A shattered Rolls Royce to a missing willy, no job is too big, or too small, for China restorer Jackie
And her latest rescue mission saved a £4,000 porcelain figurine from the dustbin after it was smashed to smithereens by a four-year-old girl.
The Lladro Rolls Royce, titled Motoring In Style, looked beyond repair before Jackie got to work in her studio in Preston.
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Hide AdBut after a delicate restoration lasting the best part of two months, the figurine was as good as new - much the the relief of the child’s dad.
“When he brought it in the sweat was pouring off him. I thought he was going to have a heart attack.
“It belonged to a friend of his and his daughter had knocked it over when they were visiting. It was in dozens of pieces - in a right state.
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Hide Ad“I’ve tackled worse disasters - not many - but I just knew I could mend it.”
Jackie has been repairing porcelain, china and marble for 37 years, but hit the headlines in 2016 after carefully restoring a rare Capodimonte coach and horses which arrived in Fulwood in thousands of pieces, some no bigger than a grain of rice.
Over her career she has had some strange requests, none stranger than being asked to make a replacement penis for a Greek marble statue in the grounds of a house in Blackpool.
“Somehow this figure had lost his willy and it was nowhere to be found,” she recalled. “So I had to use my imagination to make him a new one. It was a bit embarrassing and I kept having to stop what I was doing when someone came up the drive.
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Hide Ad“I’ve repaired life-sized horses, huge garden urns and one couple from the Lake District brought me two giant foo dogs which had been battered about a bit. They were so big they had to transport them in a horse trailer.
“But I’ve also worked on tiny little things like making a pair of hands for a porcelain figurine and even one finger.”
Like many of her commissions, the Lladro Rolls Royce arrived in bits, some of them unrecognisable to the untrained eye. It wasn’t only valuable in cash terms, but it also had a sentimental meaning for its owner, having been presented to him on his retirement.
“The chap who brought it in was really upset,” she said. “His daughter had knocked it over at a friend’s house and he had promised to get it repaired. But he didn’t think it would be possible.
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Hide Ad“I had to redo everything. But I knew that if I could do the coach and horses four years ago I could do anything. I had to pretty much rebuild it.
“I had to make the steering column because that was gone. The lady passenger was in a real state and I had to rebuild her. But I got it done and the guy was over the moon to get it back looking like new.”
Jackie regularly gets packages from around the world with broken china in need of a bit of TLC.
“To be fair, sometimes something will arrive which, for me, would go straight in the dustbin,” she confessed. “But these things are precious to the owners and they are happy to spend a lot of money to have them put back together.
“I do a lot of crystal and I clean oil paintings, or repair their frames. It’s varied work, but it’s so rewarding and I enjoy every job. When they leave me they look as good as new.”