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    Digging for Treasure: A Guide to Finding Valuable Victorian Rubbish Dumps
    Digging for Treasure: A Guide to Finding Valuable Victorian Rubbish Dumps
    Digging for Treasure: A Guide to Finding Valuable Victorian Rubbish Dumps
    Ebook110 pages1 hour

    Digging for Treasure: A Guide to Finding Valuable Victorian Rubbish Dumps

    By Ron Dale

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    Digging for Treasure could possibly have been titled Memoirs of a Dump Digger, as although it is a practical book packed with know-how gained by the author over a number of years, all the information passed on through the book is from the authors own real-life experiences.

    Digging into Victorian and Edwardian rubbish dumps may seem a crazy way to earn a living, but many thousands of people in Britain alone have been involved in such a hobby part-time since the 1970s. It all started in the U.S.A. in the 1950s when old frontier towns were searched for their throwaway bottles. The patent quack medicine bottles of the 19th century proved a fascinating subject of research. Dump- digging soon spread to Canada and the U.K. and is also particularly strong in Australia.

    The finds in old refuse are not just bottles. In a century when local chemists made their own toothpaste in the back of the shop, it was sold in small ceramic pots with lids which had printed advertising on them under the glaze. Chemists could design their own advertising lids and the individuality and naivety of these is part of their charm. This was a time before the invention of the squeezable tube which we use today for toothpaste, creams and ointments. Ointments claiming to cure a wide variety of illnesses were sold in these pots, something which is illegal today. Ointments can alleviate or soothe problems, but they cannot claim to cure!

    In Digging for Treasure the author points out that once a dump has been emptied of its finds by hordes of collector-diggers, they have to constantly be searching for other sites. This has become a problem today as gradually more and more old rubbish dumps disappear under the building of trading estates, car parks and housing estates. Whilst this is admittedly true, the author believes there are still some town dumps yet to be found, although fast disappearing. Also he advocates the re-digging of sites which were inefficiently dug by zealous collectors the first time around.

    Victorian refuse dumps yield a wide variety of glass bottles, printed stoneware and ceramic pots and advertising lids, clay pipes with decorated bowls, china dolls heads, brown salt-glazed stoneware bottles and jars. Some of the rarer bottles and pot-lids are now selling for several hundreds of pounds and the very rare up to 5,000. As sites become even more difficult to find, this trend for higher prices must continue.

    The author points the way to the future in what he describes as the forgotten dumps. In the book he describes the research he has done on the collection of refuse in the U.K. which is a subject most of us pay scant attention to. Many would believe that there has always been a collection of our waste, but this is not so. In many towns and villages, the collection of household waste was not organised until after 1900. The smaller the village, the later was collection introduced. Although in London and a few other large cities, refuse collection began from about the 1880s, some small villages did not have this facility until about 1920. As town dumps gradually disappear under buildings, the author points the way forward for dump-diggers of the future what he calls the forgotten dumps and he claims there are tens of thousands of them to be found.

    The hobby of bottle-collecting also covers the collecting of pot-lids and other finds and in all English-speaking countries there are clubs, magazines and auctions to cater for collectors. Online auctions on e-bay for antique bottles and pot-lids receive bids from all over the world. Bottles and pot-lids are big business and for anyone wishing to dig up their own antiques, this book is indispensable.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherXlibris UK
    Release dateSep 11, 2012
    ISBN9781479714773
    Digging for Treasure: A Guide to Finding Valuable Victorian Rubbish Dumps
    Author

    Ron Dale

    The Zaca Creek author is a common man that grew up on a Midwest farm in Indiana. After University, he was an educator and coach of young people aspiring to find their way into a life of independence as productive citizens. After moving to California during a recession with limited professional opportunities, he created a family business of design and build. The experiences with government and economics were the fertile ground for the stories told in this fictional Zaca Creek novel. California is a diverse culture of industrious, creative people. The shores and harbors of the Channel Islands near Santa Barbara inspired this story of the Chinese invasion escaping the 13TH Century hordes of Genghis Khan that blended into magnificent Chumash Nation. He has five sons that share DNA from Mom and Dad. Observing the patterns of each son with ancestral influence led to an interest in family ancestry.

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      Book preview

      Digging for Treasure - Ron Dale

      Copyright © 2012 by Ron Dale.

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

      To order additional copies of this book, contact:

      Xlibris Corporation

      0-800-644-6988

      www.xlibrispublishing.co.uk

      Orders@xlibrispublishing.co.uk

      304918

      Contents

      Introduction

      Chapter One       The Beginnings of Refuse Collection

      Chapter Two       Finding Town Dumps

      Chapter Three       Brickworks Dumps

      Chapter Four       Other Types of Dump

      Chapter Five       On Finding Your Dump

      Chapter Six       Digging Safely & Efficiently

      Chapter Seven       Let’s Go Digging

      Chapter Eight       Collecting

      Chapter Nine       Cleaning Your Finds

      Last Words

      Introduction

      ALLOW ME TO INTRODUCE MYSELF:

      In the 1970s and 80s I spent over 10 years digging full-time into Victorian and Edwardian rubbish dumps and for several years after this it was also my part-time hobby. Additionally, I was running a Sunday auction at Hollingbourne in Kent for the finds: antique bottles and printed pot-lids, dolls heads and salt-glazed stoneware. I also sold my own finds to collectors and dealers from all over the world at a stall in the famous Bermondsey Antique Market in Long Lane, London and Maidstone market in Kent.

      In my spare time I also wrote magazine articles, resulting from my own research, as dump-digging was in its infancy in the early 70s and there was no published information on the finds. These were published in a variety of magazines such as Treasure Hunting, Kollectorama, Bottles & Relics News, Antique Bottle Collecting, Art & Antiques Weekly, The Lady and many others. In 1977 I was able to publish a comprehensive book, The Price Guide to Black & White Pot-Lids through the Antique Collectors Club of Woodbridge, illustrating over 2,300 different advertising pot-lids with their approximate dates and values. This was only made possible due to the flow of pot-lids through my auctions which at this time were the only ones existing in the U.K. for dump finds as they are called today. This book was the very first price guide on these types of advertising lids and has since become a classic in its own right, being something of a collector’s item itself. Although a revised paperback edition was published in 1987, the values quoted in this are long out-of-date and more up-to-date valuation guides for some lids now exist. However, it still stands alone as the most comprehensive listing of pot-lids between two covers. There is breaking news of a soon-to-be-published book of pot-lids listing 7,000, which shoots mine out of the water. This is good news as research should be progressive and such a book is long overdue and I am looking forward to seeing what has been found since 1977. It is time all these newly-discovered lids were between the covers of one large book and values updated. Since those early days advertising pot-lids have escalated enormously in value and are still keenly sought by collectors in all parts of the world, many of them realising from £200 to £300 each and the very rare reaching up to £5,000. Not a bad price for an old hair grease, toothpaste or fish paste lid thrown away in someone’s dustbin just over a century ago! It seems natural that the value of bottles I was digging out in the 1970s have increased and I have been surprised to see many printed ginger beer bottles commanding as much as £40 to £80 each for the rarer pictorial specimens. I remember well finding the first blue submarine poison bottles in the 1970s and seeing them sell for £5 to £8 each in my auctions, but although they were not common in those days, we were pleased to accept such prices. Today they sell from £800 to over £1,000 each. It is encouraging to me as an old-timer, to see that a hobby which I participated in at the very beginning of an exciting time is still flourishing. The fact is that in the early 1970s no-one alive could remember the pot-lids and bottles we were finding from the 19th century. They had been thrown away, buried and forgotten. Then along we came and dug them up to start a new hobby, and an interesting one at that. Digging outside in the fresh air is good exercise, healthy and profitable. Furthermore it’s exciting as you never know what rarity you might find on the next shovelful and although in those early days there was no fixed price range as we did not know what was rare and what was not, prices have eventually found their own levels like water does.

      The hobby of digging century-old rubbish dumps and collecting the finds has mushroomed enormously since I first started digging and it is now well established in the U.K., Australia, New Zealand and in the U.S.A. Although my experience of digging has been only in the U.K., the principles of finding dumps applies equally to all countries of the world as all houses and farms built before about 1880 would have their own rubbish dump with valuable finds still buried underground, waiting for someone to dig up this forgotten treasure.

      I have heard it said that all British dumps are now dug out. Nonsense! My gazetteer of 1904 lists over 50,000 towns and villages in the U.K. and I am absolutely certain this number of dumps or even half that number have not been found from Victorian and Edwardian times. Read on and I will tell you why.

      I will also advise you how to find these valuable early rubbish dumps. I am no longer able to do such physical work, having developed a spinal problem and having reached the tender age of 80, I think I have to hang up my digging fork. I hope to pass on to another generation the enthusiasm for dump-digging—the thrill of finding rarities—the gaining of a new hobby in which all the family can participate. Now you know who I am and that (like Oscar Wilde) I wish to remind people that rumours of my death are exaggerated. Please allow me to introduce you to the world of dump-digging, to the treasures hidden under the ground for over a century. And although the finds are not gold coins, they are treasure in other ways: they do have a cash value, but digging for dump relics is not all about money. You will never get rich from dump-digging. It is more about finding something with a garden fork and spade which was discarded as useless by previous generations and today may be regarded in a different light. It is about finding antiques which did not exist to be seen anywhere on earth, because they were buried under the ground. It is about digging up your own antiques. There is a thrill in re-discovering such items from a previous century. And the finds themselves—lowly household containers of no interest in the 19th century—have since acquired charm, antiquity and in some instances a high value. Also there is beauty in the colours of deep cobalt blue poison bottles, the antique mottled surface of a bitters bottle reflecting the wooden mould into which it may have been mouth-blown and the striations in a bottle-neck caused when an apprentice applied a lip by hand-tools to a crude jagged bottle-top. And there is the printed humour of the advertising on certain ointment pots claiming they could cure gout, rheumatism, erysipelas, myxomatosis, galloping lugrot, the screaming heebygeebees etc. Personally, I also find the diversity of typography on Victorian pot-lid advertising to be fascinating too as some used several fonts on the same lid to attract attention. The finds in old dumps may not

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