Marrow scoop/spoon

Any help with this will be appreciated.
Id…
It seems to be silver but its a marrow spoon or scoop.
I can add more pics thanks

You are correct in that it is sterling silver. It was hallmarked in London in 1743 and has the maker’s mark TM (script). This mark is not shown in any of my references. It is similar to a mark registered by Thomas Mason in 1745 but there are enough differences for it to be accounted not the same.

Phil

Thank you.
Ive thought about washing it or some how making the marks more visible.
I thought it was j.m.
So thank you.
I didn’t have any clue to the year or date but ive never had any spoon like this one and am newish to the market of silver coins flatware etc.

Thx for your time i appreciate it and the gold and coin shops around here have no clue.
It weighs about 50.1 or 52.1 grams.
I used a scale im not familiar with but it’s heavy.

Could the maker be James Morrison?

https://www.silvermakersmarks.co.uk/Makers/London-IM-IR.html#IM

The initials are definitely TM rather than JM or IM.

1 Like

Thank you Phil.
Would this piece have any value above just sterling and what would be a easy price point for a sale?

93d36fa70f4a32de7e129a833a215685f9f9fdb9

As I mentioned earlier this mark is too different to Mason’s registered mark with script letters:

TM-ThomasMason-3

1 Like

Phil, after diligent research and deep thought, I agree with you again. Hats off!

Im at a loss as to what i could /should do with the piece. If you guys are having as hard of time with the maker as I. Im curious if this is rare enough to hold onto as something with value other than sterling of course… but identifying it would be a good thing value is almost always what a collector would pay i guess
Thx for the help and the education

Not being able to identify the maker is unlikely to affect the value. Any serious collector would know about the missing registers which leave a bit of a black hole in our ability to identify marks.

What to do with a marrow spoon whose maker is condemned to eternal anonymity by the 18th century parliamentarians who “borrowed” the Goldsmith’s Guild’s registry books where the name likely was and, setting a low bar standard of conduct for their modern political successors, failed to return it.
The short answer seems to be sell it on eBay or take up drinking Manhattans and other American-invented cocktails in tall glasses where it can be employed as a stir spoon. It works well with the Calgary Airport contribution to drinking your veggies; the clamato cocktail.
For the marrow spoon, once part of essential tableware for our forebears who apparently liked scooping the essence out of cooked cow bones at the table, is well passed its best-buy date.
And it is likely entirely because of its lack of modern utility that so many exist in such fine condition.
Entire collections have come up for sale recently and can be found listed in “price realised” on www.liveauctioneers.com. Sold like this, the poor things are scrabbling hard for a ton a piece (I am presuming a “ton” is still slang for a hundred in your country) but I have seen them go a lot higher.
For the marrow scoop is simply part of that paon of silverware and other objects of antiquity which, until we reach the post nuclear age Putin and Trump seem most earnestly to desire for us, have little practical purpose in our gadget-rich, packaged food world.
Looking through my own collection of silver I realise much of it consist of items like the marrow scoop to which I attribute intrinsic value and I have utterly failed to palm off on children, grandchildren or those of my friends brave enough to venture into the fraught world of matrimony for the second or third time and in apparent need of a wedding present they can hock to fund the eventual divorce of the long suffering little understood trophy wife (or husband these days).
On the question of wedding presents when a member of the Drones Club got married in the Jeeves series by Wodehouse, Bertie Wooster always opted for a silver fish slice for his addition to the tabled glitter of wedding booty.
And a fish slice may well have joined the ranks of utterly useless items since wait persons at even the most staff-centric restaurants have given up filleting Dover sole for dining edification a la table.
Other items for the category have to include the meat skewer, originally used to hold a joint of beef or game together for dining room carving and now relegated to letter opener or, if you live in Chicago, weapons of self-defence status.
Then there is the toast rack. I belong to that generation which actually liked its toast cooked the night before in a fair-away kitchen and aired out in racks overnight before appearing at the breakfast table along with a jar of Dundee marmalade and a decent kedgeree. I think, looking back, I liked it because at breakfast one had to self-serve and as a small boy reaching for covered silver dishes on chin-high polished mahogany sideboards was un-necessary with toast racked bread as it arrived at the table and just sat there daring those around it to disturb its pristine perfection.
One might go on. Coffee pots are replaced by glass and electrical drip coffee makers. Butler and footman salvers with email and text messaging, and tea and lemon strainers with green bottles containing the essence of lemon without any of the tricky bits.
Some items, like page turners saw hundreds or possibly thousands of them sold to modern collectors and now turn out not to exist or ever existed in their eponymous form. See more on this elsewhere in this forum yesterday.
So there. What to do with the marrow scoop; find someone who collects them and “pass the parcel” or learn to love it and go shopping for a companion.
They were rife from the mid seventeenth century through to Victorian times and there are scholarly articles on their evolvement so you should be able to find a suitable mate possibly even with the same lost maker’s mark.

Christopher
Guildhall Antiques
Toronto.