HOUSEHOLD SILVER

Ashburton Guardian, Volume XLV, Issue 10163, 18 July 1924, Page 2

HOUSEHOLD SILVER

'disappearing from greatest HOMES. "Long though its other uses are likely to continue, silver is losing its former popularity as a material of ornament, for the good reason that there is no one to keep it clean," says the "Times." Hired labour is too costly to be employed by any but the most fortunate in polishing without end, and submissive daughters, willing to spend the greater part of their lives with plate-powder, brush and chamois leather,, now, like Lincoln in the play, 'belong to the ages.' Though we dare not regret the polishers' emancipation, it is perhaps pardonable, before the last silver salt cellar is banished from the dinner tables of England, to look back upon the old display, and to remember its confortahle shining. With the decay of Victorian prosperity, silver may have grown thinner, but its tradition was bravely maintained. The granddaughters of the Trafalgar ladies liked their hair brushes to glitter with the heads of Sir Joshua's angels; their prayer-books and hymn-books were bound in perilous filigree; they, put up brackets (between a couple of Japanese fans) on which the heroes of South Africa- were immortalised in silver and their dressing tables were gay with a hundred trinkets that shone again every Wednesday,, and perhaps every Saturday morning. Yet further progress of democracy carried silver into the humblest homes, where attenuated vases, conspicuously hall marked, gave gentility to the wallflower and distinction to the pea. All are gone, or will soon be going. The kingly tureen, which by reason of its extreme weight, James had so much difficulty in carrying with appropriate nonchalance, has gone with ,James; his padded calves will support that burden no> more. The vase, the statuette, and the filigree prayer-book have been thrown to the dealers. Even the rose bowl, which in its rich flutings used to reflect the surrounding flush of mahogany, and distort, like a mocking glass, the features of our hungry ancestors, is withdrawn into tissue paper. and disdains to have converse with stainless steel. We are all turning to substitutes, and, the uniformity of silver being gone, we reveal ourselves in our choice of them. James the Younger, in those houses which still can find a place foi him, is busy with cut glass, silver's most exquisite understudy. Others rely upon porcelain, or charming pieces of pseudo-majolica collected on their travels. Everywhere the spell of silver- is being lifted. No more shall candles gutter in gleaming branches or oceans gather in a tureen. We are grown at once practical and elegant with a new elegance. Henceforth, bv electric light, we shall nibble an olive from an earthenware saucer, and now and then visit a museum or a university, to see what a tankard was like.