Dank u hartelijk mijnheer.
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Probeer meer uitdagingen voor het team te vinden op deze website.
CRWW
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Probeer nog harder. 
Christopher, i envy your friendship with robert Bateman. Such a wonderful artist. I don’t believe he did any silver work. Am i wrong? If so I’d be delighted to aquire some.
Sorry about your father.
You seem to feel hester Bateman was an excellent business person but not so a silversmith. Do you feel the same about her sons? It’s a fascinating period of English silver work. Just interested in your thoughts.
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Thanks all not only informative but also oh so entertaining!!! Would love to see that Snow Goose!
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Here’s what the National Trust of Scotland has to say, somewhat obliquely providing an approach to answering your question:
Hester Bateman – British silversmith… | National Trust for Scotland.
The key to her success is hidden in that one sentence about her adopting innovative methods.
Back in the mid-18th century, if you wanted to flatten silver, which generally arrived in ingots, you hammered and heated and heated and hammered.
And it wasn’t tapping with a gentle handheld tool but an enormous sledgehammer. I used to watch blacksmiths hot-shoeing horses using much smaller devices and they found it hard enough.
When her husband, the chain maker, died, this story says of TB, then called consumption, but equally likely of the mercury vapours from his gilt process used for vermeiled watch chains, she inherited his tallymen, registered her own mark, and added two of her children to the 3,000 square foot or less Bunhill workshop, made unbearably hot by the furnace and all the hammering.
Now she was supposed to be illiterate, so it would have been one of her sons who wrote to the owners of the rolling mills in Birmingham, the famous Matthew Boulton and his engineer partner, Watt.
The letter, explaining she wanted to buy already flattened plates of silver rather than ingots, will have caught Mr Boulton’s attention as he had been thinking along the same lines for a while.
He invited her to come north and discuss the matter further. She took the two-day stagecoach from Bunhill to the banks of Hockley Brook and the magnificent factory created on its shoreline.
We don’t have the letter and don’t know if she met with one or both of the partners, but we do know the upshot was she agreed on a price for sheet silver and thus began an extraordinary story, a family legacy whose work impacts today.
Rather than selling directly to the public she subbed for other manufacturers. Her shop made the material to the order and design of the other smiths and they submitted it for assay.
Gradually, as she accumulated the capital, she invested in more taly men, more silver sheets rolled by the Soho Manufactory, and the blanks and moulds she had created for others got adapted and adopted for her purpose. This was pre-trademark legislation, so perfectly legal.
I think it’s as likely she ever took the time to hammer out anything as it is unlikely Mr Whitbread or my own London brewer forebear and Whitbread competitor ever created a pint of beer start to finish.
However, the design of much of the work from Bunhill is decidedly feminine, and whether it was designed to the order of a contracting fellow silversmith or for her own label, I strongly suspect there wasn’t much that left her shop that didn’t come under her critical and constructive eye.
Sorry, I took a while to get back to you on this. There were a couple of things your excellent question prompted, and I was awaiting answers.
Of all the Georgian London women I would have liked to have interviewed, she is one. There is some excellent scholarship on women in the silversmithing business at this time, a time of huge. social unrest and uncertainty not unlike our own as America broke its colonial bonds, and Paris heaved and fumed beneath the powdered heads of a Versailles-caged government.
I have this mental image of a small, rather intense, practical woman ordering her business and her household with experience and deliberation so often lacking in modern boardrooms or on their factory floors.
CRWW
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Thanks for the informative response and the link. As revolutionary in her own way as Robespierre. I wonder if the inspiration for this semi industrialized lot work using sheet silver was due, at least in part, to her small size and physical inability to swing the massive hammers her husband and others used to flatten ingots? Was necessity the mother of invention here? Or was she just on the vanguard of a burgeoning industrial zeitgeist in all manufacturing? I covet that rather splendid teapot by Peter and Ann Bateman that the Scottish NT has.
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Glad it was helpful. I am biased of course, but The Queen of Bunhill was way more revolutionary than Robespierre, the provincial lawyer who came to town to pursue very middle class goals, hitched his wagon to the Fourth Estate, got a taste for power and decided to behave like a King himself. I think of him as the 18th century Mickey Cohen who has already ascended the metaphysical scaffold, the little lawyer from Arras was forced to actually climb.
La Bateman was rather like the other La Petite Reine 40 years later living in that rat-infested, sewage-backed up draughty palace down the road with her German beau. Both of them were extremely good at encouraging powerful men to see things their way and get the job done.
CRWW
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