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“Bottles By The Thousand In New P.N. Museum”

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Description: These images were taken for the June 25th 1978, edition of the Tribune weekly newspaper, the first of which was published with the caption “On the table behind the two women is one of the collections' bigger items, a water filter from a railway carriage. It's a Doulton vessel - made even before the Royal Doulton items. On the left are soda siphons with Palmerston North company names. The two elongated bottles lying down used to contain ‘Hamilton's aerated water’, and one of them came from under a Chinese hut in Marlborough, a relic of goldmining days. The large jar in the middle is a preserving jar - from Chicago. The big bottle beside it is one of the only two "M.R. Gabriel and Company Ltd’ bottles known to be in existence. Beside that is Mr A. N. Gibbon’s ginger beer bottle, and then a Carson and Company bottle. The two smaller bottles on the right were supplied by a Palmerston North chemist long ago - H. W. Scott's. The same dump yielded the chemist's botties, the Gabriel container and the codd bottle.”

An excerpt from the article read “A museum of old bottles, some of them rare and many of which were only made in Palmerston North, has been established in the city. The display comprises about 4,000 vessels, ranging in age from about 1820 until 1975 when metric measurements came in. They range from ‘Dr Williams Pink Pills for Pale People’ tiny bottles, to huge porcelain vessels for acid storage, and are the fruits of many years’ work by Mr and Mrs D Hicks. Work often spent at the bottom of farmyard dumps, digging out years of rubbish in their hunt for fragile prizes. Or scraping around the foundations of old houses. Or swapping with friends or buying them from antique shops.”

These images form part of the Manawatū Evening Standard Negative Collection. Unfortunately, only negatives between April and December 1978 are held.