Lacquered
(A tale of good advice)
“A pair of Georgian Old Sheffield Plate candelabra, shall I put them in at £800-1200?”
I asked my colleague who was overseeing me in my first few weeks cataloguing at Sotheby’s.
“Hmmm”
he paused and picked them up, peering quizzically then lightly scratching at one sconce with a finger nail and then tapping it, listening for a slightly dull thud.
“Better halve that, £4-600, they’ve been lacquered”
This was the first time I came across the practice of lacquering a piece of silver.
If you get tired of polishing silver, perhaps because you have too much of it, or perhaps because you can’t afford to keep a silver Butler anymore, you might consider getting it “lacquered”. This involves taking your silver to a professional, first for cleaning the piece to within an inch of its life, then for dipping or spraying on a thin clear plasticy coating of lacquer, to make it airtight and prevent any further tarnishing. It will keep your silver bright for years, you’ll never again have to polish it and the overall effect will be quite, quite revolting.
Collectors sensitive to the colour and patina of an Antique piece of silver would never do it. However, large institutions, owner’s of big country houses and civic bodies are sometimes tempted to save themselves the hard work of all that polishing. They want the easy life that lacquer promises, like a serpent spraying clear varnish all over the Garden of Eden. An eternal shine without any of the effort.
The reason the price of this particular pair of candelabra had to be halved was, as my colleague then explained to me, two fold. Firstly lacquering a piece wasn’t for ever, eventually little bits would harden and then, if roughly handled or dusted, chip off. This left a horrid pock marked surface and to make things worse those little exposed areas would then quickly tarnish black. Secondly and most importantly, it was as expensive to remove the lacquer properly as it was to apply it in the first place and that expense had to be taken into account. I duly noted the lesson but happily did not see anything which had been lacquered for a few years after that.
It was one day, back dealing down Birmingham Market (the Big Brum), that I spied a large Georgian Old Sheffield Plate communion flagon. A good foot and a half high, it stood rather majestically on a trestle table and was priced at peanuts (£50), though the reason why was plain for all to see. The church which had previously used it, thought to lacquer the beauty and it now had a surface not unlike that of Michael Gambon’s Singing Detective, irregular and flaking, some parts blackened entirely, others a horrid sellotape yellow over a silver base. Up close, the surface of this once holy vessel, was simply not that pretty.
I went round the fair that morning and only found a few odds and ends, the flagon was still standing on the trestle table, tempting me, as I went to leave. Recklessly I threw caution and the sound advice of years earlier to the wind.
“I must be able to get that off with a bit of elbow grease”
I convinced myself, handing over the fifty pounds and walking off with the ancient flagon under my arm, already starting to try to pick at the flaking edges of the lacquer with my thumbnail.
Once back home I immediately cleared the kitchen table, getting out rags and polish. Bowls of hot water were drawn and scrubbing, rubbing and picking began. My fingers turned first from white to red then to black, stiffening and aching more with each and every new assault upon the surface. A cloth, then a toothbrush, then a softened match were deployed in my war against the persistent lacquer coating. I knew that I knew what I was doing, but I didn’t.
An hour or more passed, half a bottle of best polish was gone and my three best rags lay in blackened tatters, fit now only for the bin. The flagon, barely touched from all the effort, stood defiantly upon the kitchen table, quite as horrible as it had been before I had begun, perhaps more so. My colleague years earlier had not been joking about the problem of lacquer and I rued not listing to his advice, as I soaked my now aching hands in the warm water of the washing up bowl. The “bloody flagon” was placed unceremoniously in a cupboard and I swore never to touch anything that had been lacquered ever, ever again.
A few months later I was dropping off a Georgian goblet with a couple of dents to be removed to “Bob and Dave”. Bob and Dave were elderly silver haired identical twin silversmiths that had been working in the heart of Birmingham long before I was even born.
They undertook the larger part of all the tricky (but mundane) handwork for most of the now mechanised working silversmiths in the City and they knew just about every trick of the trade.
Their premises lay off an almost derelict side street in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter (today lushly and expensively redeveloped).
One part of the street had been levelled to rubble and was now an anonymous waste ground used by locals as a car park. The other side of the street was occupied by a large Victorian brick factory. The door to their workshop stood, due to various civic alterations over the last two hundred years, a good foot off the pavement level. The bell to ring them on was just out of reach unless you mounted the stone step at the foot of the door. The step itself had worn smooth and was now barely over an inch deep which meant you literally threw your self at the door on the tips of your toes, hoping to press the bell before falling back onto the pavement. I attempted the manoeuvre, hitting the thick panelled door at pace as a shrill bell rang out and a creaking of wooden stairs could just be heard. A moment later the door pulled open as either Bob or Dave answered the bell.
In their work aprons it was virtually impossible to tell them apart, so the wisest course of action was always just to say a cheery “hello” and wait for the inevitable clue as one brother would refer to the other by name, then you knew where you were.
The workshop was bare brick throughout and dusty, they were the only two people now working in the whole building, which in its heyday would have accommodated hundreds. The ground floor was empty space except for a metal drum in one far corner containing some vicious toxic concoction beside a rickety wooden staircase. The stairs were of the same age as the building itself and want to groan and perilously list whenever assailed, though neither Bob nor Dave ever seemed to mind.
The upper floor was a large open space, nothing but brick and bare stone flooring just as downstairs, though littered with work benches, an open furnace, a block and anvil, all the tools any silversmith would need to carry out their trade. I passed over the goblet I’d brought with me to have the dents removed and then mentioned, in passing, the trials and tribulations I’d had with the flagon, as it was still partly praying on my mind, that awful lacquered beast.
One of the brothers simply smiled as I explained my fruitless labours.
“Well, that’s alright” said Bob
“Yes, that’s alright” replied Dave, as he looked up momentarily from hammering a piece of silver at his bench. They then quickly looked across at one another then directly at me before crying out in twin voices:
“NITROMORS!”
“What? Paint stripper?!” I replied a little open mouthed, “But it’s Old Sheffield Plate, you can’t use paint stripper on silver, I mean you can’t…can you?”
They replied, both still smiling as if I’d said something vaguely ridiculous. “It’s just a bit of silver ain’t it? Well you ain’t gonna hurt that with a bit of Nitromors”
I’d once stripped an old pine chest of drawers (second hand, not Antique) for my older sister and used the filthy stuff as it fizzed and bubbled on the surface, scrapping off the resultant muck. I couldn’t imagine doing that to a piece of Antique silver but Bob and Dave were insistent.
“Wallop some on, leave it, no longer than five minutes and wash it off. That’ll do the trick.”
At the time a tin of Nitromors was a little under two pounds whereas the professional “lacquer removal” was well over a hundred. Perhaps if I had not grown to dislike the flagon quite so much over the ensuing months since buying it I wouldn’t have tried it out, but this was very much going to be my Waterloo, one way or another. I stopped at B&Q on the way home and got myself one of those metal green tins of caustic jollop.
Immediately I fetched out the flagon from the cupboard of despair and misappropriated by Mother’s best washing up gloves and Father’s second best paint brush.
Outside, on the concrete garden paving slabs, near to the drain and gloved-up, I eventually undid the childproof stopper on the tin of Nitromors and began to decant the glutenous mucus into a waiting dish. I liberally applied the viscous astringent with a brush to every part of the flagon until it looked as if it had been thrust up a Giant’s nostril. The whole thing bubbled and fizzed as I looked on, fearing I had possibly just destroyed an Antique. Next to me a watering can was poised, already filled with warm soapy water ready for emergency action. I looked down at my watch to see the prescribed full five minutes had elapsed. I quickly tipped the watering can up, washing all the attendant sticky froth from the surface of the flagon, holding my breath and not just because of the awful chemical smell, afraid to see what job the Nitromors had done.
As if on cue the Sun poked through a cloud to hit the now pristine and gleaming surface of the flagon. Bob and Dave had, of course, been right. A two pound tin of Nitromors had stripped away all the revolting crumbling lacquer and I was now gazing at a near pristine George III Sheffield Plate flagon. Let’s be clear, it was still a fairly unsaleable piece of ecclesiastical plate, Nitromors couldn’t change that, but now it was at least a gleaming and beautiful unsaleable piece of ecclesiastical plate and to me that made all the difference.
Since that day lacquered silver has been very, very kind to me. I have always been the first to buy it, as now it promises fortune not fear. Especially as I heed Bob and Dave’s words of advice and always, ALWAYS have a tin of Nitromors to hand.