Do you think there’s that many? The middle class Canadian neighbourhood I grew up in, only families of British heritage might have had a tea set, and almost invariably, they were electroplate. I think Birks made a lot more profit on the plate, and only the really wealthy had the real thing. I don’t have any evidence to back this up but that is my impression. What do you think?
You are 100% correct. Gerald Birks admitted that for every one .925 service made, electroplate examples were produced and sold.
But its worth looking at the scrap price of silver during the relevant period.
In 1929, the average price of silver was approximately $0.48 per ounce , and it reached a decade high of $0.69 per ounce between 1925 and 1934.
A 1929 Canadian dollar has the buying power of approximately $17.54 today so a troy oz of 1929 silver was worth $8.59 in current dollars or about one tenth of its current value.
Perhaps even more important, silver was not just something that came out for special occasions, but was standard gear when neighbours dropped in for tea. And there were servants to polish it and make the tea and serve it.
Even when we lost the servants to factories that paid better wages, the silver teapot made twice daily appearances once for morning tea or wakeup tea and again in the afternoon about 4.30.
“And is there honey still for tea?” is a famous line from Rupert Brooke’s poem “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester”, Cambridge. Brooke, writing from the front lines before his death wasn’t talking about anything the rich did but a very ordinary vicarage event, tea with honey from hives kept at the bottom of the garden.
I have no idea why Anglican priests kept bees but they did. My personal thought about my grandfather was so long as he was tending the vicarage bees, his congregants and various wives would leave him in peace.
CRWW
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thanks Mr. Wilson. And not to be pedantic, but the poem was written in 1912 while he was in Berlin (ironically) recovering from what I believe was a mental collapse, two years before the guns of August. But your point on the relative affordability of silver a century ago vs today is well taken (though after 1929 I’m pretty sure the market for most luxury goods collapsed for at least the next 15 years).
Having switched to a sterling teapot for my morning ritual, I can say that good gauge sterling keeps the tea hotter longer, and makes me realize that the hot water pot (that Americans think is a coffee pot) made good sense as that water would stay hot for topping up the tea.
Young Mr. Brooke’s less famous line from that charming poem, “And things are done you’d not believe At Maddingly on Christmas Eve” makes me wonder if I’m not spending the holiday season in entirely the wrong location.
Accuracy is never pedantic merely accurate! Brooke’s prewar poetry is now regarded as a sort of pastoral canvas for an aimless society. His 1914 sonnets dealing with the opening years of the war and the attitude of Kitchener’s pals army rushing off to their deaths while planning on returning home triumphant by Christmas are difficult for the next generation which, like Sassoon and Graves, had to deal with mass slaughter with no end or purpose in sight.
Some wonder if Brooke hadn’t died of a blood infection on board ship to Churchill’s ill-fated Dardanelles campaign if he would have been regarded as anything more than a light weight poet. But he remains one of my favorites, even if, apparently, I don’t know much about him.
The thing about money in 1929 is it rather like where we are going today. JP Morgan put the UK on the gold standard as a condition of bailing it out and there was lots of money just none or very little in general circulation. Looking at my own family history, London brewers acquiring thousands of acres of northern land and villages from families selling after their sons and grandsons had been slaughtered in trenches and their own agrarian finances shredded by the introduction of Lloyd George’s income tax to pay the butcher’s bill and the introduction of cheap Canadian wheat.
Today exactly the same thing is happening. Different players but the same dance macabre.
Small business and farmers driven to the wall and giant monopolies doing the driving and the governing.
CRWW
sic semper erat, et sic semper erit
I’m a historian not an economist, and while I am prepared to subscribe to the notion history never repeats itself, I am also prepared to assert people who don’t read it are less good at predicting the future much less understanding the present.
CRWW