Bottles

As Wednesday is my usual day for the DGP blog and this Wednesday is Christmas Day I’m betting that at sometime during the day most of us will have come across bottles of all shapes and sizes but what were the origins of these containers?

Mesopotamia. Where else. The discovery of the oldest known glass bottle in 1925 provides a window into the early origins of glassmaking. It was discovered in Uruk, which in around 3,700 BCE was a busy city-state. The bottle itself is small, less than 5 inches tall, with thick uneven walls indicating it was free-blown by someone learning the craft. Analysis shows the glass contains high levels of silica, lime, and alkali, revealing the basic recipe used over 5,000 years ago. Traces of wine residues confirm it once held a precious liquid.

Roman Glass History Museum

Similar techniques were used until the Romans pioneered the technique of glassblowing around the first century BCE. Glassblowing made the mass production of a variety of glass bottles possible. If you want to know more about glassblowing I highly recommend a trip to the World of Glass in St Helens. The process is mesmerising.

However, even with relatively high mass production, the cost of glass bottles meant that most wine was contained in animal skin or leather. However, by the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution represented a shift in this as glass bottles were put into production via semi-automatic machines. This allows containers to be mass produced. Additionally, the ease of manufacturing meant that different styles, finishes and shapes could be trialled allowing companies to start the comparing the quality of storage and chosen glass bottles.

The earliest perfume bottles date to around 1000 BCE in ancient Egypt. These perfume bottles were made from glass, alabaster, gold or ceramic. These perfume bottles were sophisticatedly designed and prized highly.

Here are a few, I think, interesting facts about bottles:

the oldest known message in a bottle

The oldest message in a bottle ever found was 131 years and 223 days old when it was discovered on Jan. 21, 2018, at Wedge Island, Australia. A German ship captain threw a gin bottle overboard on June 12, 1886 with a message written in ink, that contained the ship's coordinates and details, including departure and arrival times. The note requested the finder deliver the note to the nearest German Embassy.

The Carmona glass urn is a first-century CE find that contains intact wine. The urn was discovered in 2019 in Carmona, Spain during excavations of the city's western Roman necropolis. Analysis of the urn's contents five years after its discovery demonstrated the contents to be the oldest surviving wine in the world. This surpasses the previous record holder, the Speyer wine bottle, discovered in 1867, by three centuries.

Carmona wine vessel

According to the Guinness Book of Records the largest collection of beer bottles belongs to Ron Werner (USA) and consists of 25,866 individual beer bottles in Carnation, Washington, USA. Ron started his collection at the age of 14. On average, a 1,000 beer bottles are added to the collection every year.

Some of the info above is from Vitalie Trestianu, Southern Jar Company.

And locally the Harris Museum holds the largest scent bottle collection in Britain. These were collected by Mrs. Ideonea French, who was a collector since her early teens, but began a passion for collection after the death of her son in action in 1941 in North Africa. Mrs. French explored antique shops and dusty junk shops and her home became rather like a museum, with the collection displayed in glass cases in every room. Upon her death, Mrs. French wished not to split up the collection and the Harris received the entire collection.

Harris Museum scent bottle collection

Back in 2011 a friend had been to the event below and asked me to write a poem about it.

An Evening of Celebration and Entertainment

where a fiddler tails
the white sheet and skull
of Fari Lywd
as she snacks if she can
whatever’s left from
bottles of wine and beer
and whatever is on the plates
of an alloy of Brass
and Wenceslas
and Christmas fare

Fari or Mari
the grey mare won’t care
in English yn Cymraeg
as long as mince pies
are there for the taking

from the tables
of Pagan and Christian
and non- Christian folk
gathered in rounds
at this time and again
of singers and songs
that carol the half light
of winter’s turn
in the merry solstice
and merry Christmas in
Amgueddfa Ceredigion Museum

Thanks for reading. Merry Christmas, Terry Q.

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Message in a Bottle

Everything seemed simpler in the 1950s when I was growing up. 

In the summer holidays (which, incidentally, consisted of endless days of constant blue skies and sun) we went to the local recreation ground - or 'rec' as we called it - most days. Sometimes our mum came with us and we took a cobbled together picnic - sandwiches, crisps, an apple and, if we were lucky, a Penguin biscuit. If mum was busy we went on our own. It was about a fifteen minute walk or a ten minute bike ride away.  My elder brother had a second hand bike - his pride and joy - from a jumble sale. Mum had paid seven shillings and sixpence for it - a lot of money at the time - but it turned out to be a sound investment.  So, sometimes we walked, sometimes we biked it, but either way we used to go and spend most of the day there, playing in the bushes and round by the pond. These days it would be unheard of for three children, between the ages of eight and fourteen to spend a whole day playing out, fifteen minutes from home, but in the fifties this was the norm. Men were at work, their wives were busy at home and so the kids entertained themselves.  

I only remember two incidents connected with the rec. One was when a man appeared from behind a tree and asked me to come and see what he'd got in his hand. I hadn't got a clue what he was talking about and took a step towards him, smiling politely.  Luckily my much more streetwise friend pushed me back and told him in no uncertain terms where to go  He turned tail and legged it across the rec, while we continued to play quite happily. I don't think I even bothered to mention it to my mum when I got home.  The other incident was far more worrying to me.  After a few hours at the rec I returned home, only to discover I'd left my brand new cardigan (hot off my mum's knitting needles) on a bench. Mum was fuming, promptly donned coat and shoes and raced up to the rec. Needless to say, in those days of common poverty, somebody had taken a fancy to my cardigan and it was no longer abandoned on the bench. My mum wasn't happy and my main worry was not that I'd lost my cardigan but that I might be banned from ever returning to the rec. 

We played out after tea - cricket, the stumps chalked on to our front wall, the bat another jumble sale find; 'keep uppies' - until Gilly's mum came out and shouted at us for constantly banging on her wall; 'Keep the Sunny Side Up' with Iris Whitewell and Christine Archer - two big girls who, in all honesty, struggled to keep anything up, least of all their beefy thighs. I was self appointed choreographer and star dancer, with absolutely no ability in either field. We practised for hours for the show in my dad's garage, stopping abruptly if my dad or brothers dared to come in; we played Mothers and Fathers where my poor younger brother was always the baby; we held sales in the front garden, goods set out on kitchen stools, signs made from cardboard boxes. Our mums took pity on us and came and bought our old rubbish back. 

Back then, everyone had a local milkman, complete with super slow milk float, delivering to every doorstep. We had a baker, too, who left us our daily bread. He still had a horse and cart, which was a great novelty to us kids.  Most days we had a couple of pints of milk delivered. Sometimes my mum would leave a note in the empty bottle. What I really wanted was the half size bottle of orange juice that teased me from a crate on the back of the milk float. My mum said it was a waste of money - and at that time money was tight and certainly not to be wasted on such frivolities. The more I was told I couldn't have the orange juice, the more I wanted it. I devised plans of how to get hold of a bottle. I worked out how long I would have to save to buy one, but on 1d every other day for pocket money I soon gave up on that idea. Christine Archer had the bottles of orange regularly, but then she was allowed most things, including staying off school if she so much as murmured that she felt a little poorly.  In contrast, I had to be at death's door before missing a day's schooling. 

My lucky break came the day I was offered sixpence to go off with a man lurking at the bottom of our street.  I was highly temped to take the sixpence and leg it, but after the rec incident I was a bit more wary of strange men asking me to accompany them, and raced home to tell my mum.  The police were called, a description given and a police officer led me by the hand around the local streets, looking for the culprit.  I decided that any man who was willing to throw away sixpence on the off chance of getting a young girl to go off with him wouldn't be hanging around after his offer had been rejected, and sure enough, he was nowhere to be seen.  I actually felt it was all quite exciting being the centre of attention but my mum obviously thought I'd been scarred for life and was desperate to minimise the trauma.  She came out of the kitchen and handed me a scribbled note.  

"Just stick this in the milk bottle outside, love," she said, handing me the note.  I was about to complain when I glanced down at the piece of paper.  I grinned, went to the front door and poked the rolled note into the empty milk bottle.

The next day, my bottle of orange juice stood next to the milk on the step.  My brothers looked on enviously as I peeled off the foil top, raised the bottle to my lips and took a large mouthful. I never admitted to anyone, least of all my brothers or my mum, that the orange juice wasn't actually all that it was cracked up to be.

An Early Lesson in Disappointment by Jill Reidy

Eyeing up the bottles

On the milkman’s float

It wasn’t the white stuff that drew me

It was that amber nectar

Highly coloured

Reflecting the light

So many times

I’d imagined

The sweet, smooth orange

Sitting on the doorstep

In its half sized bottle

Next to the milk

It took a minor drama

To produce results

A simple message in a bottle

Foil cap peeled off slowly

Bottle to lips, head tipped back

Large swig...

An early lesson in disappointment

Thanks for reading     Jill

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