A very quick one tonight, I've been having
a 'bit of a week', boiler wise! Among the items I've inherited are two ships,
in bottles, these are they . . .
This was from a Perrier Water promotion in the 1970's, a friend of Mum's (also our friend
Guy's mum!) was a promoter who used to go round supermarkets or department stores demonstrating
things and giving out free samples (Mum did too; a while later - I became
addicted to mini frozen jam-doughnuts at one point!), and as well as the bottles
of free Perrier, there were plastic
key-ring bottles (which I should have somewhere, but can't remember seeing it
for years?), and reward bonuses, and I think this was one of those.
Google and feebleBay reveal other Perrier ships in bottles, but they must
have been different promotions or regions, as I only remember Janet having a
few of these for her team. The ship - Loch Torridon, a four-masted
barque/clipper-ship; one of the last) is fascinating, although it's history
varies on the internet, some thinking it Norwegian when it foundered, some
Russian, Wiki's probably best for a primer!
I've also seen this exact model in a
different bottle, for a whiskey company's similar promotion, so the model must
have been commissioned from a commercial ship-in-bottle modelling company!
This is more of a tourist memento/keepsake,
and a fine example of blown-glasswork it is, one sail has fallen off, but
finding someone with the skill to mend it is going to take a few phone-calls,
as while there are craft glass-works about the place, there can't be many who
can do key-hole surgery with long molten rods through the end of a bottle!
It's a more fanciful model of a more
medieval type I think? That's it - two ships in bottles!
