Finally I noted with interest the post mentioning a hurricane artefact having been sold with the provenance it was from a BoB casualty, the identity of which is now unknown. Such provenance does indeed seem to raise prices and I have to wonder how often such provenance is manipulated to assist sales and how many unidentified pieces are given value by adding details from our websites or museum displays? To qualify this I have seen an item on eBay that could not have possibly come from the aircraft stated, yet was listed as originating from a site we have excavated.
I have often seen items for sale as you speak of. How do you warn off prospective buyers of said pieces though, apart from the usual way through having ebay delist the said item. if someone wants to own a piece of Battle Of Britain heritage, the provenance offered, albeit fake, could or would, cloud their judgement and go ahead and buy the item anyway.
In 1974 I bought a piece of Dornier in a militaria shop in Southend on Sea. No ebay in that day!, The sheer thought of owning a genuine ‘Battle Of Britain’ relic, was to me a dream come true. Here I was ,the owner, or should I say Custodian, of a small piece of History.
But was it a good thing or a bad thing by buying a piece of history? I like to think of it as a good thing, for it gave me the determination to find out more about the Battle, and has given me the deep interest in second world war aviation that I have today.
It was also the jolt I needed to find and join a local recovery group. I finally joined the Essex Aviation Group in 1978 and took part in many digs up untill about 1984. I did collect items from different crash sites during that period, most members of the group did. They were parts that were repeated in other displays in the museum, or items not deemed worthy of inclusion in the display of artefacts from that particular site. but all given to me by senior group members.
Like Neil, there were many weekends spent after a dig, cleaning and sorting atrefacts for a display, often….nay, very often without the multitude of members who actually were on the dig… they were conspicuous by their absence:)
The majority of those parts today still reside with me, Although from time to time I have given bits and pieces away, but I am selective. I have only given parts to people I know will look after them and who hold them in the regard that I do.
Cees Broere
We have a huge building where our museum is based and a relatively large storage area and we have in recent years been sifting though the recovered wreckage and anything that is not useful will be send for scrap (mostly scraps of aluminium) with the money put back into our museum.
I used to know a fellow who would cast aluminium models of the aircraft from leftover wreckage, he always reckoned that would bring in more money for individual museums than just scrapping the leftovers. It also kept part of the aircraft ‘alive’ so to speak, brings me nicely back to ebay, and the many ‘Cast from shot down german aircraft Bell’ you see for sale, Oh, that and all the endless ‘From a Spitfire/Hurricane/Lancaster/Mosquito’ switches and dials also available:)
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