Silver Spoon Antiques

A question often asked is ' How much is this item worth? ' or ' What value would you put on this piece?'  Indeed the climaxes on Antiques Roadshow are when values are announced, either elating the owner with a high valuer or disappointing others with a low one.  The hard thing when it comes to valuing an item is there is actually a number of values a single item can have.  Here is a list of some different types of values, from lowest to highest: Wholesale - This is the price a dealer would pay.  This value has to include room for a decent mark-up for the dealer, often 100% (this covers other overheads as well as some profit) Auction - Auctions are where the dealers and customers meet, often cheaper than retail, there is always the exception when two bidders decide they both want an item! Retail - often at least triple the wholesale price, this is because only does a dealer need to make a living, they also need to pay for other costs such as utilities, insuran...

Can you tell me what this is and what it was used for?   Irish Marrow Scoop, John Shields, Dublin It’s known as a marrow scoop .   Back in eighteenth century (the earliest example dates from just before then in 1690), the marrow (which is the stuff inside bones) was considered a delicacy.   So they made special spoons just to get at the stuff.  Very popular in the 1700s, they became scarcer in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.   Quite large, often around 25cm long, some would have a spoon on one end and the scoop on the other, others, such as this example, had two different sized scoops.   Keep an eye out for them, especially rare Scottish and Irish examples.  

It is always worth having a look at each spoon in a boxed set...especially if they don't quite match. Here we have a boxed 'set' of golf club teaspoons and a pair of sugar tongs. Silver plated and priced at $45. What would you think? I picked up each one and each was marker as APEX silverplate. Except the last one! It was hallmarked as Australian Sterling Silver, made by Fairfax and Roberts. Not the 'Stg' for sterling as the third mark. I asked the dealer his best price for the set...$30. A nice 1920's-30's Australian sterling silver teaspoon. In itself well worth a price of $30.

Is it fake??? Antique silver has been forged and faked for a number of years, whether to dodge duty in the early nineteenth century or to mislead an antique collecting public from the 1890's. But this spoon can technically also be called a fake. These spoons are often called Berry Spoons, and have different fruits embossed into the bowls. However for many spoons this embossing was done 50 years after they were made, as Berry Spoons became popular in early Victorian times. So any Berry Spoon with hallmarks for the late 1700's actually began life as a normal tablespoon (or in rarer cases, such as the spoon here, as teaspoons). So although it appears to be a Georgian Berry Spoon, it has been modified into that at a later date. Is it a fake? What do you think????

This lovely pair of sugar tongs was my first ever silver purchase!  I found them at the Woollahra Antiques Centre, back when I was in high school.  When I saw them I loved both the lions paws and the little cherubs. The hallmarks on these tongs are from Germany after 1888.  The 800 is the silver purity, the crescent moon  and crown are the national mark for Germany. As there is no makers mark, I haven't been able to work out who made them, but they were probably made in the 1930's.   From these tongs, I managed to dig around the family home and find another piece, which was an English Sterling bookmark that belonged to my great-grandfather! These two were the beginning of what I'm sure will be a lifetime of collecting!

With some ancestry in the Channel Islands, I was excited to find out they had their own silversmiths, marking their wares with unique marks.   This spoon was made by the last of the Jersey Silversmiths to make spoons.  It was made by Jean Le Gallais, around 1850.  As you can see the hallmarks don't follow the standard English hallmarking system.  In this case there is the makers mark, (JLG), a crown and the letter J (for Jersey).   Another really cool thing about Channel Islands spoons is their use of the double drop (I've also seen it called a skeleton drop) heel to join the stem to the bowl of the spoon.  Although this can be found in early English spoons, it died out reasonably quickly there.  In the Jersey however, the silversmiths continued to use this style up through the nineteenth century.  It was hard to take a photograph of, but you can see it in the photo, the little pitchfork shape.

Welcome to my blog! Here you see an interesting piece of antique sterling silver flatware.  This little item was actually produced in reasonable quantities and can still be found at quite good prices (I see a possible collection!).  The earliest examples come from the late eighteenth century and have ivory handles, but by the late regency period (such as this one), they have a scimitar blade and the same handle as other flatware.   This one is a little more special, because it was made up in Scotland.  It was assayed in Edinburgh in 1835, but the maker, David Gray was actually a Scottish Provincial maker, working in Dumfries.