My Family Silver

R. & S. Garrard & Co’s burnishers at work on the replacement Ascot Gold Cup of 1907,
which was delivered in August that year, about two months after the original had been stolen on 18 June
(photo from The Sphere, London, 20 July 1907)

Mark Twain, the American humorist and author of the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, awoke one morning in June 1907 on the first day of a visit to England to find newspaper headlines proclaiming, MARK TWAIN ARRIVES – ASCOT GOLD CUP STOLEN. His waggish British friends took note.

The sensational theft the day before of the 500 sovereign cup was all the more embarrassing because it had vanished from under the noses of guards at the famous English horse race grandstand, one of whom was from Garrard’s, the Crown Jewellers, who had made the trophy. Besides, the cup had been paid for by King Edward VII and should have been the focus of all eyes on Gold Cup day, the most important of the racing calendar. It was never seen again.

The cup, 13 ¼ in high, comprised 68 ounces of 20 carat gold. Its design was in the style of similar early 19th Century racing trophies, Garrard’s craftsmen working from new drawings and a life-size model provided by their artist colleagues.

Enter Mr Twain. Shortly afterwards as guest of honour at a Savage Club dinner he was handed a parcel. It contained a copy of the stolen trophy in gilt plaster, with an incriminating note from a ‘partner’ who was supposed to have purloined the cup on the author’s behalf. The laughter subsiding, the replica was found to be exact in every detail except for the acorn top which had been replaced by a well-modelled bust of Huckleberry Finn’s creator.

artists at R. & S. Garrard & Co, working on the design and the model
for the Ascot Gold Cup of 1907
(photo: The Sphere, London, 20 July 1907)

A selection of items made by Garrard’s and its predecessors will be found on myfamilysilver.com, for which see:
George Wickes
Wakelin & Tayler
Garrard’s

‘Sir Roger de Coverley and the Gipsies,’ a silver group made in the workshops of Joseph Angell, London, about 1850, inspired by Joseph Addison’s tale, which first appeared in The Spectator, 21 July 1711.
The much-loved character of Sir Roger would have been familiar to many, his exploits having been reprinted several times during the 18th and 19th Centuries. He also featured in Sir Roger de Coverley; or, The Merry Christmas, a dramatic entertainment produced at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, in 1746; and in Sir Roger de Coverley; or, The Widow and Her Wooers, a drama at the Olympic Theatre in 1851. Furthermore, the artists Thomas Stothard (who sometime provided designs for silver to Rundell, Bridge & Rundell) and Charles Robert Leslie had both chosen ‘Sir Roger de Coverley and the Gipsies’ as a subject for paintings, the latter winning praise for his at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1829.
(photo: unknown, circa 1853)

The production of so-called ‘narrative’ plate – pieces which ‘tell a story’ - was by no means confined to England, but it was in London during much of the 19th century that silversmiths produced some of the best examples. Scenes of bucolic peace or episodes from the myths of Antiquity had decorated silver cups, cream jugs and boxes and dishes for generations, but it was probably the appearance of Flaxman’s ‘Shield of Achilles‘ in 1821, with its wide border of figures inspired by Homer’s Iliad, that began a fashion for finely wrought objects that were intended to elevate mere silver and silver-gilt into precious works of art.

Rundell’s, the firm responsible for the ‘Shield of Achilles,’ was inevitably involved in the manufacture of other such pieces, such as the ‘Crecy Shield’ (William Bateman, London, 1834), but it was in the hands of Garrard’s and Storr & Mortimer/Hunt & Roskell’s designers and craftsmen that in the 1840s and 1850s the genre flourished. Both firms displayed magnificent examples at the Great Exhibition of 1851, most of which had been made as testimonials or race ‘cups,’ but a worthy, less celebrated entrant to this field was Joseph Angell. With his silver group, ‘Sir Roger de Coverley and the Gipsies,’ made from models by John Henning junior, he had hit upon an old, familiar subject that with nostalgic warmth recalled the age before factories and speeding locomotives. As the Athenaeum remarked approvingly, ‘Mr. Angell could not have chosen a scene more thoroughly English than this.’

• Various items of interest are currently listed on myfamilysilver.com, including pieces from Rundell, Bridge & Rundell, William Bateman, Garrard’s, Paul Storr, Mortimer & Hunt and Hunt & Roskell

Harry Emanuel’s new premises, Brook Street, Hanover Square, London (The Illustrated London News, London, Saturday, 17 November 1860, p. 455); although somewhat altered, No. 2 Brook Street still stands and is presently the headquarters of the United National Bank

The humming bird necklace I mentioned last week was devised by Harry Emanuel, one of the most remarkable figures of the London silver and jewellery trade. He caused a sensation at the 1867 Paris Exhibition by his display of  the silver mechanical swan which so delighted Mark Twain and which still thrills visitors today to the Bowes Museum, County Durham.

Emanuel was not 25 when in 1855 he took over the family business. Although it was already successful he determined that it should rival the leading firms of Garrard’s, Hunt & Roskell and Hancock’s. Few were surprised when in 1860 he opened new premises in Brook Street, Mayfair,  decorated in the Elizabethan style, its ebony cabinets filled with every conceivable type of wrought gold, silver, jewellery, object of vertu and enamels. The focus of the showroom was an ornamental stove like a gigantic flower vase brimming with hot-house plants. For a man who sold humming bird necklaces and persuaded the Sultan of Turkey to purchase a jewelled gold-mounted ivory stereoscope, nothing was too exotic.

Harry Emanuel himself was an exotic. His fortune made, partly from South African diamonds, he sold his business. In 1874 he purchased a Portuguese title, that of the Baron de Almeda, and removed to Paris with his wife where they lived in great luxury. In 1880 he agreed to represent the impoverished San Dominican state as Minister Plenipotentiary to France, which of course opened many doors, social and political. He died at Nice in 1898.