An eccentric British obsession: meet the super-collectors
In an achingly cool canal-side gallery in London’s trendy East End, Tim Baker is showing me his deeply uncool collection of toy soldiers. Or rather, the 1,000 toy soldiers he is arranging on shelves today, which represent a mere twelfth of his total, and still-growing, stash. “These flat ones from the Franco-Prussian war are German, and are still produced today,” the 68-year-old actor tells me. “Those Danish ones you were supposed to make yourself: you bought the moulds and melted down bits of lead pipe. Those French ones were given away in cans of coffee, and you painted them yourself. A lot of these are hand-painted.”
His Beatles collection is probably the most valuable of all those represented at Proud: he bequeathed the original handwritten lyrics of Help, I Wanna Hold Your Hand and Yesterday (“a bit of a fiddle – Paul wrote that out later for me in 1966”) to the British Museum in 1985 when he realised “they were worth more than my house”. Kelle Blyth has some very rare items but just loves the way her multi-coloured, different-headed Pez dispensers look: she doesn’t even like the sweets. Jill Latter started making dolls’ house furniture while caring for a mother with dementia, then started buying it. Her late husband supported her hobby, as does Blyth’s husband and Davies’s wife (“though if I go first, everything’ll go in the skip”). Only Tim Baker concedes that his obsessive habit of haunting toy shops on family holidays may have been a factor in his divorce.
By: Nick Curtis
Source: The Telegraph
