Barker Ellis | Sterling Silver Open Salt | Birmingham | 1968

Barker Ellis | Sterling Silver Open Salt | Birmingham | 1968

The salt has always sat a little apart on the table: small, necessary, and given a silver setting of its own.

The Barker Ellis Silver Company was a Birmingham firm of silversmiths and manufacturers of table silver. This salt draws on the Georgian tradition of English table silver, with an oval body, gadrooned rim and decorative feet: forms and details that silversmiths continued to revisit well into the twentieth century.

The oval body swells gently outward and rises to a gadrooned rim, with shell motifs at each corner. It stands on four legs, each with a rounded knee and a paw foot. A fitted blue plastic liner sits inside. The silver interior is plain. The body is fully hallmarked for Barker Ellis, Birmingham, with the date letter T for 1968–69, and is also stamped “England”.

Good condition. There are three noticeable dings to the silver body. The liner is intact.

Key Details

• Maker: Barker Ellis Silver Co.
• Hallmarks: Birmingham, date letter T (1968–69); also stamped “England”
• Form: oval open salt with gadrooned rim, shell corners and four paw feet
• Material: sterling silver, with blue plastic liner
• Dimensions: length 7.2 cm; width 5.3 cm; height 3.5 cm
• Liner: length 5.6 cm; width 3.3 cm; height 2.3 cm
• Weight: silver 50 g; liner 10 g
• Condition: good; three noticeable dings to the body
• Buyer profile: collectors of English table silver, and anyone completing a set of salts

Collector Appeal

A clearly hallmarked Barker Ellis salt, its oval body raised on four paw feet beneath a decorative gadrooned rim. The fitted blue liner brings a vivid contrast to the silver, while the traditional form gives this mid-twentieth-century piece an affinity with much earlier English tableware.

Some forms endure because each generation finds something worth keeping in them.