I know many people who love to poke about in the trays of junk shops picking up odd silver spoons. Some hostesses like to put nice odd coffee cups or odd glasses in front of people: after all, it gives them something to talk about. So why not odd spoons, particularly tea-spoons?

There is certainly any amount of variety in shape, and most of them by now have a trade or traditional name. (I am, of course, leaving out the very early Apostle or Maidenhead spoons which are such rarities nowadays, and talking about things which really can be found by the modest collector.) A spoon has a bowl, a stem and a finial or handle, and each of these can vary in all sorts of ways, from the quite flat to the highly ornate. The Guide to Flatware, published by Heywood and Company, London, gives over two hundred different patterns for spoons and forks, many of them contemporary manufacturers’ names, but many—like Stuart, Feather Edge, Old English, Fiddle Thread and Shell, Kings, Rat Tail are traditional designs which have been made right back to Georgian days. If you extend your range to christening spoons there is no limit

Antique Collector MagazineAnother sort of spoon sometimes found which has puzzled collectors is the marrow spoon. The bowl is long and narrow, rather like a thin pipe cut part way along its length, and was used for scooping out marrow from bones—a great delicacy /VI the eighteenth and nineteenth century.

Salt spoons seem to have started out shaped as a flat shovel, but most of those one sees are the normal round- bowled type. All the same there are plenty of types to choose from, with the different sorts of backs and finials found in the other spoons in the service. Two kinds of perforated spoons can be looked for, the mote skimmer, first cousin to the caddy spoon and used for taking the floating “strangers” off the surface of the tea. At its other end is a spike, said to be for removing the larger tea leaves of those days from the perforation at the entrance to the pot’s spout. The other is the sugar sifter with its embossed bowl, usually scallop shaped.

Then there are the tea caddy spoons or ladles. They date from times when tea was almost as precious as silver itself, and had to be doled out with care. In those days, too, tea-drinking was a very important social affair, when all one’s most critical friends came into the house. Be sure, they would look carefully for some originality in one’s choice of a caddy spoon.

To provide the hostess with every opportunity of impressing her guests, the silversmiths of those days produced an astonishing variety of shapes in these spoons. Most often seen, perhaps, especially in rather heavy designs, is the scallop shell, but there are others in the form of leaves— often the tea leaf itself, scoops, shovels, jockeys’ caps, fishes, even small hands. Caddy spoons in simpler shapes were also made in Sheffield plate, Britannia metal and other alloys, sometimes silver plated.

Fish slices and servers don’t sound a promising field for collecting, but there is a great variety in shapes, and also in the pierced designs. A show of them properly mounted can be a very fine anthology of silversmiths’ work.

Of other items, one supposes that small silver bells, with their delightful and quite unmistakable sound, are no longer very cheap, although the later Victorian ones with classical scenes embossed in high relief may be easier to buy than the chaste ladies of the eighteenth century with bell skirts. Tobacco stoppers are in this material as in others with figures or heads, or simply plain balusters. Posy holders for the early Victorian lady’s flowers, made like a cornucopia, with a ring for holding and sometimes three legs for standing on a table, have long been ardently collected, as have the tiny vinaigrettes one still sees quite often. These will be distinguishable from other silver boxes by the little grill behind which was kept a sponge soaked in aromatic vinegar—and much of the interest in collecting them is in the pattern of these little grills.

People who go to museums have long admired the admirable little silver toys gathered in some of them, but early ones can make expensive collecting whenever they come on the market. Their fascination is that they record exactly the contemporary fashions in furniture, table ware and other household items like fire-dogs and grates. But there are modern versions which are very pleasing, and it is by no means impossible to get together a pleasant little collection of them. While we are in this department we ought to look at the many little animals in silver one sees in the shops, although the silver cow milk jug, in its early form, is ferociously dear nowadays. The herd of twelve cows went at Sothebys last year for £2,400!

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