Hi, we have been clearing out our old mums house, and came across this, could somebody identify this please?, any help would be much appreciated.
Meat skewer I think !! 
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U right, bro! George III Inverness Sterling Silver Skewer | BADA
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H & E. Electroplated and almost certainly British, but I canât find the mark identified in any of the usual places.
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I just spent several hours searching without success. 
For a moment I thought it was âHall & EltonââŠ
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Queenâs pattern. silver-plated meat skewer with faux gothic lettering hallmarks reading H&E followed by a crown. If it has any other marks or initials your illustrations donât show them.
Queenâs pattern was created by the Lias brothers at the request of George IV for his wife about 1830. Silver electro-plating became widely used about a decade later. And gothic lettering to create the appearance of genuine hall marks are a Victorian conceit.
Meat skewers usually came in bundles of ten in various sizes and were used in the dining room to hold beef joints together for ceremonial carving not for actual roasting. Dine at Simpsons in London and you will see such theatre continued. And because dining room carving was more about flourish than precision, cuts and gouges to the inserted skewers are frequent and make plate a rather less than ideal medium for them.
The Americans, either boiled their beef or roasted it in ovens so never really used ceremonial skewers to replace the forks of a spit on which British beef was suspended over open fire, otherwise one might suppose this was a stray Holmes and Edwards of Bridgport, Conn. mark. But it isnât.
It also isnât a pre-incorporation Charles Hawksworth & John Eyre mark, successors of Blagden, Hogson & Co, 1821 Old Sheffield Plate manufacturers in Sheffield as that would have been plated not electro-plated which, judging by wear, this is. By 1833 they founded Hawksworth, Eyre & Co at White Rails, Sheffield, registering their first hallmark as âplate workersâ in July.
And that, together with one Bart mentioned, is the end of the great 19th century platers and electro-platers either side of the Atlantic the world today seems to record or I can find or remember.
There was in Newcastle a James Hethington who worked in partnerships with Henry Edwards circa 1774 and entered his own mark in 1773-74 (see Jacksons page 501). Wyler shows him with an IH/HE sterling mark with Edwards on page 188 for 1775, but we have no reason to suppose that partnership lasted out much more than the year leave alone the better part of a century or they ever become platers.
Which leaves us with the shipsâ chandlers and Ironmongers. (hardware and dry goods if youâre American) who sold their customers plated goods under their own nomenclature having had someone else, often Watt and Boultonâs Soho factory in Birmingham, actually make the product.
Wandering through UK city/port directories of the target period mid to late 19th century one finds four retailers in those businesses with the right initials. There may well be many more. Iâm not persuaded any of them so far commissioned this item.
The rule about platers not using the Crown, which was finally passed into law in 1896, had long been a proposal urged by Sheffield platers and sterling silversmiths who had adopted it as their town assay mark. So the offenders were often those upstarts from Birmingham. Which increases the odds of this being a Brummy maker or, in any event, a non-Sheffield maker.
The only skill required of city directory searchers is time, patience and perseverance. I doubt itâs a chandler as cooks aboard ships, even early steamships, tended not to have open fires and were notorious boilers of beef and the weevils that came along for the ride. So inland ironmongers or jewellers, probably in the south east, should anyone decide to continue the hunt.
Slashes or cuts on skewers are marks of honour rather like Prussians who saw facial scars as badges of former duelling honour. This seems to have one or two and a bend in the end where someone had mis-used it to either pry something open or to hasten the close of primogeniture inheritance in the best traditions of âKind Hearts and Coronetsâ an Alec Guinness movie of the late âforties which is still amusing.
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