Friday, December 01, 2017

Rare new additions to the Beatties collection

Recently, I've added a couple of new items to my collection of Beatties memorabilia. Both are rare simply because sensible people would have thrown them away years ago.
 

First, we have a plastic carrier bag, the "Hornby Railways the present with a future" edition.

Won on eBay for a stonking 99p including postage, it's a quality item. Certainly rather thicker than bags we tend to get nowadays. The condition is perfect and yet again, I'm tempted to head to Google Streetview to see what the various stores are now.

While watching this, I noticed that there are quite a lot of auctions for carrier bags, maybe there is a whole collecting scene for them? It's not so daft, let's face it, old shop names are properly nostalgic for most of us. There is more pleasure seeing a Wavy Line or Bejam bag than many "proper" museum artefacts.

Rarer still, how about a shop receipt?

Dropped off by a kind visitor to Warley show last weekend (thank you!), this slip of slightly faded paper comes from the Manchester branch on 7th March 1998. A Bedford Dropside TK (£5.00) and Maidstone bus (£11.99) were bought, paid for with a £20 note.

I'll need to keep this in the dark as the printing process isn't particularly stable. Lasting nearly 20 years is pretty impressive as it is.

All this stuff is pretty well worthless, except to me. One day, when my museum of model shops opens, you will all pay good money to come and marvel at my precious things though. 

1 comment:

Nick Brad said...

That receipt is doing really well, I did have a trains4u receipt dated 2001, but despite being in a box, the ink is all but illegible now.

That's quite the collection you have now, the Colonel would be proud I'm sure, that someone is keeping his legacy alive in some small way.