of digging together we work well as a team, having similar attitudes and both being happy to plough a furrow away from the bottle digging hordes. We seem to manage to turn up interesting items fairly regularly, and we have no problem deciding who keeps what when we dig together. We also both like Jaffa Cakes, which is a great bonus on a dig because if one of us forgets them (usually me) the odds are that the other (usually Darren) has remembered.

Collecting now:

I now collect more or less anything that I really like related to antique bottles, but with a few major themes. These can be summarised as:

1. Patent and quack medicines, circa 1710 – 1920. Far and away my main bottle interest, to the extent that I will swap almost any bottles in other parts of my collection for interesting patent medicine bottles.

The 200 year period from approximately the early 18th to the early 20th centuries encompasses the First Golden Age of quackery (arguably, we are now in the Second Golden Age), during which the nostrum peddlers could, and did, get away with fraud and deception on a grand scale. This area of collecting encompasses the history of science in general and medicine in particular, and constantly provides wonderful insights into many aspects of pseudo-science, superstition, quackery and human credulity.

Another reason it appeals to me is because I'm an environmental biologist with first hand experience of having to deal with, and trying to limit the damage caused by, pseudo-scientific environmental quackery, which can bear a remarkable resemblance to old fashioned snake-oil medical quackery. Some things just don't change.

The First Golden Age of Quackery was brought kicking and screaming to an end in the first half of the 20th century, by a combination of legislation and increased public awareness on both sides of the Atlantic.

A trio of English patent medicine bottles from the first half of the 19th century. Dr Siblys Solar Tincture (on the left), Daffy's Elixir, and Solomons Balm of Gilead..

2. Earlier stoneware, especially ale and spirit bottles c. 1800 – 1900. This covers a wide range of stoneware bottles and flasks that I just happen to like. Stoneware drinks bottles, especially those with impressed (rather than printed) bottlers names, have always been among my favourites. These include ginger beer, ale, stout, and porter bottles, and spirit flasks. One group of special interest are 'reform flasks'. These are decorative or figural stoneware flasks, mostly made between about 1820 and 1850, and often associated with major political or social movements of the time.

Four very varied stoneware spirit flasks dating 1830s - 1900. On the left is a reform flask.

3. Self-dug stuff I just happen to like. A small but varied group including glass mineral water bottles (especially from Lincolnshire), pot lids, and miscellaneous other items!

A varied group including mineral water, ink, medicine, ale, wine, spirit and veterinary bottles.

Related activities.

In recent years I've broadened out my activities related to this hobby. Thirty years of digging, searching and researching means that I now have enough expertise in this subject area to occasionally work for York Archaeological Trust as a finds specialist, and I have also worked as a volunteer at York Castle Museum, cataloguing and identifying the bottles in their stores (and some very nice ones they've got, too). I'm also very happy to give talks to local history and archaeology groups. Please contact me directly if your group might be interested in a talk or presentation (but please be patient about receiving a reply: I sometimes travel for work, and at those times email and internet access can be difficult).