An Irishwoman's Diary

BRIC-A-BRAC. A sequence of words that imply junk to some, treasure to others. Bric-a-brac. To me, they describe those mysterious, fabulous, and superfluous bits and pieces that surface in every charity shop. Trinkets. Ephemera. Stuff. Not all of it, of course, but there are some bits and pieces that particularly sing to me. Candlesticks. Jewellery boxes. Vases. Vintage lamps. And various yokes that defy description.

I’ve written before with enthusiasm of my long and happy association with charity shops. Every few months, I make donations to charity shops, particularly books, which arrive into my house hard-wired with the genes of rabbits. Most of my kitchen crockery, some of my furniture, about half my books, and two-thirds of my wardrobe have come from such shops. It’s a win-win for me. I know my money is going to charity, objects are being re-used, and I find things that are not the high-street norm.

Thus, on a hot Saturday last month, my friend Beth and I were trawling the charity shops in Cranleigh, Surrey, where she lives. There are four charity shops in the village, and we went to them all; our companionable ritual whenever I visit, Beth being as much a fan of the trawling as I am.

In shop number three, Barnardo’s, Beth disappeared to try on a lace dress while I peered into the china cabinet beside the till. There is always a china cabinet with glass shelves in a charity shop. My guess is it’s often been donated. The cabinet is the showcase for the extra-special donations. Here you find still-boxed crystal glasses, frequently etched with wedding anniversary messages; large pieces of ethnic jewellery; thimbles; silver spoons; ornaments; vintage ashtrays; porcelain cups and saucers, and other sundries. Bric-a-brac, in other words.

In the glass cabinet, I spied two small metal matching dishes with mismatching blue liners; one liner made of glass and one plastic. The dishes were discoloured metal, each with four delicate claw and ball feet. I asked to see them. I turned one over and saw hallmarks. I’m always looking out for yet more receptacles for the costume jewellery that I magpie onto my dressing table, and thought these two looked like they’d hold some rings or necklaces. I bought the two of them for £3.

Years ago, I interviewed the magnificently-named Ronald Le Bas, the third member of his family to serve as Ireland’s Assay Master. The Assay Office is where all precious metal goes to be tested as such – gold, silver, platinum – before being hallmarked and sold. For a small fee, members of the public can bring along items to be tested, or assayed. It was Le Bas who taught me how to read hallmarks.

Most silver and gold that originates from Ireland or Britain has at least three hallmarks, sometimes four. There is a set of initials, which are the maker’s mark; one or more symbols which indicate country and city; and the final mark is a letter, which indicates the date of the piece.

Back in Beth’s house, she dug out a can of Silvo polish and an old toothbrush of her son’s. I removed the glass and plastic liners, and set to work cleaning the silver. Once cleaned, the hallmarks showed up more clearly. The maker’s mark was T.N., the location marks – rubbed, but still visible – showed the pieces had been made in England, in London. The English mark was a lion; the London mark was a crowned leopard’s head.

By then, thanks to the internet, I had figured out what the “dishes” were. They were a pair of open silver and glass salt cellars, although only one of the pair had its original scalloped glass liner. The date letter took longer to identify. It was a tiny gothic p, with three distinctive rune-like lines through the letter. Silversmiths use letters in different fonts, usually in cycles of 20, with one each referring to a specific year. Thus there’s roughly five cycles of fonts in a century.

There are lots of sites on the internet where you find hallmark date-letters. I started working my way backwards. When I got to the 1850s, I started again, thinking I had missed the sequence. I hadn’t. I arrived back to the 1850s a second time and kept going back in time. The date on the salt cellars? 1770. “Wow,” was about as eloquent as either Beth or I could get.

Salt in the 18th century was still expensive and uncommon enough on domestic tables to merit special, precious-metal containers. The glass liners of the 18th century stopped the salt from corroding the metal. At a particular time in history, depending on your status in society, you were either seated above or below the salt: the closer you were to it, the higher your place in society.

There is a little bit of information about Thomas Nash, the silversmith, on the internet. He made mustard pots, salt-cellars and buckles during the 1760s and 1770s, but apparently was bankrupt by 1782.

There are intertwined initials engraved on my pair of salt cellars, that read “CA”. It is my guess they were the initials of the family who commissioned them for their dining room table in 18th-century England. It’s impossible to know who they might have been from trying to trace initials alone; the family could have lived anywhere.

I abandoned my plan of putting the “dishes” on my dressing table. Instead, I filled each of the George III salt cellars with salt, and put one at either end of my kitchen table. Everyone is close to the salt in my house. Almost 250 years after Thomas Nash made this beautiful pair of silver salt-cellars, they are still, thrillingly, being used for their original purpose; dispensing salt to the people who gather around a table and tell their stories of the day.