Hello and thanks for viewing this award given to Mr. Edmonds, esq.
Have a nice day
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Phil Edmonds played for Middlesex and England. Phil Edmonds - Wikipedia
I am sure that the award would look much more impressive if it were polished.
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Yes, you are right. However: this was cherished by his mother who cleaned it, once in a while but she passed away and left it in her linen drawer. I intend to have it returned to the rightful owner as his mother left it. He can do what he wants to with it but I wasn’t going to erase his mums’ fingerprint
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J.R. Ogden & Sons Ltd. Harrogate & London. r - 1972.
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To many of the Forum’s readers this salver’s greatest interest is its origin.
Ogdens of Harrogate has been an institution in that small Yorkshire spa town since 1893.
The dales town, today with population of 164,000 opened as a spa with the discovery of sulphur springs, some 88 of them, in the 18th century. In a time when medicine was hit and miss, mostly miss, sulphur was a popular cure for many ailments.
A two-day coach ride from London back then, it can into its own in the mid 19th century, just about the time this retail establishment opened, when the rail roads reduced the journey to a comfortable four or five hour ride from London.
Building on fame which saw multiple Kings, Queens, Czars and Czarinas visiting the town and Ogdens, by the 20th century its per capita income for its then population of some 25,000, grown from 1,200 at the end of the 18th century, was higher than The West End of London.
So World War I, which in the first days of 1914 when Europeans still thought they were fighting an 18th century-style, pre-mechanized war, a misapprehension which slaughtered thousands of professional soldiers, came as a great shock to their relatives retired in Harrogate’s leafy streets.
Odgens took up the challenge and raised funds to provide refugee capability for many Belgians fleeing the brutal German invasion of that country when the war expanded to France.
This tray and the inscription reminds us all of a time when things seemed orderly compared to the mayhem of the present with most of Europe and the Middleeast engaged in some sort of conflict all driven by men who see war as a short term solution to economic problems for which they otherwise have no solutions.
Oddly, an exact repeat of the prelude to WWI
CRWW
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