Glass Message Board
Glass Identification - Post here for all ID requests => Glass => Topic started by: Cazza on February 19, 2008, 01:52:27 PM
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Can anyone tell me please has stuart crystal ever made items and not put their etched mark. I know anyone could change a label but the tankard looks good quailty, its for the queens silver jubilee.
thanks
Cazza
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Cazza — Yes, frequently. It's only within the last decade or so that John Lewis's buyers have favoured marked glass; previously if you wanted to sell to them it had to be unmarked. ... and M&S has never had a policy of revealing its manufacturers. Just two examples. Your most valuable and important trade buyers always received the best service, however irrational their requirements, leaving the leftovers for the small occasional buyers.
Sometimes normally marked glass would escape marking. I have a boxed Stuart/Stonier set in stock that you would expect to carry the Stuart/Stonier "=S=" mark on all six glasses. This is decorated in the Cunard White Star wavy line pattern, so was probably a competition prize awarded to a passenger on board either RMS Queen Elizabeth or RMS Queen Mary. Yet it is unmarked. The most likely explanation is a last minute rushed order.
There were no rules other than survival — maximising turnover and profit, both long- and short-term. The more you appreciate the workings of industry and commerce — the more sense you can make of the glass that you are collecting. It's not like collecting postage stamps!
Bernard C. 8)
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Funnily enough, I'd been intending to ask the same question in relation to a set of shot glasses unmarked, but in a Stuart box (and looking very much as if they belonged there, plus definitely Stuart quality to the glass).
A subsidiary question: did Stuart ever use transfers? I bought them off e-bay thinking they might be hand-enamelled. But they look like transfers to me.
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A Stuart worker in the 80s told me that they used whatever method was the cheapest in just about every aspect of production - which is of course a common theme in most industry from that time, at least. 30 years before adherence to tradition was much stronger in the glass industry but the trend was set for glass by the 1947 Board of Trade report on Hand Blown Domestic Glassware, available from bookseller at around 50 quid or digitised with license in the Glass-Study. An important and interesting report for anyone interested in Post War glass.