Topic: Percival Vickers Rd 80632 Glass Pot with 1911 HM & Rd Silver Gilt Lid

[Bernard C]

Percival Vickers Rd 80632 Glass Pot with 1911 HM & Rd Silver Gilt Lid

Click any image to enlarge.

Measurements:

    Glass bowl: h. 1 5/8" 4.1cm, d. 3¼" 8.1cm, weight 8 3/8oz 239g,
    Silver lid: h. ¾" 2cm, d. 3" 7.4cm, weight 5/8oz 21g,
    Combined: h. 2¼", weight 9oz 260g.

The glass bowl:

Beautifully made and accurately cupped bowl marked R^D 80632 on the inside base.   The design was registered 12 September 1887.   Other examples of this design are shown on the Manchester Glass website here - scroll down to the bottom of the page.   Note that most are silver plate or other metal mounted, like this item.

The silver lid:

The lid snaps shut on the top of the bowl, and, quite remarkably after over a century, it still works.   The inside of the lid was gilt.   The lid carries a design registration number REG^D 581748 which we know was registered 4 – 6 April 1911.   It also carries a conventional silver hallmark for Birmingham, 1911, with the maker's mark HCF.

The design on the lid appears to be a Hindu Ganges river god, being transported over the river (complete with rushes in the background) by a Makara, a Hindu mythological creature, here in the form of a fish with a serpent's tongue and an elephant's trunk. 

The silversmith:

The silversmith was Henry Charles Freeman, jeweller, of Hatton Garden, London.   The few examples of his silver to be found on the internet indicate that he was a skilled specialist in novelties and artistic pieces.   A fine Art Nouveau picture frame from 1903 also carries a design registration number, showing that Freeman was accustomed to use this technique to protect his designs when appropriate.   Most of his pieces were assayed in Birmingham, suggesting that they were manufactured in his workshop, then at 22 Hylton Street in the heart of the city's Jewellery Quarter.

Condition:

There is acceptable light wear to the neatly levelled and polished base.   The lid is now slightly lop-sided, possibly through being accidentally crushed, but much more likely from metal fatigue caused by repetition of the snap shut closure over the last century.   Soft Sterling Silver is not the ideal material to use where metal fatigue is a consideration.

Discussion:

See Yates, Barbara, The Glasswares of Percival Vickers & Co. Ltd., Jersey Street, Manchester, 1844–1914, in The Journal of the Glass Association, Volume 2 1987.   Yates tell us that Percival Vickers went into voluntary liquidation on 6 September 1907, and that glass production would appear to have continued for some time after this date.   As Freeman would have been unlikely to register a design based on a pot that had gone out of production, causing problems with further supplies, Percival Vickers must have appeared to him to have been a normal active manufacturing glass maker.   In addition, the snap shut lid fitting would have required a special mould to have been made or modified by Percival Vickers.   So, in all respects other than scale of operation, this pot shows that Percival Vickers was producing glass perfectly normally in April 1911, over three and a half years after liquidation, and only two and a half years before closure and the large stock clearance sale reported in the January 1914 issue of The Pottery Gazette.