I was wondering if anybody had any idea on the possible origins of this large ladle. It is marked 3 times with JS and twice with a crown.
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Plain fiddle, late eighteenth, early nineteenth century transitional style, Unattributed American mark. Similar mark in the Winterthur Collection. Probably .900 or coin. Silver cutlery production in the southern states was utterly unregulated and mostly worked by local small town producers, some of whom didn’t even put any mark on their silver product relying entirely on local reputation and custom for word-of-mouth advertising. The method of single drop manufacture is typical of someone taught in Northern England or Scotland, rather than the simple sheet or bar stamp of the US makers
Can you tell us a little more about it, weight size and where you got it would be of interest. Any scratch marks or owner initials, wear patterns? I note the wyvern head erased.
The two crowns are different from each other and the use of them points to pre Federal legislation governing trademarks on metal including silver.
CRWW
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What is single drop manufacture?
Method of attachment of bowl to handle. “Single drop” or “drop heel” refers to a specific, traditional design on the back of a spoon bowl where the handle joins the bowl, often found on 18th-century antique silverware. A single drop just looks like a single extension whereas a double looks like two.
We can also sometime find a strap drop which is really just a long single, they are sometimes called extended drops.
Some people count the shells on fancy backs as drops, and there are other disagreements; such as whether or not the die stamps on King’s and its variations should be considered drops.
CRWW
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Scottish provincial silver hallmarks?
Thank you all for the replies. The ladle is not in my possession, I spotted it at a Scottish auction house and the marks piqued my interest.
My initial thoughts were Scottish provincial but the marks don’t feature in any of my reference works and the auction house are used to dealing in provincial pieces, but are unable to identify the marks.
The ladle measures 35.5cms and weighs 8ozt. The possible American connection certainly sounds like a possibility but is not my area of expertise.
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James Smith, Aberdeen. John Stewart, Dumfries. James Sturrock, Dundee. John Sellar, Elgin. James Sturrock, Montrose. John Scott, Perth. James Stobie, Perth. John Sellar, Tain. John Sellar, Wick. John Sutherland, Aberdeen. James Sim,Elgin and James T MacKay
They all shared one thing in common; a profound distaste for kings especially English kings after Billy Cumberland had done them over on the moors of Culloden. The 1746 defeat triggered the end of the Highland clan system, the banning of tartan and bagpipes, and forced disarmament.
The Scottish kings, the Stuarts had become English Kings when James VI of Scotland became James I of the Union of the two countries. I know I forgot Wales.
The Stuarts had become Kings in Scotland but oddly they weren’t Scots by origin, but Lancastrian. A Lancastrian family finding itself with one too many sons to inherit dispatched the youngest to help out King David of Scotland. Five generations later they had taken over. Typical pushy Lancastrians.
The Royal House of Stewart, later Stuart, was founded by Walter Stewart, 6th High Steward of Scotland who became the first Stewart king of Scotland in 1371, succeeding his uncle David.
While the family had Breton roots, descending from Flaald, the key Lancastrian connection came later in their history.
The Stuarts may have made good courtiers to Kings but they were lousy kings. James I spent most of his time rewriting the bible and chasing after his boyfriends so he wasn’t too bad. Charles I, his son was a menace. They decided he used his head so little in matters of governance they should deprive him of it. Charles II, his son had so many mistresses and bred them so efficiently that he quite forgot the main task of a hereditary monarch is to produce a legitimate heir so we ended up with his brother the so-called Grand Old Duke of York who, like the current Duke of York, aka Randy Andy was a complete disaster. The Whig families got so fed up with his attempts to reintroduce Catholic rule into Protestant England they brought his cous’ Mary and her soldier husband William over from Orange and thus began three hundred years of German kings which we are still labouring under.
CRWW
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Eight troy oz is on the light side for a 13-inch ladle, sorry I can’t think in Napoleonic metric.
It’s worth testing. I would bet on colonial. Not us guys. Canadians are too respectful of the British system in the period to stick crowns on their stuff. Not Cape or if it is neither Leopard or I cannot find it. Not Raj because we know them all by reputation. Possibly Chinese but if it is it’s a new chop for me.
So Occam’s razor leaves us with the Americans, not the Yanks, the southerners. I would think a northern Brit or lowland Scot who had headed over there, possibly to fight against them and then decided, red serge wasn’t a good look if you wanted to avoid annoying the locals and traded it in for a leather apron, a ball peen hammer and an anvil.
CRWW
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I’m leaving this topic open because it’s worth exploring. Fatigue is taking its toll. I’ll leave it for tomorrow. Good luck with your search!
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This occasionally pushy Lancastrian appreciates your persuasive thoughts on this.
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Your efforts are most appreciated Bart, thank you.
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I had suggested you get this tested for silver content, but as you have now told us it it isn’t yours to test I guess either one of us buys it or we’ll never know.
Can you post a link again if you are not interested.
Just finished watching your King pouring oil on troubled waters over here. I though the did rather a good job.
Interesting you are from Lancashire. All most of us know over here about your county is that TV program.
My mother’s forebears ran cotton mills in Heywood for over a century and investing in building a canal there. Everything I have read about their mills horrifies me. But they did also build the sewage system for that town and others so I suppose something useful.
CRWW
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I try my best. I stumble, I get up, and the sarcastic, insecure comments directed at me give me strength.
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The fact that we still, to a large extent, rely upon the sewage systems installed by your forbears and their ilk, is either a great compliment to the quality of their construction, or a damning indictment to the lack of investment in significant upgrade and investment since. Probably it is both.
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So single drop vs being cut out of a sheet and shaped whole?
And how could you tell it was a single drop from the front with no photo of the back?
I am grateful for your comments and now I have a clear picture of the crest I can tell you it is for a Galway family, the Browne’s and an Eagle head erased with an arrow in its beak.
“Browne, an eagle’s head erased arg., hold-
ing in the beak an arrow ppr. cf. 83. 2”. Fairbairn Heraldry
So I am back looking at Silversmiths in that part of the world and quickly alight upon James Salter who has already been the subject of inquiries in this forum by Phil of silvermakersmarks.co.uk.
https://www.silver-collector.com/t/irish- makers-mark-help/7565
This shows his mark as JS in the same shape of shield but with Hibernia interposed rather than a crown or crowns.
The other Cork silversmith possibility is John Seymour of William Street. I do not have a mark for him.
https://www.925-1000.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14695
We know the 1807 Act put all the regional assay offices in Ireland out of business and dictated all silver had to be marked “within the Pale” in other words in Dublin.
The Plate Assay (Ireland) Act 1807 (47 Geo. 3 c. 15) is the key legislation that standardized hallmarking in Ireland, requiring all gold and silver plate manufactured or sold in Ireland to be assayed and marked by the Company of Goldsmiths of Dublin or its appointed deputies.
We also know that Salter emigrated to New Zealand in 1841 and was drowned abroad the ship taking him and his family there.
The auctioneer figures this is an c.1840 ladle.
With a crest for an Irish family and all the unidentified JS silversmiths there seems to be a heightened chance it is Irish. Both Cork and Limerick have or had assay offices and the silversmiths in both town kept producing and marking after 1807 in defiance of the British edict about Dublin.
Galway has the oldest guild office of the three. And would be the logical and local place for the Browne family to buy silver.
“…there was little chance of the Galway silversmiths risking their plate upon the uncertainty of the double journey to and from Dublin, for the sake of having it assayed and stamped with the hall-marks. As in Cork, so in Galway, a stamp was adopted that was of equal value to the old “Hibernia” of the Dublin Assay Office. In Cork it was certainly the ship between two castles; in Galway, I hope yet to prove that it was the anchor.”
https://www.925-1000.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=31263
To clinch it we need a JS mark for one of the three western Irish Guilds using the British Crown in defiance of the Plate Assay Act’s stipulations.
I guess I like Seymour for it as this mark is identical to the one Phil has demonstrated as his with Hibernias instead of Crowns and given he was leaving an act of departing defiance is perfectly understandable.
However, I cannot find a Galway guild or assay mark other than the national Hibernia mark. So this sort of increases the possibility of a Galway smith using a crown mark.
Generally the Cork smiths regulated themselves with assiduous attention to propriety after they were officially shut down by London.
CRWW
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There’s what the back will look like on a single drop.
I doubt I am going to find a double drop or a rat tail on this 1840’s ladle which I now think may be Irish.
CRWW
The Manchester Diggles were amazing engineers.
They followed London’s sewage system, designed by Sir Joseph Bazalgette between 1859 and 1875, which was built following the “Great Stink” of 1858 to alleviate cholera and massive pollution in the Thames. It involved 1,100 miles of street sewers and massive pumping stations like Crossness. While it revolutionized London’s public health, the Victorian infrastructure is now overwhelmed, requiring modern upgrades like the Tideway. The only surviving Diggle family member I met was Uncle Stanley who lived in Llandudno and took his boat to Dunkirk to rescue the retreating BEF. .
The mill owners were the Openshaws. They seem to survive with parks and fountains named after them. The most famous member of that family was Thomas Horrocks Openshaw who became rather well known in Victorian, England not for his work at St Bart’s Hospital where he was a surgeon but because of his correspondence with Jack the Ripper. He not only managed to perform the first brain surgery that anyone survived but worked to create artificial limbs. For this work he got knighted. The hospital displays much of his impedimenta including silver plates which were used to patch drilled holes in skulls.
My mother as a child used to visit with him over Christmas.
The mills have all now been closed down. and replaced with housing which looks modern and comfortable unlike the rows of older back to back houses still in family inventory which were built for operatives..
I bought at auction recently a boxed five-piece silver tea set by Wm. Hunter which was presented to an overseer for 20 years service. What it was doing in a Canadian auction house one can only speculate.
The overseers job was to ensure the children many under 10 years who worked under the looms picking up stray cotton and putting it back into the system before the passage of the Education and Factory Acts .
CRWW
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The picture you paint was replicated across the county and indeed further afield. The vast majority of the mill buildings have long disappeared, however some have been repurposed, with others left to decay. In fact a few that possess some historical merit even have listed status. Many parks, statues and commemorative paraphernalia remain as testament to mostly long forgotten benefactors (at least so called).
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