Antiques Roadshow guests admit ‘creepy head’ worth thousands was used to ‘scare people’
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WARNING: This article contains spoilers from Antiques Roadshow. Antiques Roadshow guests were pleasantly surprised when they discovered their family heirloom was worth a tidy fortune. Filming at Firstsite in Colchester, the BBC daytime series saw expert Serhat Ahmet meet with a couple who presented him with a bust of a man’s head wearing a headdress.
“I don’t know about you but I feel the rest of the body is slowly going to rise out of this chest,” Ahmet joked. The woman teased: “His eyes do sort of follow you around the room”, as he agreed: “They do, they’ve got a very intentional stare about them.”.
The woman described the sculpture as “beautiful”, and Ahmet went on to explain that it was made by Doulton “master artist” George Tinworth. The piece had not only been signed by him but by inventor Henry Doulton, and had been made during the early stint of Tinworth’s career which ran from the late 1870s to the early 1880s.
When asked how the bust had come into their possession, the man answered: “Well we’ve had him about 15 years but before that, it was my great-grandfather, in about 1910, he bought a house off the Doulton family in London and he came with it as well.
“He’s had a fairly exciting life so at one stage he was cemented to my grandfather’s garage for 20 years outside. “My grandfather also had him lurking in the outside toilet to scare people and then he was in the garden and for the last 15 years he’s been inside with us and come Christmas, he has his tinsel around him so he’s a very loved bit of the family.”.
