(Photograph) - Everyone should have a hobby. But even the most avid collectors can’t compete with Ron Broomfield, whose hobby has become his life. Forty years ago, Ron bought seven gnomes,“just to decorate the garden a bit”. Then he bought a few more. Soon there were dozens of them. Gradually, he became a collector. Then, he says - and this is the scary bit - “before you know it you are one”.
Ron already had a beard, which helped. When he was in his twenties he won a bet with a group of friends to see who could grow the best one, and he’s kept it since. He is 5ft 7in, which, he admits, is on the tall side for a gnome. “And I’m not really chunky. I would like to be a bit plumper.”
But when someone noted his resemblance to the little men dotted around his garden, dressing like one “seemed the natural thing to do”.
Ron retired as a window cleaner five years ago and moved from north London to Lincolnshire. (Nine hundred gnomes in Alford, Lincolnshire?) You know you’ve got the right number when you ring him up because he answers the phone, “Ron the Gnome, Gnome Cottage”.
“I’ve got them everywhere,” he says. “In the garden, round the pond, fishing and in a big windmill. Some of them come in the house. I’ve got them on the stairs, in the dining room, in the spare bedroom. You gnome it, there they are.”
He has concrete gnomes, plastic gnomes, wooden gnomes, wax gnomes, glass gnomes, coal gnomes, Bakelite gnomes and bone gnomes. People send him gnomes and gnomerabilia - he’s got a gnome lamp, a gnome teapot and biscuit tin, gnome clocks, and a Snow White and the Seven dwarves rug in his bedroom. Are the gnomes taking over? “Some people think they are,” he concedes, “but I think they brighten the place up.”
He says it’s a cheap hobby - most can be bought for a gnominal amount. The most Ron has ever paid for a gnome is pound;70, “although I saw a really nice one that I would have liked, a cast iron one, for pound;250”. His most valuable examples stay indoors for their own safety, and those outside are set in concrete.
Still, it seems some of them can’t resist the gnomadic lifestyle. “The odd one goes for a walk. The other day I was on my way back from the shops and I saw one on someone else’s doorstep, but I knew it was mine. Some kids said: ‘Hey, Mr Gnome, one of your gnomes has escaped’.”
On Tuesdays and Fridays Ron dresses up as a gnome (“I’ve got four or five outfits”) and goes to the market where he collects money for the NSPCC. He doesn’t think his obsession is un-elfy. In fact, he runs a hospital in his spare bedroom for chipped or damaged gnomes. “I like all their different characters; they are always happy and cheerful. They smile all the time and they never answer back,” he says. “They grow on you and you become one. I like the things they get up to. Gnomes sleep most of the day, and come out at night. There are gnomes around everywhere. They look after injured animals in the woods and live under great big oak trees.”
Away with the fairies, in other words.
HARVEY McGAVIN. Photograph by Bob Thomas
Weblinks:
Gnome tales: www.foundus.comjanignomeswelcome.html
Collect It magazine’s A-Z of collecting: www.collectit.sagenet.co.uk a-z.htm
Gnomes and leprechauns: www.vedicreader.comarticles seasonalleprchan.htm
