Hello !
Very new to this - can anyone help me identify the hallmark - for the life of me I can’t ? Thanks in advance 
I got London (crowned leopard) 1775 ( I think ? ) then absolutely no clue …
London 1775 is correct. The maker’s/sponsor’s mark is IS (or JS) and is upside down in your picture. It is probably the mark of John Swift but we can’t be sure as the relevant register which would have recorded the registration was destroyed.
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Swift. a London silversmith, as best we know, was apprenticed to Thomas Langford 1718, turned over to William Paradise 1719, and again to Thomas Serle 1723. Free in 1725. First mark entered as small worker 1728. Second mark as large worker 1739. Third mark small size 1757. Fourth, 1757. Granted livery in 1758. His son, John, was apprenticed to him 1750.
All this was gleaned by others from probate and tax records, the Guild’s records having been borrowed by the House of Commons and “lost”.
Then there is the story of the Appalachian silver mine, which like King Solomon’s mines has never really been identified but which was attributed to an Englishman John or Jonathan Swift.
Wikipedia sets it out:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift’s_silver_mine
Silver mines were not something discovered in the new world by Europeans as claimed under the phony doctrine of “Terra Nullius” propounded by the Roman catholic church, they were discovered and mined for their silver by the former inhabitants of the Americas for millenia before Europeans arrived. Modern archeologists have found burial silver in graves in Ohio dated back at least two millenia and maybe more.
But is there a relationship between the prolific hollow ware maker and the European “discoverer” of the Appalachian mine? John/Jonathan Swift was a fairly common Anglo-Irish name so who knows. The surviving journals attributed to one John Swift are probably created after the fact to throw people off the trail.
Sources of silver used by English silversmiths in the mid 18th century included, silver taken by privateers off the Spanish galleons pulling silver out of the Potosi Mine in Peru, recycled silver and melted down pieces of eight or Spanish coins. But the latter were often of a lower, hence the word “coin silver”, percentage of precious metal.
The great western silver mines weren’t to come on line for another half to three quarters of a century and for the most part of the eastern US mines in the Appalachians and up into what is now the shield country of Canada were still under the control of the indigenous population.
I live on top of one of them in Cobalt, Ontario a mine which was started in the time of the Pharoahs and still had enough silver left to fund most of Britain’s efforts in WWI. Funny business that shipping all that silver to the UK then shipping it back here to pay for the armaments.
Now with raw silver heading back the three-figure digits there is renewed value to these mines which, until now have been treated silver in the 21st century as a by-product of other minerals needed for EV’s and computers.
CRWW
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