Brian Blench in his talk on Scottish glass history at the Ysart conference mentioned that it was a common practise by both British potteries and glassworks to use a registered number assigned to them on ANY design, not necessarily the design registered which may or may not have been produced!!!!
Frank — That quote of yours needs qualification. I've never seen a British registered number deliberately misused on any
different design, not in the field of glass discussed on the GMB, nor in the bottle collecting field. Same applies to the pre–1884 registration lozenges.
However, in a very limited way, Brian Blench was correct. If you look at the very early registrations by the big Manchester glassworks, you will see a variety of shapes in the same pattern registered separately. They were clearly unsure of how far the new design registration system would protect a suite of glass, all made in the same pattern. You will see that it did not take too long to resolve. Registering every shape in a pattern, possibly as many as thirty or forty shapes, ranging from candlesticks to epergnes and lampshades, would have swamped everyone with paperwork, both the glassworks and the design registry, so within a short time it became established that a single registration would protect a full suite.
I've no experience of Class 4 registrations — pottery and china — but I would be very surprised if the history was significantly different.
Note that I'm not including mouldmaking and other errors, of which there are a fair number. I think I've seen examples of just about every error possible in both registration lozenges and registered numbers, including a wonderful hybrid of 1884 where the mouldmaker clearly didn't know what he was supposed to do, so he put the registered number in a lozenge just to be safe! One of the best is one of the early Manchester comports, where two different designs had plungers marked with different lozenges that were interchangeable, so you get the wrong lozenge on a few examples. It amazes me that I've not yet found anyone collecting these errors. Wouldn't it be a fabulous collection!
In respect of designs which may or may not have been produced, he may have been thinking of something along the lines of Sowerby's patent No. 2433 of 15 September 1871 (see Hajdamach I), which I suspect was an over-elaborate spoof, deliberately designed to confuse competitors in the UK, Europe, and the USA, as the only known examples of this patent are in a far simpler design.
Bernard C.
Topic: Help with registered number (Read 2244 times)
