COLLECTORS
Malcolm Goodman is the owner of the largest collection of kites in the Western world – a hobby that has taken over his home and cost him more than £100,000
Malcolm Goodman owns a B&B in County Durham. The occupants of his guest rooms have flown in from all over the world, but they have no need for pillows, sheets, or a hearty fry-up. They are kites, in their hundreds, strung up across five rooms and spilling into the corridors. Kites shaped like butterflies and turtles, trains and castles, snakes and tigers. Kites smaller than a penny, and as large as his prized dragon from Indonesia, which is 100 metres long when in the sky.
Malcolm, known as ‘the Kiteman’, purchased the B&B to house his collection. He estimates he has well over 1,000 kites and is confident that his is the largest collection in the Western world. A retired electronics engineer, he has spent 50 years growing his hoard, visiting over 50 countries in the process. He reckons it has cost him more than £100,000, including travel expenses. Malcolm lives upstairs with his wife, Jeanette, as the entire ground floor is dedicated to kites. Even then, they don’t all fit – he has six garages in which he stores the rest.
He has never grown tired of flying a kite – ‘All your worries go up that string,’ says Malcolm. ‘You don’t think of anything else.’ He also praises the health benefits of the pastime. ‘I’m 80 and I can still run as fast as I could yonks ago.’ As a child, he made diamond kites out of brown paper with his father, who died when Malcolm was 13. Struggling with what he later learned was dyslexia, he left school a year later with no qualifications.
He took up an apprenticeship at a radio, hi-fi and TV shop, where he became skilled at repairs; he later started his own electronics firm.
On a trip to the USA in his thirties, he was impressed by adults flying single-line kites. He joined a kite club in Seattle and purchased the first of his collection: two birds with papier mâché bodies and silk wings.
A couple of years later, he heard that the club had been invited to China to help revive kite flying in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, which had seen them banned for their decadence. Funded by the British Council, he secured a six-week work sabbatical and joined ten Americans on the trip that cemented his hobby. Since then, as his collection spiralled, he’s become a familiar figure at international kite festivals, meeting other enthusiasts from all over the world. He has taught kite-making in schools, and in 1989 he married Jeanette at a kite festival in Hawaii. You might think of flying a kite as simply a pleasant way to spend a summer afternoon on the beach. But kites have a rich history. Their exact origi
