Can anyone help with these marks. Thought they were Richard Woodman Burbridge, but year stamp seems to be 1815, which predates him. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks
The date is for Sheffield 1934, the mark on the right is the George V optional jubilee mark, you have correctly identified the maker.
1934 for sure. ![]()
Burbidge (sic) otherwise known as the Harrods silversmith. Here’s a story about him and another piece he made which became a prize in a bet between him and the owners of rival Selfridges.
CRWW
At the risk of standing accused of over-egging the pudding again, the very reasonable confusion over the name Burbidge and Burbridge put me in mind of Oscar Wilde’s drawing room drama, “The Importance of Being Earnest” and Algernon’s invention of Bunbury and the entire business of “Bunburying”.
The world is much indebted to this family of Burbidges. The name is shared by so many enlightened British leaders, including two other silversmiths, one with a slight name variation from the 18th century, that one wonders if Wilde might have drawn “Bunbury” from “Burbidge”?
Bunburying, as fans of the “Ballad of Reading Gaol” author will recall, is the business of having a fictitious person to provide an excuse to avoid doing something one should but isn’t going to.
As in " My dear, I would simply love to head up to your (cold damp) Yorkshire castle, but Bunbury and I have arranged a pheasant shoot in Dorset and I simply can’t let him down (also I know you have lost your French cook and the Yorkshire food will be inedible)."
The Burbidges seem to have sprung from Wiltshire where, like so many families before the introduction of a poll tax, had no second or surname so adopted, or were lumbered with, the nomenclature of the place they came from.
In England they, like so many others, migrated to London and one became a Lord Mayor and another became a Nova Scotia (Canadian) baronet and their descendants created the dynasty that managed Harrods long before that department store became the property of folks who still think Charles off-ed his Ex in a carefully staged Parisian traffic accident. If anything in Paris can be carefully staged.
So far as I can find there is no direct or consanguineous connection between the silversmith of late Victorian Edwardian times, Frederick Augustus Burbidge and the subject of this inquiry and second eponymous Baronet.
My grandmother was a fan of his and used to supply her table with accoutrements made under his sponsorship. I don’t think he made any of them himself by then.
She lived round the corner and used to insist on being driven to the store she could easily have walked to. Her theory was she got better service if she told them her chauffeur was pining away on Cromwell St. I suspect they just gave her credit and charged her more.
CRWW
Many thanks, I was thrown by the jubilee mark, not that I’m any sort of expert. Cheers
