Goffe & Sons cobalt blue Codd bottle, sold for a record £33,000 at BBR Auctions.
The exceptional Goffe & Sons cobalt blue Codd bottle hammered down at £33,000 on July 7 - improving on the previous high of £23,500 bid for a handled shaft and globe serving bottle at BBR in 2008.
It has been estimated there are between 500 and 1000 different types of marble-in-neck bottles based on the famous 1872 patent by Hiram Codd.
Collectors will seek to own as many designs, shapes and colours as possible with the relatively few cobalt blue examples long commanding a premium. This 7in (17cm) ‘bulb neck’ 10oz example is moulded with the oval pictorial trademark of two crossed bottles for the Birmingham retailer Goffe & Sons and crisply embossed to the reverse for the Castleford glassworks of Edgar Breffit & Co Ltd. As the firm became a limited company in 1884, this neatly dates the bottle to this period.
Most surviving examples of this bottle (several have been dug up in the Midlands) are damaged and restored. This one, from the collection of long-time enthusiast Garth Morrison who is thought to have bought it in the 1990s, is remarkable for both its luminous colour and its pristine condition (graded 9.8 out of 10). Described by BBR’s Alan Blakeman as “a truly once in a lifetime chance to obtain a top of the class bottle - the bottle of everyone’s dreams”, it was estimated at £8000-10,000 but won by a UK collector at a price that, with the 18% buyer’s premium added, was a fraction shy of £39,000.
BBR’s previous high for a Codd was the Schon’s Patent sold for £10,000 in 2013.
Mineral waters are perhaps the most collected category of UK bottles. The second-highest price for an English bottle was set at BBR just 38 lots later with the sale of a giant 10½in (26cm) amber glass mineral water bottle embossed for Rogers, Rock & Co, London and The Nazam’s Government, Hyderabad.
With a capacity of around 20oz, it was almost twice the size of most aerated water bottles and the design was a hybrid, combining the form of William Hamilton’s egg-shaped or torpedo bottle (patented in 1814) with the neck of a Codd.
A bottle previously only known from fragments and one other, this complete example was recently found by a bottle collector in India. It had an estimate of £12,000-15,000 and sold at £30,000 to an English collector.
Many Codd bottles were exported to India, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand in particular. However, the design never caught on in the US where bot tles using Charles Hutchinson’s 1879 patent spring stopper dominated the soda trade.
Evidence that the top end of British bottle collecting is enjoying a purple patch, a series of collecting benchmarks were set at this auction, which closed out the UK Summer National bottle and advertising fair on the weekend of July 6-7.
Victorian Prattware advertising plaque for Feast (late Batty and Feast) Pickles, Sauces and Fruits, £16,000 at BBR.
A Victorian Prattware pictorial advertising plaque, promoting the merits of Feast (late Batty and Feast) Pickles, Sauces and Fruits sold at £16,000 to a London collection.
Measuring 10 x 8in (25 x 20cm), this image, with its two large replica prize medals, is incorrectly attributed to the Mayer factory in KV Mortimer’s book Pot-lids and Other Coloured Printed Staffordshire Wares. This example is clearly marked to the rear for F&R Pratt of Fenton.
The previous high for these exhibition-style advertising plaques was the £8000 bid at BBR in October 2023 for an F&R Pratt plaque advertising Crosse and Blackwell’s anchovy paste.
Restoration period sealed shaft and globe wine bottle, £12,000 at BBR.
The patent coffin-shaped poison bottle previewed and discussed in ATG No 2649 sold at £13,000 (UK buyer), while a bid of £12,000 (US buyer) was taken for the earliest bottle in the sale, a 9½in (24cm) Restoration period sealed shaft and globe wine bottle in a rich mid-ol ive hued glas s c.1660-65.
This excavated bottle, with the unidentified seal with the initials GO, was first shown to specialists at a bottle show held at the Spa Hotel in Lucan, County Dublin in May 2004. The owner, who thought it might be Roman, had bought it in a job lot of bottles at a car boot sale in Warwick or Worcester, c. 1991.
It was sold at BBR in 2012 for £15,000 and then again at Bonhams in June 2023 when it was bought by the vendor at £4600.
