posted 10-14-2004 02:21 PM            

Dear All,

The attached image is taken from a "relic" silver teaspoon, found buried near Sevastopol in the Crimea. The spoon handle is broken just above the top mark shown, so there may be a fourth mark missing. Logically, the hallmark should be Russian, but it doesn't seem to match any marks for which I have found references. Can anyone tell me anything about it? Even a country of origin would be of great interest to me.

Thanks in advance for any assistance you may be able to offer.

posted 10-16-2004 05:09 AM            

This does raise a couple of further questions. Firstly, this spoon is not electroplated brass, but a solid silver-coloured metal - presumably solid "nickel silver" alloy - precisely when and where was nickel silver first introduced? I've googled the term but can't find an answer to that one, although I am guessing it pre-dates EPNS by some time. akgdc says "mid-late nineteenth century", and Waylander refers to the 12-pointed version of the Maltese cross being a mark used by James Deakin and Sons (known to me as a late nineteenth-century maker) on EPNS. The "NS" monogram certainly seems to suggest English manufacture, and therefore, by extension, an English original owner. The only time that there were significant numbers of Englishmen available to lose teaspoons on the uninhabited areas around Balaklava and Sevastopol was during the war. Could this item date from the mid 1850s? If so, it seems likely that it belonged to a perspicacious British officer, who had decided that it wasn't worth taking decent silver on campaign! (NCO's and men had government-issue pewter flatware).

posted 10-16-2004 11:29 PM            

Most of what I'm saying from here on out is speculative, because I haven't made a study of nickel silver, so please take it with a grain of salt or three. A quick internet search finds various claims that nickel silver was invented anywhere between 1810 and 1860. But I will say that I can't recall seeing any nickel silver flatware that appears to be earlier than circa 1860 in style. The specific reason I ascribed a later date to your spoon (and it would help to see the whole piece, not just the marks) is that the style of the sans-serif NS monogram mark appears to me to date from the end of the 19th c at the earliest.

I hope there's someone else on these forums who may know the marks and will be able to give a more definitive answer.

As to how it ended up in Sevastopol ... remember that England was an economic and industrial superpower in the 19th c, and her factories shipped their wares to the shores of the Black Sea and far beyond. I happen to have spent a week in Odessa last month, and saw a goodly smattering of English objects at the flea markets and antique shops there. (The city had such a well-esablished English merchant presence before 1917 that one of the grand old buildings downtown, now a museum, was once the Englishmen's Club.) English sterling with Russian monograms turns up on the market not infrequently. So just because John Bull made the teaspoon, that doesn't mean it wasn't Ivan who dropped it.

posted 10-17-2004 04:15 AM            

Alas, the only thing I have ever literally stumbled over in the old British camp was a glass medicine bottle, of mid-nineteenth-century manufacture. However, I do have quite a large collection of Crimean War items from the area which I have bought from local friends and dealers.

Here is a scan of the whole spoon - or rather, all of the spoon that is left:

If it is of later date than the Crimean War, then so be it (it wouldn't be the first time that I have bought a relic item in Sevastopol that turned out to date from the 1890s), but it would be great to know one way or the other.

Odessa is a beautiful city, (every time I go there, I have to be forceably restrained from visiting estate agents) and was once the playground of the rich and famous from all over Europe. Had this turned up there, I would not have had the slightest suspicion that it might have been connected with the Crimean War, but Sevastopol has never been anything other than the base of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, and until the late 1990s, it had comparatively little contact with England or the English (aside from a couple of years in the mid-nineteenth century when quite a few of us came calling...) I do accept, though, that there is no reason that this spoon could not have belonged to a Russian.