a photograph from a rare 1870s trade card of ‘METCALFE, BINGLEY & CO., Brush & Comb Makers, Sponge Merchants, Perfumers, and Fancy Soap Manufacturers, Wholesale and Retail, By Special Appointment to H.R.H. The late Prince Consort, 130B & 131 OXFORD STREET, LONDON, W. 2nd and 3rd Doors West from Holles Street.’

Metcalfe, Bingley & Co, in London’s Oxford Street in the late 1870s, is not a business we usually associate with the sale of gold and silver. Established in the 1830s by Jacob Metcalfe (d. 1862), it specialized in brushes and combs, sponges, perfumes and fancy soaps, dressing cases and bags, photographic albums and other luxury goods. Typical of its rivals, however, the stock would have included many gold and silver mounted items, supplied by various specialist manufacturers, mostly in London and Birmingham.

These trade concerns, largely unknown to the general public, flourished during the Victorian and Edwardian periods: healthy home sales were easily outstripped by orders from abroad, particularly from the largely captive markets of the Empire. So it was that shops like Metcalfe, Bingley & Co might turn to Corke Brothers of Clerkenwell, silversmiths, gold and silver mounters, engravers and importers of fancy goods, who made heraldic devices, monograms, cyphers, &c, to enrich ivory, tortoiseshell or ebony brushes, combs and other dressing table paraphernalia. John Batson, originally a Soho cabinet maker, subsequently specialized in making silver-mounted tortoiseshell and ivory in a wide variety of forms, from inkstands and blotting pads to clocks. If mounted leather goods were required the retailer might have turned to Frederick Wich & Co whose wholesale warehouse was described in 1893 as ‘a paradise of leather [with] absolutely thousands of patterns of purses, letter cases, cigar and cigarette cases, with every description of mounts, from a plain silver border, up to elaborate fifteen and eighteen carat gold…’