The Dollar Value Of Oddjob's Hat(s)

The British show Antiques Roadshow has been running continuously for over 40 years. Britain has an endless supply of places with names like Hampton Court Palace and Hutton-in-the-Forest and an endless supply of people with homes full of old stuff. It's possible you personally wouldn't be interested in all the pocket watches and scarves being appraised, but then someone goes and pulls out Oddjob's weaponized hat from Goldfinger.

In May 2020, the old Welsh villager getting his collection examined offered the following story. His brother-in-law Peter Davis drove a limo for Aston Martin in the '60s, and part of his job was chauffeuring Sean Connery to and from the Goldfinger set. When production wrapped up, he asked Pinewood Studios for a souvenir, and they handed him the bowler hat Harold Sakata wore while playing Oddjob.

The prop had included real steel in the brim, and though it didn't function as a lethal weapon once that was removed (or even with the steel, maybe), you could still fling it and smash it into things. Peter Davis did just that, many times, battering the hat severely. On Antiques Roadshow, presenter Marc Allum judged that the bit of pop culture history is worth £20,000 to £30,000.

Well, that was nice. But wasn't it weird that the hat was tossed around by this Welsh family all these years instead of having been previously snapped up by collectors? As a matter of fact, as of 1998, the "James Bond Fan Club" claimed possession of Oddjob's hat. Club president Graham Rye then auctioned it off at Christie's, and it fetched £62,000 (it was in better condition than Peter Davis' 2020 hat). Why were two hats floating around? The movie production must have had more than one of them, said Marc Allum.

More than two, even. In 2006, another Oddjob hat went for auction, and this one sold for $36,000. This hat came from the estate of Harold Sakata, who died in 1982. Makes sense that Pinewood would have let Oddjob himself take one prop hat home with him, but we're now quickly losing faith in just how valuable these pieces of memorabilia are. For all we know, there's a vast collection of Oddjob hats somewhere that can be sold one by one to pay the bills. Possibly, they're stored deep in Fort Knox.

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