19.3.2012 A collection of airships worth a million pounds

David Kirch has collected hundreds of memorabilia from airships. Nine years ago, a 70-year-old businessman from the United Kingdom decided to sell the collection. Its price has climbed to more than one million pounds.

The collection is so huge that Kirch even wanted to open a museum in the old air hangar he bought. He also planned to create an attraction so that visitors could try flying in an airship. However, he did not manage to complete this idea, so in March 2012 he decided to sell his collection at auction.

For example, he managed to obtain hundreds of photographs of huge German Zeppelins. They were named after the famous airship builder, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin. The collection weighed an incredible fifteen tons and the auction hall even had to rent more storage space. In addition to the aforementioned photographs, the collection contains thousands and thousands of items associated with airships such as flags, toys, models, clocks, cutlery and crockery.

Kirch even got medals, commemorative coins, badges and uniforms of soldiers who flew in the airship when it crashed and did not survive the fall. But also other photos. These are aerial shots of London, New York and Rome taken from huge Zeppelins hovering menacingly over these cities. In some photos, the Zeppelin is illuminated by dozens of spotlights as he flew over London during the First World War.

But the collection also contained stranger items. For example, special darts invented by the British to be thrown at Zeppelin by pilots during World War I in an effort to get him to the ground. Kirch is a wealthy real estate agent who lives in Jersey. He wanted to donate money from the sale of the collection to charity.

He would not get into the airship himself, because he is afraid of heights. He started collecting items from airships in 1998, when he bought a collection of envelopes from airships from his friend. "He didn't have the money then, so I bought it. The airships started to fascinate me, so I bought everything that had something to do with them. I also managed to get bombs that dropped Zeppelins during the First World War and scrap from crashed airships, "Kirch recalled.

He fell in love with collecting and went to the trunk shops. He also participated in various sales events. "I really intended to open a museum. I even bought a huge hangar in Cardington, Bedforshire, a former base of the British airline industry, to have all the items to place. But I had to devote myself to business and I didn't have enough time to complete this plan, "admitted the collector.

The collection was eventually sold out in four auctions and brought in over one million pounds. Only part of the German naval officer's uniform yielded eight thousand pounds. And that was one of 600 items.

Sources: www.dailymail.co.uk, www.dailymail.co.uk