HOARDED BOTTLES

Greymouth Evening Star, 9 December 1939, Page 10

HOARDED BOTTLES

A STRANGE HOBBY. .About 50 years ago a girl in South Africa was given a small blue bottle with a copper top as a present from a boy friend. That started that girl off on one of the strangest hobbies in the Union —collecting bottles and when she died not long ago she left behind a collection of 1,600 bottles of every shape, size, and colour, and not two alike. Now her husband, Mr. Tinie Neethliiig, of the little village of Rivicr Zonder End. near Caledon—the boy friend who' made the first bottle offering”—wants to sell the collection. “I haven’t time to keep the bottles in order,” he said. His wife kept the bottles in a special room in which there was nothing but bottles. Every day she would dust her collection, rearrange them, and keep them generally in order. Mr. Neethling. however realises that it is not going to be easy to find a buyer for the bottles, for although people become collectors of anything, they usually prefer to start from the beginning and then have the joy of gradually building up a collection. But he hopes that there may be some other bottle collectors in South Africa to whom, of course, such a collection would be a real “windfall.” Mr. Neethling has heard of an Eastern Province enthusiast who also has an amazing collection of bottles, kept in a specially-constructed underground “museum” on his farm.

In Mrs. Neethling’s collection is a white wine bottle of exquisite cut glass, which is more than 150 years old, and a bottle which belonged originally to one of the first settlers in Breda sdorp.

There are also 77 different types of ink bottles and 30 bottles shaped like people, birds, or animals.