- Friday, April 26, 2024
By: Pramod Thomas
BRITAIN’s ‘biggest hoarder’ Ramann Shukla’s,64, more than 60,000 rare items will now go up for auction with Unique Auctions between October 22 and 25.
The collection includes signed photos and letters relating to John F Kennedy, Winston Churchill, Mahatma Gandhi and Elvis Presley, more than 6,000 vintage comics, 3,000 chemistry sets and 12 Rickenbacker guitars.
The entire collection is valued between £500,000 and £4 million ($5.2 million), and will be auctioned in no fewer than 3,000 lots.
Shukla was reportedly a computer programmer and lived in Nottingham, central England before his sudden death earlier this year.
According to reports, his three-bed home, rental flat, two garages, neighbour’s garden and 24 wheelie bins were used to store items.
The trove, which crammed every room of Shukla’s properties from floor to ceiling, was discovered by his brother.
“His first impression was to put them in landfill. But thankfully he decided to call us in,” chief auctioneer Terry Woodcock of Unique Auctions in Lincoln said in a video on the company’s website.
He said eight staff from the auction house took 12 days to empty the main house, and there was still more to be removed from the other properties.
Shukla had been amassing items via eBay since at least 2008, Woodcock said.
“It was clear that this man was a total compulsive buyer,” he said.
His collection mostly consisted of unopened parcels and was so vast that he had to move into a bed and breakfast for the last year of his life because he ran out of room for himself, reports said.
It is thought he started it about 18 years ago with the intention of selling it all one day to fund his retirement.
Shukla’s neighbours said that a Royal Mail van filled to the brim with parcels visited the address once a week without fail.
