Silver Spoon Antiques

Some of the purchases from today's auction Today was spent hunting for bargains at an auction in New Zealand. It seems there were plenty of good buys in the royal doulton items, but the sterling silver this time around was generally too high for a dealer.  Luckily I'm a collector too so still managed to pick up a few items. The highlights include an Omar Ramsden ladle and a pair of Scottish Provincial (probably Perth) sugar tongs. Stay tuned for some further descriptions and info. :-) Scottish Provincial Sugar Tongs Omar Ramsden Ladle

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????