Hi , can anyone please identify these sugar tongs ,quite worn marks and no city/ town mark.im told they’re one of the Bateman family.Appears to have a Georgian Duty mark. Any information would be very gratefully received. David
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Try to clean it gently.
1809?
Peter and William Bateman?
https://www.etsy.com/listing/876172810/antique-1809-english-georgian-bateman
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Collecting sugar tongs seems to have become a sort of niche market and even has its own webpage where every sort of UK tong is illustrated:
Here’s some Peter and William Tongs for you to compare with yours on one of those pages which are well worth leafing through.
Hester Bateman tongs seem to lead the pack in terms of price.
The tongs some people look for are the cast pairs. Unfortunately, for all their delight, they tends to break so finding an unbroken pair allows for more buyer interest.
The provincial tongs also common decent prices even from somewhere like Newcastle which saw a lot of production.
These springy single bar tongs, of which you have a good example, replaced the earlier Georgian nips and afforded a range of styles with relatively little silver work
What Winston Churchill referred to as " honest British teeth" gapped and blackened, were a direct result of an over use of sugar which was the poor man’s drug of the 17th and even through to the 19th century.
The ruling class especially the Stuart and Hanover kings were sponsors of the triangle trade, forming the West Africa company bringing slaves from West Africa to their sugar cane colonies in the Carribean and then sugar to Bristol and Liverpool.
William IV, The Sailor King, Queen Victoria’s uncle and the five times great uncle of Harry and William owned or partly owned three of the largest Barbados plantations. Records are such it is difficult to establish the truth of it but if he didn’t own Harry’s wife’s forebear he certainly owned 373 of their neighbors shipped from and through modern Ghana.
Some sugar tongs actually feature family crests with what is referred to in the current literature of the time as “blackamoor” heads as part of the crest of the original owners.
Unfortunately that trade is rather what the British empire and much of the fortune of the current royal family is descended from.
Of course sugar wasn’t the only somewhat unpleasant trade, back when these tongs were popular. My lot was in the Lancs cotton trade using the flight from the land which was being enclosed to staff their factories and cheap slave-cut cotton from the colonies to provide them with their spinning and weaving profits.
This is perhaps the fascination of silver. Where it was made, by and for whom and with what profits gleaned from what source. Mind you, what the sugar tongs represent in miniature the National Trust and the older colleges grapple with on a major scale with their buildings also built out of “colonial development” to use neutral term.
CRWW
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Thanks Christopher, im very pleased with these, I gotthem at the carboot at just under the scrap price, silver has risen overnight.Its a shame that the rising price of silver means that a lot of older silver will end up in the pot…not these .Thanks very much for the information. Best David
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So these tongs and a salt weighing 210 grams total sold for $C381 including the buyers’ premium. The scrap value was $C415.69 so sale price was $C35.00 +/- below spot melt.
With scrap at $C66.56 we’re about to see a lot of Victorian and earlier silver hit the smelters again.
CRWW
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