These marks are on a set of 7 different sized skewers - swan skewers?
I suspect they are plate rather than silver and might originate from Chester.
Thanks in advance.
And yes, these are silverplate from Sheffield. Not sure what the circled “C” signifies, but it’s not Chester.
Thanks for your speedy response.
Any idea on the date? Is the ‘C’ significant?
What would the set of 7 expect to sell for?
Thanks again
It’s generally not possible to date silverplate items, since there’s no regulatory system in place for them. All you can do is guess, based on when the company was in business. In this case that’s a very broad range, from 1823 to 1984! The style sometimes helps, but these could have been made any time during that same range. They don’t “shout” that they come from a specific period.
Silverplate items like these meat skewers have only decorative value, since there’s virtually no silver in them worth mentioning. Just looking around on eBay, similar skewers which, like these, are fairly generic in design (i.e., no “interesting” elements to the design, like sword hilts or molded animal figures), seem to sell for about $25 each. A matched set of seven might boost the total value somewhat.
Interesting item, Tony. Older kitchens used to keep graduated ringed sets of these skewers hanging on a peg for insertion into joints of beef or lamb or the smaller ones for game birds before being taken upstairs for carving.
They were substituted for the base metal ones used to keep the joint together during roasting either on a spit or in an oven.
Usually they were made of sterling rather than plated because of the rather hard life they had. Similarly softer Britannia metal was little used or has little survived the flourishes of the dining room carver.
Examine any older set – and they seem to emerge as sets in the time of William III – and you see cut mark on the blades from the carving knife hitting them.
So we know they were used to adorn the roast before it was taken upstairs to be carved by the staff there.
The last set I saw in use were at Sion House in the 1950’s. “Gatwick Park” if you are Robert Altman. Otherwise the Percy London home, best known to us kids as having a great dressup box!
They disappeared from kitchens when roast disappeared. In many homes they were victims of wartime rationing or Lloyd George capital gains taxation or both
Today I use A Dorothy Langlands’, Newcastle example for opening bank statements since my bank is slow to turn to the internet.
Older skewers were hammered and the ring soldered on. More modern skewers were cast and the ring end was part of the cast. This is not a hard and fast rule.
When my bank eventually concedes to the modern age Mrs Langland’s fine work will get added to a drawer full of now redundant silver.
A ringed set, I refer to the custodial ring holding the individual utensil loups or handles would be very sought after.This plated set is not entirely without value just because it is a set. I see a plated pair on offer at $160.
I have never seen a Sheffield plate (as opposed to an EPNS) example probably because the cut marks would quickly expose the base metal underneath, but they do appear in catalogues so they must have existed.
CRWW
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But as always, what a seller is offering and what a seller can actually obtain are often separated by a yawning chasm of hope springing eternal. 
A quick review of auction prices in the last decade for plated silver meat skewers would. be helpful for anyone seeking to retail such an item.
This silver plated skewer with a loop sold in 2014 for 14 pounds plus 20% for a total of 16.80 pounds suggesting that a set of 10 might go for … well you can do the math. A ringed set of plated by Christophe sold in the three figures
I concede that received wisdom on this forum is EPNS is of little or no value. That was once also the view of Sheffield plate – a sandwich of metal and silver – sometimes even an open. sandwich— but we have seen prices for interesting casts by makers going at prices rivalling or exceeding sterling silver.
Bottle sliders, possibly with a solid silver plate to take buyer initials or crest are often looked up with favour despite their mongrel origin. Large meat covers with an interesting crest also do well at auction.
Some plateware is dipped as many as four times – or so the manufacturer claims, building up a significant thickness of .999 silver as opposed to the .925 of Sterling.
A friend of mine recently took a meat cover and platter and removed all the silver from it before re-plating. It had apparently had some water damage to the underlying metal. He recovered 137 grams of pure silver worth more or less that in US dollars.
CRWW
Thanks everyone for your help.
Food for thought…
The copyright mark is a symbol (©) used to indicate that a work is protected by copyright. It is here followed by the name of the copyright owner. While not legally mandatory, using the copyright symbol is a helpful reminder that a work is protected and can assist in enforcing copyright claims.
Exactly what the copyright refers to is a little less clear. It must be the name itself as the design of the scoop itself would have to have been protected by patent and, since it was a common design back to antiquity that would have been a contentious claim.
Better would have been trademark protection of the name as later the trumpet became the firm’s trademark.
However The first British trademark, the Bass Brewery’s red triangle logo, was not registered un til January 1, 1876 when The Trade Mark Registration Act 1875, which allowed for formal registration of trademarks, became effective.
This is some indication the items were made between 1836 when the name was adopted and 1875.
Elsewhere in this blog I wrote a little about early attempts by Victorian silversmiths to protect intellectual property mostly of the designs superimposed on the silver rather than patent for implement itself.
CRWW
Thanks fof the information. Very interesting.
Is anyone interested in adding these skewers to their collections?
I’m open to offers…
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I have, upon further reflection, decided that while all my comments about the three forms of intellectual property protection; trademark, copyright and patent, remain accurate, none of them apply to the circled c on your set of plated Dixon & Co skewers. The mark is simply an internal mark to identify inventory or factory source rather similar to the old tally marks often found on sterling under or near the sponsor’s mark.
I draw this conclusion from two facts, first that I have never seen copyright claimed by mark on UK silver, it would be superfluous given the UK mandated hallmarking registration system, and secondly that another Dixon plated skewer illustrated here contains a circled capital B.
Copyright, the ownership of words, music or design, artwork is inherent in the work to the creator whether specifically claimed or not and unless assigned to the publisher.
So in this blog for instance, there is a “terms” sheet governing ownership of material submitted to the blog. The term sheet may have been " borrowed" from a US term sheet on another website as it refers to “States or Provinces” usuallly meaning American or Canadian.(That, in itself, may be an infringement of copyright although lawyers do it all the time and call it “boilerplate”).
Also this term sheet does not specifically claim that anything submitted to it becomes the property of the blog proprietors, although that is usually the intention.
While web publishers generally want control over product — words or design or music submitted – they are equally anxious to avoid responsibility for errors — such as concluding a circled c is copyright claim rather than an inventory identification by the factory.
As billions of dollars rest of these matters and as legislation in each country, is usually determined by the degree of control the web publishers have over the legislators – apparently a lot in the US and not so much in Europe— rules change from time to time.
The greatest sufferers are the private artists, especially musicians who lose billions in royalty revenues and newspapers whose articles are taken and republished without remit.
Taylor Swift, has come up with a novel way of protecting her songs using corporate legislation which may well dictate a way forward for some.
CRWW