‘Teacher's Gotta Lotta Bottle’ screamed the headline in The Sun in 1987 when it told how a young teacher had ditched his career for a rather less secure job dealing in old bottles and pots.

It didn't seem very promising.

Who could have dreamt that it was the grandfather clocks and Dalton figurines carefully handed down over the generations that would become virtually worthless as the years advanced – while those rare bottles and pots would actually shoot up in price.

Alan Blakeman, of BBR Auctions, based at Elsecar Heritage Centre, Barnsley, has spent the past 45 years, since leaving his career in teaching, promoting the collecting of antique bottles, pot lids and advertising signs.

Alan Blakeman of BBR Auctions, Elesecar Heritage Centre, Barnsley pictured with a blue Hiram Codd bottle which recently made nearly £40K at auction. Picture taken by Yorkshire Post Photographer Simon Hulme 22nd July 2024

He hosts an annual ‘SummerNational’ weekend which draws collectors from all over the world. Once £500 to £1,000 was seen as an enormous price to pay for an empty bottle, but even in the 1990s prices started to reach "seemingly impossible" five figures.

His latest auction shows the heady prices that rarities can now command, with an “exceptional” blue Codd bottle setting a new world record for an English empty container.

While to the layperson it may look a typical marble-stoppered Victorian bottle, to the collector its luminous blue colour and mint condition makes it "the Holy Grail of collecting".

Bottles which kept the fizz in without the use of a cork were designed by Hiram Codd in 1872. The pressure of the gas in the bottle forced a marble against a washer, sealing in the carbonation.

Alan Blakeman of BBR Auctions, Elsecar Heritage Centre, Barnsley pictured with a blue Hiram Codd bottle which recently made nearly £40K at auction. Picture taken by Yorkshire Post Photographer Simon Hulme 22nd July 2024

The previous record for a Codd marble bottle was just under £13,000 in 2013.

However earlier this month the hammer came down on the bottle for £33,000 at BBR Auctions, up from a previous high of £23,500, to a bidder from the Midlands.

Alan explains that because of their age and design – the bottles have a 90 degree lip – they are usually damaged. The bottle also has a link with Yorkshire: "Hiram Codd went round the country (with his innovation) and they laughed at him, but Rylands Bottle Works near Barnsley took on the novel invention.

"Barnsley's coat of arms is a glassblower on one side and a miner on the other and that invention alone spurred on the glass industry in South Yorkshire," he said.

The bottle was actually made by Edgar Breffit & Co of Castleford for retailers Goffe & Sons of Birmingham. "It is the first mint Goffe & Sons, Birmingham Codd bottle to come on the market," says Alan. "The irony is in that period blue bottles were often associated with poison, quite an odd colour to use for a pop bottle."

Alan's very chuffed with how the auction went and the fact that from being on page 3 of the Sun he has now made front page of the world's leading antiques publication, Antique Trade Gazette.

Meet the canny collector who sold the Holy Grail of rare bottles for a record price