Took quick snaps at the shop so this is the best I could do. Fell in love with this fish server, I think London 1802. Wondering if this type of decoration would have been added later? The price is pretty premium so I don’t really want to pay top dollar for something with later embellishment but jeez it’s pretty. Thoughts? Thanks in advance
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It can be fiendishly difficult to tell. Some Georgian pieces have nice clean lines, with only modest adornment, but the rococo goes well back into the 18th Century, so you often see fairly early pieces with a lot of elaborate decoration.
Occasionally, it’s easy to tell. Someone in the U.S. was auctioning what clearly started life as a nice, straightforward George III quart tankard. But it had been covered with all manner of repoussé frippery. Worst of all, someone had added a spout to it, so it became some sort of pot or jug, rather than a drinking vessel. No new hallmarks dating it to the mid-Victorian, so in the U.K., selling that would be a crime, literally.
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This fiddle and thread fish slice is almost certainly half of a box set. Looking at it have you any reason to suppose the chasing isn’t contemporary? At auction single slicers without a fork go for US$150-$185. Pairs start at $US500.00. (See www.liveauctioneers.com)
Can you remember who the maker was? Is it WB for William Bennett? Difficult to read on the picture. Bennett was working from 19 Little Bartholomew Close in 1802. His shop specialized in trays and salvers so employed excellent decorators.
CRWW
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Thanks Bart, that was my guess too, and thanks Jeff. And I didn’t have my loupe with me Mr Wilson so couldn’t read the maker. I think the grouse in the centre struck me as more early Victorian, but I’m encouraged that you don’t see it as anachronistic. It’s a little overpriced but I do like it.
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I had sort of presumed your grouse was a pheasant but you may be right. Grouse were limited to Scotland, season opening Aug 12th. Pheasant season kicks off October 1st and runs through Christmas. Georgians shot both with fowling pieces. Highly refined, long-barrelled, smoothbore weapons used by the aristocracy specifically for bird hunting.
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/364770071109
But why put game birds on a fish slice? I can only presume it was made for someone who had both shooting and a good trout or salmon stream on his property which does rather point back to Scotland making your grouse nomenclature more likely.
CRWW
Maybe it’s a grouse server? They are smaller than a decent sized brook trout.
Publish and be damned! I might have to buy it, it’s just too charming.
Would you like an 18th century fowling piece to go with your grouse server?
It’s a smooth-bored, muzzle-loaded, flint and pan fired weapon. I have three of them locked away in the gun room in Shropshire. They are relics of the local shoot when it was started in about 1760. An American friend of mine, a gun enthusiast visiting, insisted on testing one of them with some black powder a paper plug and a light load of modern shot. The thing worked but the ricochet knocked him backwards and his enthusiasm for testing the other three diminished somewhat.
I’m afraid I don’t have a picture with me over here but there’s several listed for sale various places on the web.
One of them was modified to serve as a military weapon during some slight contretemps with the French. My father used it in the Home Guard ( Dad’s Army) in the last war to deter Germans. Apparently it worked as none arrived.
CRWW
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Probably more reliable than the Ross rifle a number of the Home Guard were stuck with. And would it have been modified for the Seven Years war? It may have made it’s way to our shores in the hands of one of the Louisbourg Grenadiers.
But your birding gun does sound like a fine piece. Reminds me of the late and lamented Raymonds restaurant in St John’s Nfl. The local hunters would bang on the back door with a load of recently hunted ptarmigan. When served as today’s special you would be warned that there may be some birdshot in the meat you were about to eat.
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Growing up on a post-war hunting estate in a limited-butcher-meat economy, I don’t think I realized meat didn’t come without lead pellets until I was sent off to boarding school where they didn’t seem to have meat at all and had decided Latin and Greek was best absorbed through the seat of a well-thrashed schoolboy rear-end.
It was an odd and, I suppose given what was happening in the rest of Europe in the 1940’s, privileged world where central heating was non-existent and the bogeymen were our late allies, the Russians and immigrants from a Europe we had seen bombed into oblivion.
The best dentist we had in this post war Ruritania was a Dresden POW who tended our garden and had elected to stay on rather on than return to his own Stalin-dominated country. He introduced me to the magic of cloves for infantile teething problems.
Funny world. We ate off silver using silver cutlery but, lacking petrol, had to take a horse-drawn sled to get to church where we were lectured by my other grandfather on the manifest shortcomings of others. Never us segregated in a private chapel to the side.
Ah, the Ross Rifle. Years later in Rossland, BC, I twitted our then PM, John Turner whose mother was a Ross, about this delicate weaponry. Mr Turner who had inherited the poisoned chalice of P E Trudeau scandals, seemed almost relieved to defend his maternal forebears’ gunnery failings. Writing then for the Vancouver press, my bosses got a lengthy screed on WWI weaponry rather than a quote on some sex scandal they had dispatched me to the Red Mountain silver and gold mines near Trail, BC to harvest.
To redeem myself I was sent down into the valley to the smelter to photograph the silver bars stacked 7 foot high , a by-product of the lead zinc recovery process and destined for the mint.
CRWW
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I can give a pretty exact date for when your chat with Mr Turner better than I can for most silver as he was pm for less than 2 months in 1984. I never found his vehement denunciation of free trade remotely convincing in the ‘88 election. Previously he had seemed pretty sensible fiscally. Were you working for the Vancouver Sun? Newspapers seem almost as quaint a relic of the past as the fish server.
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Stu’ Keate, who had died the previous year, had got me the Vancouver gig years earlier. I was free lancing. I had first got to Red Mountain in 1965 then as news editor of the local daily, returned in '68 to interview Nancy Greene Raine then World Champ and yes, Turner’s stop over was the last time there. The link there was my stepfather’s younger bro’s estranged wife who was the daughter of the former Cominco boss and a Whistler pal of my former editor.
Miss Greene in 1968 decided to thin the media pack hounding her by ending the press con’ with a run down the then newly- opened main track in the fog. I was stupid enough to accept the challenge and by the time I got to the bottom, having skied exactly once before on a groomed gentle slope in Kitzbuhel 20 years earlier, she was boarding a plane back to Vancouver from Castlegar. I wrote the story anyway and she married Al.
Relics? Yes I suppose. That put me in the dinosaur age. I still read four newspapers every morning, a Canadian, an American, an English and a Chinese. Strangely the Global Times seems most reliable which may explain my current dateline
CRWW
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I used to enjoy cruising down Nancy Greene Way in North Vancouver and reflecting on what a huge star she was in her day in a country that at the time didn’t have many.