If a group of ladybirds is a loveliness, then a collection of Ladybird books is lovely. An individual publication charms, but when seen en masse — as is the (book)case with Helen Day’s long-term touring exhibition, now at Mansfield Museum, Nottinghamshire (until November 21) — the subject becomes more than the sum of its parts.
Cataloguing, completing and curating are all essential elements of collecting and, although the process can be a pleasingly solitary endeavour, most collectors, such as Day, aspire to share their efforts.
Sometimes, the thrill of an audience prompts collectors to stray from a beaten path that is signposted by stamps, coins and fridge magnets.
Britain has numerous collecting trailblazers. Consider William Hamilton (1730–1803), who, having acquired a decent array of antiquities, focused his collecting on wax penises associated with the Italian cult of St Cosmo. Or George IV, who became obsessed with Napoleon’s personal artefacts.
Such strange items take on a Frankensteinian power as a collective. As Damien Hirst wrote on the dispersal of Walter Potter’s taxidermied collection: ‘It only makes sense (whatever sense it does make) if it is kept together. Individually, what have you got except for some bad examples of taxidermy?’
As a collection, the weird can become wonderful — and the same can be said of the collectors themselves.
Walter and Charles Rothschild
Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild famously drove a carriage pulled by trained zebras through the streets of London and up to Buckingham Palace to prove that the animals could be tamed.
‘I’ve got a saddle on; doesn’t mean he’ll let you ride him,’ comes the warning in Racing Stripes, the 2005 film about a farming family who train a zebra to compete against Thoroughbreds. It took its lead from Lord Walter Rothschild (1868–1937), who sought to prove the animals could indeed be trained — he famously visited Buckingham Palace in 1898 in a zebra-drawn trap and bred hybrid animals known as zebroids.
In addition to his live menagerie, Rothschild feverishly collected butterflies, eggs, skins and more, amassing what is thought to be the largest-ever private natural-history collection: the museum he founded at Tring, Hertfordshire, holds more than one million avian-related specimens alone.
An entomological fascination bordering on compulsion ran in the family; Walter’s brother Charles Rothschild (1877–1923) also collected butterflies and his pinned examples— o f which he claimed there were no duplicates — were considered the gold standard in contemporary lepidoptery. It was, as Peter Marren writes in Rainbow Dust: Three Centuries of Delight in British Butterflies, ‘the ultimate frontier of collecting, the polar opposite of a boy's day out with a net and a jam jar’.
Charles’s daughter Miriam (1908–2005) continued his research on fleas, cataloguing her father’s specimens (the 260,000-strong siphonaptera collection at Tring is largely his) and becoming a scientific authority in her own right.
Henry Wellcome
With its inlaid silver pattern, delicate monogrammed carving and surprisingly stiff bristles, Napoleon’s toothbrush is one of the more endearing items in Henry Wellcome’s collection of medical curiosities, together with a gruesome 16th-century amputation saw and a bronze cupping vessel from Pompeii. These are among 125,000 pieces that have been on permanent loan to London’s Science Museum since 1976; many are currently displayed in ‘Medicine: The Wellcome Galleries’.
As a pharmaceutical entrepreneur who founded one of the companies that would eventually merge to become GlaxoSmithKline, Wisconsin-born, British-naturalised Wellcome (1853–1936) had considerable opportunity to enlarge his collection, adding quirky items such as the medicine chest used by Capt Robert Scott in the Antarctic.
He later collected Egyptian and Sudanese antiquities with increasing fervour, culminating in his own large-scale excavations in Jebel Moya at the turn of the 20th century.
Although Wellcome was an occasionally indiscriminate collector — he sometimes acquired bulk lots under a pseudonym — he retained a penchant for medical memorabilia. His first museum in Wigmore Street featured instruments believed to have been used during the mummification process, including the canopic jars that held the internal organs of the deceased.
By the time of Wellcome’s death, his collection (of collections) was reportedly five times larger than those held by the Louvre.
William Buckland
Sir William Buckland, eccentric naturalist, lived with all kinds of animals as well as his own family.
When studying Britain’s most divisive mustelid for his 2013 book Badgerlands, Patrick Barkham was determined to examine all aspects of the animal. In one stomach-churning chapter, he samples stir-fried badger meat, served up by a chef specialising in road-kill cuisine.
It was an astonishing undertaking by a naturalist, but Barkham is not the first to taste his subjects. William Buckland (1784–1856), a paleontologist before the term had been invented, committed to eating every species on earth. His collection of animals at home — bolstered by his academic connections that enabled him to acquire exotic specimens, including a pet hyena called Billy — often ended up on the dinner table as part of his culinary exploration. Hedgehogs, tortoises, rats and frogs were consumed, with mole and bluebottle fly considered the most distasteful.
This was not a private undertaking — John Ruskin was said to have regretted declining an invitation to a meal in which mice were served and Peter Lund Simmonds reports that Buckland offered soup to his guests before claiming that it was made from an alligator that he had dissected earlier that day.
Buckland’s son Francis, following that parental doctrine to clear his plate, was also a keen zoophagist and became a founding member of the British acclimatisation society, an organisation that supported the introduction of non-native plants and animals, primarily as food sources.
Lady Charlotte Schreiber, Maj RT Donald Welsh and Mary Gardiner
Within her respectable collecting interests — including porcelain and fans — Lady Charlotte Schreiber (1812–95) had an ace up her frilly sleeve. Her collection of card memorabilia was a Victorian full deck, with examples gathered from across the world, including a tarot pack from Bologna and French-Spanish designs destined for South America. The cards, together with advertisements and other games, were bequeathed to the British Museum in 1896.
Among the catalogue is a late-19th-century two-of-spades American ‘squeezer’ playing card, so called because the value is indicated in one or two corners, allowing a player to ascertain their hand while holding closely arranged cards. There also was a complete pack of contemporary Chas Goodall & Son London cards, with the court cards featuring costumes from the Plantagenet, Tudor, Stuart and Hanoverian periods, and rare Chinese money-suited playing cards from the Qing dynasty.
Schrieber’s once quirky passion was popularised and other British collectors quickly jumped on the cardwagon. Maj R. T. Donald Welsh (1928–2017), co-founder of the English Playing Card Society in 1984, gathered more than 6,000 packs of playing cards and card games, which are currently being catalogued by the Bodleian Libraries.
As with most collecting circles, there’s always someone with a zanier specialism: the card collection of Mary Gardiner (1928–2002) centres on Happy Families, also part of the Bodleian’s ephemera and featured in the 2007 ‘Mr Bun the Baker’ exhibition.
Charles Waterton and Walter Potter
Charles Waterton was painted by Charles Willson Peale in 1824.
In Capt Edward Jones’s 1825 painting Charles Waterton capturing a cayman, the titular human subject is pictured straddling the crocodilian one as several men attempt to tether the poor beast, under the watchful eyes of armadillos, anteaters and birds of every feather.
The account of the Yorkshire squire’s South American escapades was much discussed — John Timbs’s English Eccentrics and Eccentricities includes Waterton (1782–1865) in the ‘Eccentric Travellers’ section — and might have been disputed, were it not for the deft preservation of the reptile, using the hunter’s own mercuric chloride-based taxidermy technique.
The creature was on show in Waterton’s home at Walton Hall, West Yorkshire, and is now owned by his alma mater Stonyhurst College in Lancashire, where it was recently displayed as part of a Shakespeare exhibition, with the animal a stand-in for the ‘What manner o’ thing is your crocodile’ dialogue in Antony and Cleopatra.
The cayman was the jewel in Waterton’s taxidermy collection, which he proudly declared contained no ‘stuffed’ animals, thanks to his hardening-scooping method. This enabled him to create monstrous creatures, such as a howler monkey's bottom turned into a human face.
The collection included a tableau of reptiles entitled 'The English Reformation Zoologically Demonstrated', foreseeing the Victorian trend for anthropomorphised taxidermy. Walter Potter (1835–1918) took up the pursuit with gusto, amassing some 10,000 specimens, including a kitten wedding, rabbit school and a diorama of ‘The Death and Burial of Cock Robin’, which contained 98 species of British birds.
Having been on public display for decades, the items were eventually auctioned, with Bonhams revealing Peter Blake and David Bailey among the bidders; the kitten nuptials went for £21,150.
Edward James
Anyone wishing to make an urgent call to the West Dean estate, West Sussex, when it was home to Edward James (1907–84) would meet an unexpected intermediary. James, a passionate collector of Surrealist art, was the dedicatee (and, according to some, collaborator) for several of Dalí’s lobster telephones, having significantly supported the artist throughout the 1930s.
A similarly crustacean-mounted receiver was also installed at James’s Wimpole Street home in London, where René Magritte painted his patron in Not to be Reproduced (1937). In an appropriately Surrealist turn, the line between collecting and living blurred and James’s residence on the West Dean estate, Monkton House, was transformed into a real-life Surrealist world, with Champagne coupes lamps, a Mae West lips sofa and purple stucco.
Later, James went to considerable expense to build his dream Surrealist sculpture garden in the rainforest north of Mexico City, where Escher-like stairways lead to nowhere and Alice-in-Wonderland concrete flora meets rare flowers. The phantasmagorical jungle enclave was declared an ‘Artistic Monument of the Nation in 2012’ and is open to visitors.
This feature originally appeared in the October 7, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.