Yetis, unicorns and even flying kittens: Inside the worlds zaniest zoo

13th April 2010

From the outside, it's an unremarkable industrial warehouse, home to Duke's Auction House. But the stench of turpentine marks it out from the other buildings on the Grove Industrial Estate in Dorchester, Dorset. It's the first clue that inside lurks a haven of Victorian taxidermy.

Step in, and you'll see a Bengali tiger on its hind legs, 8ft tall, lunging claws-first (and canines first) towards you. Behind him is a peacock, glorious tail splayed behind it.

To the right are three zebras, a camel, baby rhinoceros and seven lions, the lioness twisted on the ground, sinking her incisors into a bloodied antelope. All in all, there are 250 animals, many of which are the treasures of an eccentric 19th-century professor and explorer.

Elsewhere are grotesque figures: shrunken monkey heads on spikes, Siamese lambs conjoined at the head, a velvet coffin with the body of a 16-year-old Congolese boy (complete with an elephant's head stitched to his corpse), and dozens of glass-eyed waxworks with liver- spotted skin or daggers plunging into their chests.

Oh, and a blue dress once worn by Princess Diana.

Needless to say, the potential buyers are terribly excited by the goods on offer.
'Crikey!' says Tim MacPherson, a local photographer, on seeing the menagerie. His 10-year-old daughter Scout stops in shock for a moment before she can walk on.

Antiques dealer Julian Rogers gets out his mobile phone. 'You need to see this!' he tells his friend Douglas, the owner of Alice's antiques shop on Portobello Road in Notting Hill, West London.

Michael Ridley, director of a local dinosaur museum, is spellbound. 'I don't usually touch taxidermy. But, cor blimey!'

The only ones who stride in unfazed, eyes to the ground, are businessman Robert Ball, 58, and his well-heeled partner Josephine, 57. They own everything in the room and are 'absolutely gutted' it's being auctioned off tomorrow.

But what kind of people own such ' treasures'? And where did they get them?

These astonishing examples of taxidermy are relics of Robert's old Isle of Wight waxworks museum, Brading The Experience.

It first opened 45 years ago, and Ball bought the museum in 2001 when it was already filled with war relics, waxworks, traditional fairground models and two types of stuffed animals: taxidermies (like lions, leopards, crocodiles) and rogue taxidermies (two different animals stitched together and stuffed).

Back then, 60,000 visitors piled through the doors each year, fascinated by ghost stories about a Frenchman called Louis de Rochefort who was said to haunt the building.

But nine years later, visitor numbers had dwindled to 25,000. So Ball ploughed £150,000 of his own money in to rejuvenate it and donated his entire collection of taxidermy (mainly small animals such as seals, badgers and hogs).

Ball, a self-confessed eccentric, had been collecting taxidermy, trinkets and 'grotesque things like skulls,' since he was 12 years old, when he first persuaded his mother to drive him to an auction house on his native Isle of Wight.

'I loved junk shops, tiny second-hand shops, church fetes, even skips,' he says. 'When I was a teenager, I spent weekends looking for discarded skulls or stuffed birds. I even spent my honeymoon scouting an allotment.'

Which all begins to explain why he was so attached to his beloved waxworks museum. However, he admitted defeat and closed it down in January, along with several other businesses in his company Brading Trading (including a tea room, seaside souvenir gift shop and factory outlet shop).

As for the museum collection, he shipped it in three lorries to Duke's Auction House in Dorchester, where staff are rather more used to selling landscape paintings, the odd Picasso (in 2008), or rare Chinese vases (earlier this year).

They are still dumbfounded by the monstrosities, particularly the waxwork Queen Victoria who appears to be able to breathe - with the help of a generator, I later discover.

So how did these taxidermies first find their way on to the sleepy Isle of Wight?
Legend has it that they were originally collected by a mysterious academic in the late 1800s called Professor Copperthwaite.

Somehow, the story goes, his collection found its way into the hands of an antique dealer based somewhere in the North of England, who then sold them on to Graham Osborne-Smith, the man who opened the museum on the Isle of Wight in 1965.

Professor Copperthwaite was said to have had a thick, curly grey beard, wore long-tailed coats and pinstripe trousers and travelled the world collecting the strange, deformed animals.

'He was a real eccentric,' says Ball. 'He went around the world on tours collecting weird things like the two-headed Siamese lamb and did experiments gilding animals like swans in silver foil.'

His most remarkable find was a huge stuffed brown bear that stands on its hind legs dressed in boxing gloves and a red-and-gold sash. Nicknamed 'Battling Bruno,' he was said to have been a famous fighting bear who was transported across America to take part in bear-fighting contests sometime in the 19th century.

Queen Victoria was said to have been so impressed with Battling Bruno that she awarded him the title 'Knight of the Royal Bath'. When he died, he was stuffed at royal request.

So how on earth did Battling Bruno come to be in the hands of the elusive Professor? Well, in a strange twist of events, Ball claims the stuffed bear was left at the lost property department of Paddington Station.

He says Copperthwaite bought Bruno and added him to his collection, which by now included a 'winged cat' (seemingly two animals stitched together) that he called Thomas Bessie.

It's quite a tale - so much so that some experts doubt it can be true.

'They're lovely stories,' says Duke's auctioneer and valuer Matthew Denney. 'But I doubt very much that the Professor existed. For starters, there's nothing about him printed anywhere other than a very short book that isn't widely available.'

And, of course, on the old information placards that were hung up in the Isle of Wight museum before it closed down.

Denney shows me a 'furry pike' that the Professor apparently discovered in Lake Superior, Canada. 'Looks more like a piece of wool stuck around a fish,' says Denney.

The same goes for the 'last unicorn in the Isle of Wight', a white horse with a long silvery mane, contorted in a sitting position with a plaster horn attached to its head.

Ridley, the director of the local dinosaur museum, believes the collection is made up of the treasures of a number of different Victorian and Edwardian collectors, rather than a single person. 'It looks like a forest of museum collecting,' he says.

But Ball is convinced that Professor Copperthwaite, or an eccentric Victorian collector of his description, did exist and had some hand in the collection. 'The information about him is all there in the historical records that came with the museum,' he adds.

Either way, many of the taxidermies are 'polished' Victorian examples, according to Denney.

'Just look at this, fantastic, completely intact,' he says and strokes the wings of a golden eagle mounted on a rocky branch. 'You rarely get a chance to see a golden eagle this close.'

He shows me a leopard. 'That one's face is a bit splayed, probably done by a different taxidermist. But look at this one. Perfection!' he says of a lion with a full mane that weighs 11st.

Denney explains the process: first the taxidermist makes the armature - a length of chipboard for the body with twisted metal rods to map the position of the limbs and neck. The animal's actual skull is often used for the head skeleton.

'Then they pad it out, often with straw, to bulk out the body. It's a matter then of sculpting it with plaster, which is the skilful stage. Getting the proportions right is difficult. Then you have to slip on the skin,' he explains.

As well as fixing on the eyes which, in Victorian taxidermy, were big, bright glass pebbles.

The only taxidermy that hasn't made it to Duke's Auction House is a 6ft African elephant calf that's too wide to fit out of the door of the Isle of Wight museum. Ball says he needs to hire specialists to take off the roof and take out the elephant with a crane.

Denney estimates that the 250 stuffed animals alone will fetch more than £100,000 in Tuesday's auction.

The full-sized ostrich could sell for £500. The most expensive will probably be the male lion, which could fetch £5,000. Even the flying cat could make somewhere between £400 and £600.

The consensus among the visitors seems to be that the animals look enthralling - but they wouldn't want one in their living room.

Still, there has been a surprising resurgence in taxidermy in the art world since the Nineties, particularly after Damien Hirst pickled sharks and cows in formaldehyde and later displayed a zebra taxidermy.

Even Kate Moss reportedly bought a stuffed robin in a bell jar from Polly Morgan, an East London-based artist.

Shops selling stuffed animals have sprung up in fashionable parts of London. So it's not surprising that people have been telephoning and emailing this small auction house in Dorset from all over the world.

Then there's the added interest from zoos, including Bristol, who are keen to buy up some of the taxidermies for their educational collections.

It is, in fact, tipped to be Dukes's biggest sale yet and Denney is confident that at least 200 people will squeeze in between the animals.

The only person who seems a bit gloomy about it all is poor old Mr Ball. Josephine is a bit put out that she didn't get to try on (or keep) the midnight-blue evening dress supposedly given to Princess Diana for a State Banquet held by Emperor Hirohito.

But for him, the sale is a real wrench - he has held on to a honey buzzard as a keepsake.

He spends the morning shuffling around the room and running his hand over the treasures. 'Look at this one,' he says, bringing over a pair of Victorian leather children's shoes, studded with hobnails. 'This is the sort of thing I'm attached to. It makes my heart wrench to give them away.'

As for the future, he plans to keep on collecting - in skips, allotments, auction houses - just like has done since he was 12.

And what about Professor Copperthwaite? Well, Ball has given up on solving the secrets behind the collector. 'It's a mystery. Perhaps he existed but whether in that guise, we don't know.

Someone certainly collected it all. And it must have been someone skilled. Just looking at all the things he did. I mean, how does anyone begin to silver-gild a swan?' How, indeed.

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You Brit's are a piece of work with the Queen's language. While us Yank's are content with just being "ecstatically happy, " you folks from across the big wet bit have to be "absolutely gutted!!!" I wonder if it has anything to do with applying a tax or with having to pay said tax? LOL