Provenance is all. It is what determines an antique object’s worth, as much as any intrinsic value of say gold or precious metals. Recently, a piece of old painted timber sold for over £400 on eBay because it was a very rare Milbro wooden catapult! That was about keen collectors in the UK fighting over it. You could call that extrinsic value.
And what has just been found may have even higher extrinsic value, despite being an old piece of cast metal from 70 years ago, worth literally nothing as far as the materials are concerned.
It is a 1950’s boy-sized Milbro, with an obviously original factory coating as yet never seen in the modern UK collection scene! It is in bizarrely good condition.
I honestly think this is the only one ever found in the UK so far and is in utterly absurdly good condition. I will offer the provenance AND THE INPUT FROM THE LEGENDARY N. BIRD, who has been consulted. His first question was if it was for sale!
As the editor of Slingshot World, I have a stupidly deep-seated childish-as-hell passion for them. I am also old! I gave up a Milbro at school confiscation time in my youth, as it was the one I was least bothered about giving up and kept just my Goliath and DeadShot. The DeadShot I got back from my dad’s desk drawer when we cleared the house when he passed away. I knew it was there. It goes back that far, personally for me.
My researches into the old Milbros and other classics led me to make this video. It helps if you think yours might be a reproduction. It is easy to tell by the way…
So I get messaged from time to time as folks ask me to check theirs, like I was an Antiques Roadshow pundit. And I get a simple message to the magazine page asking if I can check both the above pictured were genuine or reproductions.
I looked and was gradually aware of what I was looking at. A boy sized Milbro, with a coating? Now DeadShots had silvery coatings and these were contemporaneous with that. I was told by Mr. N. Bird (the leading slingshot collector) when I called him, that Milbro dropped the use of the same fixing as the DeadShot (the leather strip and tightly whipped waxed cotton thread one) in favour of collets made of wood. This was once banded with leather strips….
I asked my enquiring messager how he’d come by them and was told they were in a garage for two decades after his mate’s granddad’s stuff had been cleared and there was a box of them of different types.
Thus, twenty years, a grandfather in his dotage that had kept them his whole life and had been through various kinds, dumping them in a box forever after a bit of use and going on to the next purchase. I imagine a country lad with a bit of labouring or paper boy – or crop/hop picking money to spend. That fifty years of first hand knowledge of where they came from, plus twenty more in a box in a garage.
What it is, is undeniable but that coating has never been seen.
So of course, like the dude in Pawn Shop TV show, I have some knowledge but need a total expert. And that is N. Bird. I suggested that as there were a few found in a box, the original owner was not a frame ‘painter’ as he wouldn’t bother. The ‘archaeology’ of finding a box of them suggests grandfather-as-a-lad was able to just got another. Also, close examination shows the ageing of that finish is commensurate with years of blessedly DRY storage. Even alloy Milbros get groady if left to grow ally oxide for years and this looks clearly as if what few marks of life there are on it, were put on a factory-baked coating that was there when purchased. And Mr. Bird of course would NOT state flatly that this was absolutely proven as there are so few records, but did agree that my reasoning was sound and that it was likeliest to be a factory coated boy sized 1950 era frame of a type never seen on the collectors’ market in the UK before.
And he goes back years. All my homework examples, like this one….
…Were ones he knew about and could date and price as to what sold when for how much. he is encyclopaedic and only deals in facts but does think this is pukka.
So keep an eye on eBay as once this lad has worked out how to list it – or has got a mate to do it, (and has got over the sheer amazement at what he found) will be selling it on for the top end collectors to fight over!
I was chuffed to be asked and felt like that AR presenter given a rare thing the owner wasn’t fully aware of!
“IT’S WORTH HOW MUCH????”
I think it will break records…. EDIT: SOLD FOR £321 of which good ol’ Ebay nicked £43!!!!!!!
