Random Treasure

I have become temporarily immersed in the year 1757, and (after this introduction) I’ll tell you why.

If you care to do so, you can look up any year on Wikipedia. Try it. You will find a list of important worldwide events, plus a clutch of celebrity births and deaths. A cursory look at the listing for 1757 suggests, sadly, that, despite my current preoccupation with that year, it wasn’t particularly distinguished by the occurrence of memorable world-changing historical events.

In Europe, year 2 of the Seven Years’ War featured some minor battles. In India, Robert Clive brutally established the supremacy of the East India Company at the Battle of Plassey. In Arabia, Bedouin warriors massacred thousands of Muslim pilgrims on their way home to Damascus after the Hajj. In Asia, the southward expansion of the territory of Vietnam into the Indochina Peninsula was concluded.

Notable 1757 births included Alexander Hamilton, recent subject of a musical play, Thomas Telford, engineer, and William Blake, visionary poet. Notable deaths included Colley Cibber, non-visionary poet, Admiral John Byng, court-martialled and executed by firing squad for failing to “do his utmost” to prevent Minorca from falling to the French, and Queen Inwon of the Joseon Dynasty of Korea.. 

So, nothing all that special about 1757. Why then should I pick that year in particular as my present focus of attention?

Because of a new addition to my ceramics collection.

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­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­The object in question is a large pottery bowl purchased recently in a local auction. I paid more than £150, and the first question I hear you asking is “what kind of nutcase would pay that much for a smashed-up bowl?”

For it is, undeniably, a smashed-up bowl. Badly broken and very badly mended. It has been shattered into several pieces, and some of those pieces have been lost. An attempt has been made to restore it by re-assembling the remaining sherds and sticking them together in a very careless and obvious way, and by fashioning crude plaster replacements for the missing bits, and then overpainting them clumsily. Result: it’s a mess.

Having described the repair, let me now describe the bowl. It is circular and steep-sided, standing on an applied rim. Dimensions: 10.4 inches (265 mm) in diameter, and 4.25 inches (108 mm) high. The material is earthenware, coated with a white slip crudely decorated with rudimentary curlicues and floral forms in underglaze cobalt blue and manganese purple, the whole then covered with a tin glaze.

Inside, in the centre, a hand-written inscription in manganese purple, in a spidery and rather uncertain cursive script:

One

More   ;   And

17   ;   then   ;   57

OK, so what is it and what’s all the fuss about? Why is this blogger so excited about a bit of old broken crockery?

What it is: an English delftware punch bowl, made in either London or Bristol in the year 1757.

Why I’m excited: because these things are quite rare, and because dated examples are yet more rare.

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If you don’t know what a punch bowl is for, it’s a bowl from which to ladle punch. Punch was a potent alcoholic drink, served hot, prepared from a mixture of spirits (rum, brandy, gin or whisky), citrus juice (lime or lemon), sugar, spices and water. You could get around half a gallon (imperial measure) of punch into this bowl, sufficient to cause significant inebriation in a significant number of imbibers.

The drinking of punch from a communal vessel was an exceedingly popular social pastime in all classes of society from the 1650s and for the next couple of centuries. You and your bibulous companions – usually men –  sit around a table, in the centre of which your host or landlord places a big bowl of punch. Occasionally women meet for punch (but more often for tea), and sometimes the company is mixed.

The evening proceeds as follows: you each charge your tankard or goblet using a punch or toddy ladle, often made of silver with a long wood or whalebone handle. You drink liberally. Then you have some more punch, and then some more. The host or landlord refills the bowl as required.

Conversation, conviviality and carousing increase in proportion to consumption. There might be card-playing or dice-throwing. In mixed company there might be ribaldry. If politics are at issue there might be argument and disagreement. Drinking games will be played and drinking songs sung to encourage excess. Sometimes there are fisticuffs. By midnight, the scene will look very much like that depicted by William Hogarth in his 1733 picture A Midnight Modern Conversation.

A prerequisite for social punch drinking is the presence on the table of the punch bowl. If you are rich, you might commission your own punch bowl from a fashionable silversmith, or purchase a fine Chinese porcelain example from an incoming ship of the East India Company. For the more middling sort, who take their punch gathered together in gentlemen’s clubs, coffee houses, public houses and brothels, their punch bowls were produced by local potteries of high and low quality.

In the mid-18^th century, before industrial mass production of porcelain and stoneware took hold in Britain, the ceramic material of choice for lower-grade punch bowls was tin-glazed earthenware or delftware. Like my one.

By definition, a punch bowl is an object for communal celebratory use. It encourages you to use it, preferably to excess. So some punch bowls bear inscriptions aimed at enhancing the enjoyment of the occasion. These might record, for example, the name of the pub or the publican; or a special occasion such as a wedding (with the bride’s and groom’s names) or a local parliamentary election (with the candidate’s name); or a generic political slogan (“Success to Trade” is seen quite often). Other punch bowls merely urge you to drink more punch, as in “[Drink] One [Bowl] More And Then [One More]”. That’s the meaning of the inscription on my bowl.

A ceramic punch bowl is a large but extremely fragile object, specifically made for shared use by drunken revellers. So, as you might expect, it wasn’t uncommon for them to get broken. In fact, if you consider the rough treatment to which they must have been subjected, it’s a marvel that any have survived until the 21^st century.

And all the more so, because by the mid-19^th century, communal punch drinking had gone completely out of style. In an article entitled A Bowl of Punch in his weekly magazine Household Words published in June 1853 [1], Charles Dickens (or an unidentified member of his editorial team) laments the passing of punch drinking into history, noticing a stack of disused punch bowls on a neglected shelf behind the bar in the Cock Tavern, Fleet Street, London. Upon them, he observed

“a cobweb of at least last year, symbolical — what more so? that the bowl was no longer of
any use, that punch was no longer drank”

Social punch drinking hasn’t really come back into vogue at any time since then. So you might think that 170 years on from the end of the fashion, scarcely any punch bowls would be left. And yet, some desultory online research suggests that there are still quite a number of these objects around, for the most part preserved safely in museums and private collections or with dealers.

Of course, it’s a numbers game. If punch bowls existed at their peak of popularity in a sufficiently vast quantity, then you would expect a fraction of the original total somehow to struggle through the vicissitudes of the intervening decades until the present day.

So let’s do some guesstimating around the numbers. In 1830, there were over 50,000 public houses in England and Wales [2]. If you allow for each pub to have, say, three punch bowls arrayed on a shelf behind the bar, then at that time there must have been at least 150,000 of these items in existence – or many more because I wasn’t counting unlicensed alehouses, whorehouses, private clubs or dwellinghouses.

Thus, those which survive today must represent just a tiny percentage of the total number produced. And of those, only a small proportion bear their dates of production.

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All dated pottery from the 18^th century or earlier is scarce. Pieces of Italian maiolica, German Werra slipware and Dutch Delft ware exist with inscribed dates from as early as the 16^th century. They are rare and highly-prized. Pots bearing hand-written inscriptions only really survive in significant numbers from around the mid-19^th century – a time when dates and names were quite often applied to mass-produced items, usually in commemoration of special events such as weddings.

Worldwide, perhaps only a few dozen examples of pottery dated pre-1800 will appear on the market in any year. And of course, because of their rarity, no-one would expect anything like this to turn up unrecognised in a local auction. In almost every case, you’d expect dealers to scoop up any such piece which becomes available, and propel it to the top of the market, where it would rapidly come to rest in the hands of a high-end collector or a museum.

But strangely, this is the second time in not much more than a year that I’ve encountered a dated piece in a downmarket local sale, the first time in Leith, the second time in Dunfermline. The first example was a slipware jar which I wrote about in a previous blog post which you can read here.

Stranger still, both pots bear the date 1757. How weird is that?

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Now you know why I suddenly became fascinated with 1757. But would I have got equally excited if I had found two pots coincidentally marked not with 1757 but with any matching dates? Time for a brief investigation.

At the start of this piece I suggested that there’s nothing terribly special about 1757. Just another year in history. But is it a special year to me? Have I become interested in 1757 because of discovering my two pots, or am I interested in the two pots because they bear the particular date 1757? Might I possess a subconscious attachment to or affinity for that year?

Perhaps I could throw some light on this odd notion by a review of other objects in my collections and of my past scribblings. So I did a search among the hundreds of objects from my collections described in this blog, but didn’t find any others precisely from that year. I’m thus unable to furnish evidence in support of a special attachment to 1757. But at the same time I was quite surprised to note a considerable number of references in my bloggings to objects dating from a decade or so on either side of that year.

There’s a nice Jackfield jug (which you can read about here), a Chinese dish (here), a pair of small Dutch Delft plates (here), and a beautiful and scarce prayer book from 1760 (here). Plus some other bits and pieces collected over many decades which don’t feature in this blog. Plus further apparent evidence of a special focus on this period in the form of an investigation into the mysterious death in 1747 of a cat named Selima (here).

Perhaps, then, I am unknowingly drawn not specifically to 1757, but in a more general way to the middle years of the 18^th century? To that age of intellectual enlightenment and industrial advancement, dominated by towering figures such as  Josiah Wedgwood (in industry), Joseph Priestley (in science), Joshua Reynolds (in painting) and Thomas Gray (in poetry)?

This seemed a possible hypothesis. Looking back, maybe it started when I was a teenager. While my schoolboy peers were reading the Eagle or sneaking peeks at forbidden top-shelf magazines, I was scouring the second-hand bookshops of Central London for the earliest editions that I could afford from my pocket money of novels by Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne and Tobias Smollett, all originally published between 1740 and 1770. I still have some of them.

Or did this putative pre-occupation with the mid-18^th century develop in more recent years, since I first volunteered as a tour guide at Newhailes House, a Palladian villa owned by the National Trust for Scotland a few miles from my home? You’ll find me there on a Thursday afternoon, rabbiting on and on to visitors about its owner from 1751 to 1792: Lord Hailes, advocate, judge, politician, historian and all-round brainbox of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Or possibly not. On further consideration I realise that if I go looking for specific dates or periods on my shelves or in my blog, I can’t actually present evidence of a bias in favour of 1757, or of the mid-18th century, or indeed of any particular time period. In fact, if anyone were to audit my possessions and the contents of this blog, they might find a roughly even spread of interest across the whole of the modern era, and earlier times too.

Which might suggest that it isn’t the date 1757 that especially excites me, nor indeed, any other random date in history. What might excite me are dates themselves. Maybe I have a thing about dates. And, most especially, about dates marked upon old objects.

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Although the last observation concludes this post, I’m not yet quite ready to set aside my two 1757 pots in order to move on to the next blogging topic. I have yet to solve the puzzle of where and how to show them to best advantage alongside each other in my house.

Both the 1757 slipware jar and the 1757 delftware punch bowl have been shattered into many pieces and poorly repaired. Neither is in itself especially attractive or decorative. Both will require detailed explanation to visitors, who will doubtless ask: why would you devote such prominent display space to that smashed-up dull bowl and that smashed-up brown jar?

A good question, and a challenging curatorial problem to which I have no present solution. If I find one, I’ll report back to you.

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References

[1] https://www.djo.org.uk/household-words/volume-vii/page-346.html

[2] https://lawcrimehistory.org/journal/vol.1%20issue3%202013/Jennings%20final.pdf