As it’s sort of round my birthday as a special treat I am covering FIVE legs in this Post, Post No 27. And they are all of the same genre…. they are Bottle Openers.
This first one, the opener I have had the longest, I
purchased at the NEC in 2012. For the princely sum of £10 this steel leg was
way off the valuable legs scale, but it was a good example at that time, of the
variety of legs that I was going to find over the years ahead. It has “Cheers” in 14 different languages,
and would sit well behind a commercial bar, as an easy tool to use for removing
bottle caps.
It does have “Foreign design” with a registered number inscribed
on the reverse but this is insufficient to reveal any history or
provenance. It has been well used and as
it was datelined at the NEC it is an antique…of sorts!!
It’s mate I found at Buxton last year ( 9 years later). This one has six printed one-liners.
It
takes two to tangle
A
friend in need is indeed a pest
Familiarity
Breeds
A
penny saved is ridiculous
Work
is the curse of the drinking class and
A
little yearning is a dangerous thing.
The shapes of these two large openers are almost
identical but not quite. I think it unlikely that they were made by two
different businesses, and with time I can envisage the template/master would
vary.
Moving on to another pair, these are also bottle cap
removers, but they are both small and cheap and would have been promotional
give aways for customers given away in public houses as an encouragement for
customers to remember the products.
The Schweppes lever has a high heeled shoe and an engraved garter, the same on both sides. Schweppes was selling bottled water from 1873 and crown caps (as the bottle tops were originally called) were invented in 1892. So, this style of bottle lever presumably started in the early 20th century and undoubtedly soon after bottle caps started to be used to seal bottles..
The other, is engraved on one side with “Carlsberg Lager;
-Danish- ; and the Danish crown.” The
other side is engraved with “A GOOD LEG UP.” Carlsberg started brewing in mid-19th
century, so with a similar timeline to Schweppes.
I don’t believe these levers have any age.
My fifth leg is quite simple – it is made of brass and is
quite heavy for its size. It sits well
and could be a paper weight. It does
have a little groove in the heel so that it would latch on to a metal bottle
top.
No inscriptions, it was found at Uttoxeter 3 years ago.
So there we have Bottle Openers, another example of the
many different leg forms that I am continuously searching for.
What next I hear you ask!!!
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