British Hallmarks without city mark?

[madoad1]

Hi!

I have a lid of a hot dish ( sadly, dish is lost ) with the duty mark, lion passant and two S mark (one bigger than other), but doesn't has the city mark. Is this usual? I think the bigger S mark is the maker mark, but I'm not sure. I hope someone know the maker, if it is possible. Thank you pretty much!

[AG2012]

Lion passant mark is not very informative here.
Let’s start with Sovereign head ('duty mark'); George III, George IV, William IV. They are all facing right, punched into an oval escutcheon, from 1786 to 1838.
As far as I know, there was no single letter ``S`` maker in London, Birmingham, nor Sheffield. But it seems there was another letter in the last mark, after S, not well struck. It could be maker’s mark.Even when not struck well one can see it under higher magnification.
So, the first S is date letter; search for ``S`` and depending on escutcheon you will most probably figure out the date.
Correct me if I am wrong — this is all I can tell.

[buckler]

The barred "S" is almost certainly the dateletter for London 1793/1794. This was supposed to be a small "s" but the engraver, John Pingo, made all the punches , several hundred in total , as a large "S", and by the time it was noticed it was too late to do anything other than add a distincitve bar to the middle of the "S".
The Goldsmiths' Company were mighty displeased !

[madoad1]

Thank you for your comments! It's pretty interesting. I was thinking that the blurred "S" was the maker's mark, but it's a little funny to know that this guy made hundreds of wrong strucks :). Thank you very much, I really appreciated your comments. Greetings!

[madoad1]

I found an interesting article in the ASCAS page, about the history of double mark punchs, where mentioned the marks in my lid:

'Duble (sic) marks' were again mentioned in the mark book entry for 1788 and were for use on rings. Observation of the mark plate shows that this time the mark took the form of the duty head followed by the lion.
In 1789, according to the mark book, this punch was used on buttons, rings and knife hafts and in 1790 there are two references to it; one for rings and the other unqualified.
Observation shows that this second punch was used on tea tongs (sugar tongs) and this is useful for dating tongs as this is the only year in which they were marked in this way since a fly press mark, for marking tongs, came into use in 1791. Note that the outline to the lion is now rectangular with canted top corners and an ogee base.

I let you the page of the complete article:

http://www.ascasonline.org/articoloGIUG159.html