Victorian collection raises £100,000 at Dorchester auction

9:00am Thursday 15th April 2010
By Joanna Davis

PEOPLE with a penchant for the bizarre, the unusual and the downright grotesque crowded out an auction house for a sale with a difference.

They came from all over the country to buy their very own oddities from an eclectic Victorian collection.

Objects from a recession-hit museum on the Isle of Wight went under the hammer at The Grove sales room of Duke’s of Dorchester.

A winged cat, one of the highlights of the auction, was the subject of a price war from bidders.

The 1860s stuffed feline, primed for flight with bird wings fixed to its back, made £2,800.

A shrunken human head believed to be a genuine Javara Indian head of a man from Ecuador fetched £2,400.

An elephant-headed boy in a red velvet coffin, reputedly found living wild on the banks of the Congo, went for £1,900.

Torture items from the Brading Collection – formerly the Isle of Wight Waxworks – were particularly popular with bargain hunters.

Paul Birch successfully bid £1,100 for a man trap, complete with a life-size human ankle dripping with fake blood.

He said: “I saw one like this on TV and I thought ‘I’ve got to have one of those’.

“I think it’s just what every home needs and I’m going to put it in the living room where everybody can see it. This has been a really fun auction with a lot of good characters, normally people at auctions are very hoity-toity.”

Brave Paul, of Portsmouth, also bought a scold’s bridle for £300 and handed it over to his girlfriend Tegwen Owen.

The scold’s bridle, or brank, was an implement designed to be fitted on to a female head, apparently for the punishment of nagging women.

Museum owner Robert Ball also auctioned off the collection’s main draw – its taxidermy section.

A komodo dragon went for £1,200, while Battling Bruno – a brown bear wearing boxing gloves – went for £1,000.

Bruno was said to have fought all comers at rodeos throughout the mid-West and was stuffed when he died by request of Queen Victoria.

The stuffed animals were thought to have been collected by Professor Copperthwaite in the 1800s.

The sale fetched more than £100,000 and attracted around 300 people.

http://www.dorsetecho.co.uk/news/8099286.Victorian_collection_raises___100_000_at_Dorchester_auction/
(Submitted by Mark North)