An Antiques Roadshow guest was left in disbelief when she discovered the value of her risqué tea caddy. A woman who had inherited a rather cheeky tea caddy from her mother's old friend couldn't help but chuckle when she heard its worth on Antiques Roadshow . The popular BBC daytime show visited Towneley Hall in Burnley for another fascinating episode, where expert Adam Schoon met with the owner of an unusually shaped tea caddy.
"Well this must qualify as one of the most tactile tea caddies I've ever seen on the Antiques Roadshow," he began. "It's made of a nut, coco de mer, the archaic name for this nut actually translates to beautiful buttocks, need I say more. How did it come into your possession?".
The guest explained that the item once belonged to an elderly woman who played piano at her mother's dance school back in the 1960s. "She was downsizing her house to move out and she said: 'Do you want this thing?" she recalled. She mentioned that her grandfather used to sail tea clippers around the Indian Ocean and sailors would often find these nuts floating on the sea, pick them up and have items crafted from them.
Schoon explained: "These huge nuts, which took I think six to seven years to mature, would obviously come off the tree, roll down the beach, get into the current of the sea and go floating off...
In fact, a lot of them ended up in the Maldives. This coco de mer has been found, sliced open and given the most fantastic silver plated mounts to turn it from a nut, to.