An 80-year-old donated a rare original parachute dummy from D-Day to a museum - after mistaking it for a scarecrow.<br /><br />Robert Bowley was clearing out his late brother's home when he came across the dummy.<br /><br />His brother Michael Bowley had been fond of French collectors items and got it while on a trip to Normandy in the 1950s or 1960s.<br /><br />Robert said he had initially mistaken it for a scarecrow before he passed it along to a museum.<br /><br />That's when he discovered it was in fact a rare surviving D-Day artefact worth thousands.<br /><br />The 'scarecrow' was one of several hundred from Operation Bodyguard, part of Operation Overlord, on June 6 1944.<br /><br />Paradummies, made of hessian cloth, straw and sawdust, were dropped to create fake invasions by allied forces to divert enemy attention from the Normandy landing beaches.<br /><br />Most of the dummies had a self-destroying mechanism to destroy the evidence - making this surviving dummy rare and valuable.<br /><br />The paradummy is thought to be worth around £10,000 and one of less than 30 still in existence.<br /><br />It is now on permanent display in the D-Day exhibition at House on the Hill Toy Museum.<br /><br />Robert, a retired watchmaker and antique collector from Braintree, Essex, said: "My brother Michael used to go to France a lot in '50s and '60s and brought all sorts of stuff back.<br /><br />"After he passed I found it in his house.<br /><br />"It looked like a scarecrow, or a ragdoll, or a set of child's overalls.<br /><br />"When I found out what it was I thought it was really interesting.<br /><br />"As a younger boy I found it fascinating when he came back and told me tales of the war debris.<br /><br />"He said he saw tanks in ditches on the side of the road and barns full of war stuff which he loved - he was a collector."<br /><br />Operation Overlord, now known as D-Day, was the allied invasion of Normandy beaches when France was occupied by Nazis on June 6 1944.<br /><br />Part of this was Operation Bodyguard - the deceptive operations to divert enemies from the beaches.<br /><br />Within this was Titanic - the creation of fake invasions - executed by the RAF and SAS.<br /><br />It saw four squadrons drop around 450 fake paradummies, nicknamed Ruperts, onto three fake invasion drop zones.<br /><br />Within the drops of dummies were a small number of SAS men, equipped sound recordings of the sounds of battle and mortar fire, to create the semblance of a larger force and cause confusion further.<br /><br />The SAS had orders to let some of the enemy escape, so that they would report back that a serious force had been encountered inland.<br /><br />Thus, they could deflect and confuse the enemy from the full-frontal assault on the Normandy beach-head.<br /><br />The operation was successful, as various German divisions and panzer units moved away from their coastal positions.<br /><br />This original example was purchased from a French collector in Branville, north east of Caen, and likely an example of a paradummy that landed but did not explode.<br /><br />It was subsequently tucked away by a local farmer after D-Day.
