Surrey, UK - On a pleasant summer's afternoon in a leafy 1950s housing estate in Cranleigh, as spitfires lazily crashed around the fluffy white clouds, the luminaries of the respectable side of salvage gathered in a large marquee to pay homage to Mr. Respectable Salvage himself, Charles Brooking, the man whose life's work has been collecting salvage, not for sale and reuse, but for giving joy and education to the masses.
After a fine lunch Sir William McAlpine, the chairman of the trustees of the Brooking Collection, opened the proceedings, after which Dr Alan Powers, secretary of the 20th Century Society and now at Greenwich University, gave a speech on the university's behalf. Eventually Lucinda Lambton declared the Charles Brooking Home Study Collection officially open, and Charles presented her with a bouquet of flowers strapped to one of the folding seat tops recently rescued from Wembley Stadium, resulting in her warm appreciation.
Charles, now 50, began collecting fossils in 1962 followed by rescued salvage from demolition sites around Guildford. 'I would get the my parents' au pair to accompany me and make an approach to the demolition men if there was anything I wanted. It usually did the trick,' he said. He left school, pretty well uneducated in a conventional sense, and worked at Sotheby's Belgravia as a porter. As a dyslexic he finds accuracy in writing letters and numbers problematic. 'I used to arrange the lots in the wrong order,' he said, 'so after nine months I got the sack.' He did not get his driving licence until he was 35, so he used to cart most of the stuff home on public transport. This obviously favoured small and interesting collecting. He now has 30,000 different sash window pulleys and can date windows by their hardware. He has advised Downing Street and the National Trust on windows. In 1997 Prince Charles presented Mr. Brooking with a cheque for £5,000 in recognition of services to Britain's national heritage. Until recently Charles had sheds at his Mum's house in Guildford full of windows, but luckily he managed to persuade the likes of McAlpine and Cruickshank to set up a trust, and help the rehousing of the collection in a Dartford backwater of Greenwich University. The Uni has now acquired the old Wren naval college at Greenwich where it is proposed to relocate some of the Collection future, while the rest is in the Siemens building in Greenwich by the Cutty Sark. A small proportion, of which the study collection forms part, is in sheds behind Brooking's house in Cranleigh. The future looks rosier than ever.
