Derbyshire grandad hopes to step into the record books with legs collection

Derbyshire Times

David Bennett, 84, has spent more than a decade and £6,000 of his life-savings trawling flea markets and antique fairs for pocket-sized lower limbs.

Transcript

00:00 I mean these bone ones, these carved ones, the prisoner of war ones, they really stand

00:09 out from some that are just nicely shaped.

00:13 It all started in 2009 when I had my collection of sugar tongs.

00:21 I felt it had come to as far as it could go.

00:23 It was getting expensive, there wasn't much variety.

00:27 And I'd sold them, and I had some money when I went to an antique fair in Birmingham.

00:32 And I saw a pair of legs on a stall holder at the store and I asked her about them.

00:39 And she said, "Well they both come from the same family so I'd like to sell the two together."

00:43 And I negotiated a deal.

00:45 And so I'd already got the first two.

00:47 And when you look at them really carefully you can see whether it's a leg or a foot.

01:00 There's a foot there, there's a shoe.

01:02 Very small step so it'll be male.

01:05 Can't tell left or right.

01:06 And I thought, well this may be something that'll go further.

01:10 Well it did very quickly because my wife said, "Well I've got a nail file in the shape of

01:15 the leg, you can have it as well."

01:17 And that's how it all started.

01:19 Will breathe, be breathed out through there, through there and out the top.

01:24 And it's just an opium pipe.

01:28 When you come across, that's going to be well over 100 years old.

01:32 All these, 170 I have at the moment, I bought one last weekend.

01:37 They are all legs which are functional.

01:41 They do something, be it a bottle opener, be it a nail file, be it a pipe tamper.

01:47 The 18th century, could be older than that.

01:50 Not very valuable but just unique and absolutely appropriate in this collection.

01:56 I did recently do, over the period of two years, a fortnightly blog about some of these

02:03 legs and I covered every one of them.

02:04 A bit about the history.

02:08 Good heel on that one.

02:10 You can't see left or right foot, neither of those.

02:12 You can't see any difference.

02:13 Again, a throwaway, a giveaway.

02:14 But the point is what you put inside an emblem.

02:19 I started because it was something, I wanted to collect something different.

02:26 I'd collected stamps, I'd collected train numbers, I'd collected sugar dumps.

02:30 But I want something different.

02:32 And so when I got these two together and then my wife added the third, I thought, there

02:37 is a future for this.

02:40 When I'm looking for them, really all I'm looking for is something that I haven't seen

02:46 before.

02:47 That's what I want to add to the collection.

02:50 It doesn't matter what style it is.

02:53 There are no duplicates.

02:54 The wand would be dipped into the perfume behind the ear, wherever.

02:55 That's the concept.

02:56 I just find it so amusing.

02:57 I saw it on a stand at an antique fair in Dublin.

03:07 There's no particular thing.

03:08 I don't have a fetish for legs or anything like that.

03:12 It's just nobody else does it.

03:14 It's nice to be unique.

03:15 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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