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I have a dirk hallmarked in Glasgow for 1913. One section on the scabbard has the lion for sterling, but the ohther marks on the scabbard only have the city mark, the makers mark, and the date letter. Any reason why they didn't use the lion throughout. The mounts are all obviously silver.
Why would the Glasgow assay office only mark city and date on some of the mounts?
It was normal practise to apply the full set of hallmaks only to the main body of a piece and partial hallmarks to other additional parts connected to the main body of the item, a hinged lid to a teapot for example, would be marked in the same way. The reason only partial marks were applied to the smaller parts of an item was to prevent possible abuse. If say, a silversmith was to send a teapot lid only for assay, then the assaymaster would refuse to mark the piece until he had interviewed the silversmith and satisfied himself that the lid was a replacement for a broken one and not to fitted on to a new pot that was perhaps under standard, when satisfied, the lid would be marked with a full set of marks, not partial.
These pieces would have been sent to assay prior to them being assembled and would have been entered as one lot. I believe in theory that the Standard mark should have been struck on all the pieces, but when you are busy....
The maker is Robert G. Laurie who was registered at Glasgow and then at Edinburgh following the closure of the Glasgow office in 1964. They were a known maker of highland ornamentation.
So you are fairly ceratin that all of the scabbard mountings are silver? I just cleaned them up a bit, and they eventually went from being dark black to silver. To me it behaves like sterling or high purity silver. It was also suggested to me that the other mounts could have been Brittania silver.
Another question: On the dirk there are two mounts that hold stones, not sure if they are real cairngorm or glass. They are awfully clear in my opinion to be a stone but I really don't know enough. Anyway, the stone mounts appear to be silver but don't have any marks on them. They had the identical tarnish to the other mounts marked for sterling. What do you think? Should I have them tested? Unless, they are marked on the inside and are not visible...but that would'nt make much sense.
I see no reason to think that all the ornamentation is anything but Sterling silver. Small parts below a certain weight would not be liable for hallmarking.
All the silver parts are sterling standard silver, otherwise any Britannia parts would have been marked as such; mixing the two standards on the different parts of one piece would be highly unusual and is virtually unheard of. It is normal procedure for the dirk to be marked just as it is. Henry
