West Midlands: Padlock collection discovered

Watch as Michael Hamson, from the West Midlands, shows some of the highly-detailed padlocks from the collection - worth thousands of pounds.

Transcript

00:00We're Mike and Sheila Hampson and we had an old house left to us through an old lady who

00:09we used to help out and after she died she left us everything. No idea of anything that was locked

00:15away in the garage and all this brass stuff was locked under the staircase. There's 200 locks

00:21and stashed away all into and some damn good nice ones. A lot of their locks were sent all over the

00:30world with the railways that were being built by the British and Argentina. There's one from the

00:38Peninsula Railways in India of all places. It's really really interesting and to look through all

00:44the books and the order books. There's even an order from Halfords 1905. And we thought it was

00:53time to sell because we've sort of sold the house now and this collection is still valuable to Michael

01:00because he doesn't want to sell it but I think it's the right thing to do yeah. Because of the age now

01:05clocking on 80 odd and I don't really want them to just be left and slung at the end of my death

01:14because there seemed to too much history for Willie Knoll and it's past. There ain't much left and I

01:20looked up I looked up Enoch Jones on the internet and it says locksmith from Willie Knoll. Very very

01:29little known about this company but I'm not surprised it was all at our house. The lot, all their ledges,

01:37everything. He set up the factory in 1874. Yeah, 1874. The first Enoch Jones and he passed on and left it to his

01:47son who was John Enoch Jones. Then he died and left it to another one that was Thomas Bedow Jones. I don't

01:57know where they, I don't want them to Enoch, he disappeared. Then he died. Yeah, then he died and

02:03left everything to his daughter who never got married, Eileen. Then she went on to be 93, 92 and

02:11passed away then and then because we'd helped her for 40 odd years she just took care of us really.

02:20She actually left it to us, yeah. Yeah. I don't know how you'd describe it. Amazing, yeah. We're not,

02:26certainly not gold hunters. We're just normal people. Not, not going, you know, trying to get

02:34things off elderly people. We're just normal, normal people.