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Around town Meets...
Alan Blakeman
with Stu Charmak
 I went to meet Alan Blakeman at the antiques centre in the Elsecar Heritage Centre and asked him if it had been his idea to set this up?
I was one of the original members of the Cortonwood and Elsecar Project Group that started in the early ‘80s and it was made up originally of the canal group, the railway group, people and mining, local history, and then me as the bottle museum. The canal never joined the main system beyond Brampton, the railway line never got past Morrisons, the local history group shut down, and people and mining doesn’t have a base, so the irony is I felt the outsider and yet in the end people see me as the most successful of them all.
What do you actually do here at the Elsecar Heritage Centre? Do you hold auctions?
In 1979 I took over a little thing called the Bottle Club of Great Britain and I still remember somebody giving me the shoeboxes with the names and addresses in. I was teaching then at Wath and it’s 25 years since I finished teaching. What started off as a hobby turned into a business. Initially it was just writing a collectors’ magazine printed on a banda machine at school when office staff had gone home. That magazine expanded so much that eventually I decided to try and make a living just writing and it turned into a substantially glossy full colour magazine. Then the auctions took off, originally at Brampton Enterprise Centre. I think the first 6 months I was at home it was taking over the bedroom, so we got a little office at Brampton and within 6 months it was 2 offices. Then we were offered space for the bottle museum here and we opened in March 1991 on-site upstairs and it just escalated from there, especially the auctions.
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 Are these auctions just a local thing, or wider than that?
I have a bee in my bonnet about getting people from worldwide to come to Elsecar and Barnsley. The big two day event here has now got an established worldwide reputation in the antiques world. When we have that here in Elsecar in July, we call it the Summer National, it literally takes over the village with camping on the field here and all the pubs do more trade than they do at Christmas. We have people come from Australia, South Africa, Canada, New Zealand, China, all of Europe. We even have a couple who come from the Falkland Islands. It’s quite nice to put Elsecar and Barnsley on the map.
Is the actual auction held within the Heritage Centre?
I first started it at Wath Comp. One of the reasons for doing this was to get the sixth form involved in an economic exercise of organising an event. We used to do the odd auction 2 or 3 times a year, but now it’s a set pattern of four massive sales a year, January, March, July, October and the summer one is the big two day event. We used to take over the field and it just got
bigger and bigger to the point where Friday night when the people used to arrive, the police would come to tell me that I was responsible for bringing the town to gridlock. It’s just escalated from there. We moved on-site here once the big buildings had been restored, which after a few years we outgrew and then we planned this big extension which is now the antiques centre.
 When do you get time off and what do you do?
I moved to South Yorkshire because the West Riding Authority was the best education authority at the time, and also because I was, and still am, an absolutely fanatical rock climber. So I put a compass point round Stanage Edge and applied for jobs in the area and frighteningly I got 5 interviews, Monday to Friday. The Friday one was at Wath Comp and I asked if I could use the school telephone to ring up the other four to say I wasn‘t taking their jobs. That’s how it was in those days. If I get time off I do the rock-climbing. But I don’t get much time off. I have many weeks before and after the big events when I’m doing 100 hours a week fairly easily. I have time off at tea time, 5 till 6 generally, go home and just get away from it, but it’s not work to me, it’s a labour of love.
You obviously have a very positive outlook on life.
Funny you should say that because I was not good at school. I went to a grammar school, but I was always in trouble and I actually ran the school Saturday morning detention class because I was always there! It was the rock-climbing that steered me away from all that. I only did a little bit of studying so I could stay on into the sixth form so I could get the summer holidays to go rock-climbing. Then I did enough studying to get into art college because it was only a 36 week year and I could climb even more.
 What is it about rock-climbing? Is it getting to the top?
It’s not the height. For instance, gritstone in Derbyshire; people come from all over the world for the gritstone, but it’s only rocks, yet it’s got to be rocks overhanging and the bigger the better. It’s like the bottle thing, it’s so engrossing. You forget everything else. Last year my blood pressure was a bit high. The doctor stopped me climbing and I told him that if I went rock-climbing it’d go right down, so he let me go and it went right down. 46 years now and I drive into Derbyshire and it’s still just magical, a sunny day or an evening I go out, you almost weep it’s just that nice, absolutely magical. It doesn’t wear out at all.
What’s for the future?
I’d really love a year off. Go round the world, climb the places I’ve never been able to go and probably do things before I can’t do them any more. But if I stopped this, it would disintegrate around me. Nobody else would do the silly hours, but I’m one of those people who just enjoys doing things. When I was teaching I used to give up 3 weeks every summer holidays to take one or two minibuses to somewhere in Europe rock-climbing. I just love being active and mentally alert. I’m 60 at the end of this year and I should be looking towards retiring but I’ve got 20 or 30 books piling up ready to be published, so if I packed in the auctions tomorrow I’ve got plenty to do. In my time I’ve found you get more out of life if you put more
into it.
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