Instead, the marketplace took the lead, with a series of patented containers, which, through shape, surface and colour, used non-verbal ways to warn about lethal contents.
Perhaps the most famous of all British poisons is a bottle in the shape of a coffin for which one George Ferns Langford was issued a provisional patent in November 1871. No prizes for guessing what would happen should the contents be consumed.
Today it is the bottle every collector yearns to own but just six examples are known. A photograph of one adorns the cover of collecting ‘bible’ Deadly Pleasures: British Poison Containers & Bottles (2008) by Guy Burch.
It is many years since one has come to auction. The finely preserved example that South Yorkshire bottle and advertising specialist BBR Auctions will offer as part of the Elsecar Summer National auction on July 6-7 was last sold in 1997 when it took £6700. Now it is estimated at £8000-12,000.
The rarer of two known variants, it has a shield embossed Poison Patent 5658 submitted 1871 plus a CH monogram, perhaps for the Manchester chemist and engineer Edmund Holt.
It comes for sale from the collection of Roy Sherwin, the source of a ‘wasp waist’ Eclipse bottle sold for £22,000 last year, the current record for a British poison bottle.
