In the early 60s a plane crashed into one of my father’s fields. He and his staff were first on the scene, which was rather gruesome. The pilot and co-pilot were dead, I believe one of them had been decapitated!:shock: The passengers were alive, but hurt.
When my sisters and I got home from school we went to have a look at the scene, which was being guarded by the police, who let us through when we explained the field belonged to our father! Even more incredible they allowed us each to take a piece of wreckage as a souvenir!
We brought it home and placed it in our large toy cupboard in the breakfast room, in which her ewe here we had a shelf each. Some years later my mother had the breakfast room remodelled, our toy cupboard, which we had long outgrown, was removed. We were not happy girls when we discovered our mother had got rid of our pieces of wreckage without consulting us first! I would have kept mine, a bazaar souvenir to say the least, but it would have been something to show my children and grandchildren.
As a youth we used to buy old motorcycles for just a few pounds and ride them around a farmer’s field until they were wrecked. We would then proceed to take down to the scrapyard who would pay us around ten bob then we would save up a few more pounds from our Saturday jobs and go and buy another one and repeat the process.
Looking back now some of those motorcycles were rare even then, and if not for our cultural vandalism some would now be worth tens of thousands of pounds… a few of them would have made me quite a rich man methinks… :shock:
I don’t suppose we ever gave a thought back in the 1950’s that the toys we had back then would ever fetch high prices now, if we had kept them. Dinky toys were there to be played with not kept in boxes to be looked at. Same with clockwork train sets by Hornby now worth a fortune.
I would have loved to have kept my first car a 1954 Ford Anglia 100e now a classic . I remember it cost me £125 second hand, lets see when would that have been? erm about 1962 I think and only got it as I had saved every penny since I left school
My pal back then had one of those. If my memory serves me correctly wasn’t that loosely based on some America make and Vauxhall first attempt at copying it for the UK market , Ford Pilot comes to mind from the USA???
Vauxhall also produced the Vangard around the same time
I wish I’d kept my Muffin the Mule metal puppet, my Mother cleared out our toys & gave them to our cousins to ruin. Brother & I looked after ours. Brother also had a lot of Dinky & Corgi cars etc, kept in boxes as well, all went to our cousins when we were supposedly grown up, Mother didn’t ask if we wanted them either. Most of the toys we had, in the condition we had kept them in, would be worth quite a bit now, but it isn’t the monetary value, it was our childhood.
When I was first married, l didn’t really know anything about collectible items.
One day, my mother in law gave me one of a pair, a small blue and white vase to put flowers in. Later, because it had a small crack in the top, l threw it out.
Some years later, she said, ‘Do you still have the little blue and white patterned vase?’
I said, ‘No it was damaged, so l threw it out’.
It turned out, it was Delft, Dutch pottery and was a collectible.
My mother was always throwing things out if she didn’t like something. We inherited some pottery from a wealthy French cousin, my mother didn’t like it so had a little ‘accident’ with it. Some years ago I saw a similar item on The Antiques Road Show valued at £2000!
Dragon gave away my LP classical record collection, carefully collected over some years - cost a lot of money (at least I thought so) to purchase and would have worth a fortune today. There were boxed sets and whole operas!!!
It was the first car I ever bought with my own money, I have never felt the same about any other car since.
