Recently bought this very large pear-shaped streaky/bubbly glass lamp, with brass parts marked Messenger's (trademark for lighting firm Samuel S Messenger & Sons, Birmingham). Messenger's closed down in the early 1930s after around 100 years of trading. The glass is a very nice vivid green-blue, with brown streaks and subtle opal streaks that only really show up when back-lit.
Two questions, because I can't find anything very similar:
1: Did it start life as an electric table lamp, or is it some kind of (possibly older) oil lamp base with later electrification?
Indicators it might not have:
The part that the bulb-holder is attached to screws on with the kind of tabbed screw-on fitting you find on kitchen things like pressure cookers and coffee grinders (I'm sure it has a proper name), which is unusual for electric lamps (but not unwelcome - it meant I could hide an earth tag inside and keep the old bulb-holder).
The inside of the lamp, when I bought it, was covered in many blobs of dried creosote that took a full day to soften and carefully remove with a stick, and made my kitchen smell like an old man's garden shed.
If this is the case, it wouldn't have been electrified too recently - the bulb-holder is almost certainly pre-war, and its manufacturer, J H Tucker and Co (also Birmingham), was bought up and vanished in the 1960s.
2: Who might've made the glass? It's very pretty, and almost looks like the kind of thing you'd expect from Sweden in the 1950s/60s. It reminds me of Clutha glass, but it's much more bubbly than other pieces I've seen.
Thanks for looking!
Topic: 1920s-30s (?) Messenger's streaky/bubbly glass table lamp. Converted, perhaps? (Read 636 times)
