Coffee pot, electroplated Britannia metal, manufactured by James Dixon and Sons, Sheffield ca. 1850.

Electroplated Britannia metal, hinged lid, celluloid strips on handle. Deeply engraved floral decoration.

Given by Shirley Bury

This coffee pot was assembled from sections of Britannia metal, an inexpensive industrial metal that grew out of factory mechanisation developed in Sheffield in the 1760s. It was made in sections that were stamped in patterned dies and soldered together. The coffee pot was then electroplated. The Journal of Art and Design in 1850 praised its, 'well finished and smooth, bright surfaces'. The outer skin has become worn from excessive cleaning during use.

The manufacturer, James Dixon was responsible for building one of Sheffield's great metalworking companies, rivalled only in scale in the city by the silversmiths, Walker and Hall, and the cutlers, Joseph Rodgers and Sons. He started primarily as Britannia Metalsmith but by the 1830s also produced silver, Sheffield plate, nickel silver, brass shot flasks and gunpowder belts. He later incorporated electroplating into the firm's products.

Dixon began a partnership with the cutler and Britannia Metal maker, Thomas Smith, in Silver Street in around 1807 but had worked before that for some of the earliest factories to produce Britannia metal including Richard Constantine and Broadhead, Gurney and Sporle. In the early 1820s after Smith's retirement, Dixon moved the factory to Cornish Place, possibly named after the source of the factory's tin. This was right on the west bank of the River Don where there was a plentiful water supply.

Dixon brought his sons into partnership with him in the 1820s. When William Frederick became a partner in 1824 the business was styled James Dixon and Son. When his second son, James Willis Dixon, became a partner in 1835 the firm took the name James Dixon and Sons. These partnership dates are useful when trying to attribute dates to the company's products as this part of their history can be tracked through the trademarks they applied to them.

Between 1835 and 1836, James Willis Dixon travelled in the US to develop the company's vast export business there. By the 1840s, the firm sent Britannia metal and Sheffield Plate to Baltimore and Philadelphia and dominated the US market. When this trade came under threat during the American Civil War (1861-65), the company shifted its attention to France, Russia, Australia and elsewhere opening a London office in the 1870s to manage international affairs.

Despite being at the forefront of industrial innovation in the 1820s, operating one of the first steam-powered rolling mills in Sheffield, Dixons were slow to adopt the new alchemy of electroplating when it was introduced by Elkington and Co. in Birmingham in the early 1840s and initially subcontracted this work to Walker and Coulson. In 1848 they finally applied for a licence to 'meet with spirit the electroplating in Sheffield' and by the Great Exhibition of 1851 they won two prizes for their electroplated Britannia Metal which they were instructed to label clearly 'Britannia metal goods' because they were almost indistinguishable from silver.

Their surviving trade catalogues from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries show that their stock-in-trade was tea services, dining services, cutlery, sports trophies, communion services, shooting equipment and drinking paraphernalia. Dixons occasionally employed leading designers, including Christopher Dresser, whose designs they manufactured 1879 and 1882.

James Dixon and Sons' Cornish Street works employed around 500 workers by the 1860s, this number eventually growing to around 850 by the time of their centenary celebrations in 1906. The factory was enormous and large parts of it survive close to the Ball Street Bridge. Such was the company's impact on the area that the works gave their name to Cornish Street and Dixon Street close by. After the First World War, when the market for luxury goods declined, the firm was on the decline although still survived until the 1950s as a large-scale cutlery factory. The company was eventually bought out and Cornish Place was closed as a factory in 1992. A decade of sad dereliction was reversed early in the 2000s when the vast factory was converted to apartments and shops.

Britannia Metal is an alloy consisting of between 92 and 97% tin with small amounts of antimony and copper. It was an inexpensive industrial metal that grew out of factory mechanisation developed in Sheffield in the 1760s. It could be cast, spun, hammered (raised or sunk), stamped, pierced, and engraved in ways other metals could not. It also acted as a 'white metal' base for electroplate from the late 1840s. Britannia Metal is highly instructive about manufacturing practices, factory collaborations and networks, competitive ingenuity, social change and aspiration, and the increase in public-facing product-consumption that is not always present in other materials.

BRITANNIA METAL ORIGINS

Materially at least, Britannia Metal is most like pewter, a soft tin alloy. Pewtersmithing is an ancient craft in which the vast majority of products were cast in moulds using traditional techniques regulated by one of the historic London guilds, the Worshipful Company of Pewterers. Moulds were expensive and styles persisted longer than in more adaptable materials. Britannia Metal was rarely cast, however, and was not regulated by a guild.

Britannia Metal is defined far more by mechanical production developed in the production of Sheffield Plate or fused plate. Sheffield Plate was first developed in the 1740s and is silver-plated copper where a copper ingot is plated with silver first and then rolled into a thin sheet to be worked into household goods. It could not be cast and excessive workmanship would pierce the thin veneer so the Sheffield Platers developed weight-driven and eventually hydraulic die-stamps and fly presses that meant designs could be formed and applied in one go with much more predictable regularity. As an industry, it did not come into its own until mid-century, high-relief Rococo designs give way to Robert Adam-inspired, flatter, plainer, interchangeable classical forms that could be produced in large numbers.

Classical designs could be created more easily and less expensively from sheet metal. The introduction of steam power (pioneered by James Watt for Matthew Boulton) and crucible steel (developed commercially by Benjamin Huntsman) equipped factories with more powerful rolling mills, encouraging 'white metal' workers to experiment with tin-alloys that could be rolled into sheets. In 1769 the Sheffield metalworker, James Vickers, began producing Britannia Metal after apparently being tipped off by 'a dying friend'. His first trademark, 'I.VICKERS', is stamped on items made in his factory between 1769 and 1787, the earliest pieces of Britannia Metal in production.

A century later, the novelty of mechanised production had still not passed completely. In the 1886 novel 'Patience Wins' (Blackie & Son Ltd, London, Glasgow and Dublin, 1886) George Manville Fenn describes how the hero comes across a Britannia Metal factory: 'As I looked through into these works, one man was busy with sheets of rolled-out Britannia metal, thrusting them beneath a stamping press, and at every clang with which this came down a piece of metal like a perfectly flat spoon was cut out and fell aside, while at a corresponding press another man was holding a sheet, and as close as possible out of this he was stamping out flat forks, which, like the spoons, were borne to other presses with dies, and as the flat spoon or fork was thrust in it received a tremendous blow, which shaped the bowl and curved the handle, while men at vices and benches finished them off with files. ... in spite of the metal being cold, the heat of the friction, the speed at which it goes, and the ductility of the metal make it behave as if it were so much clay or putty."

Britannia metal's light robustness had also come to the attention of Charles Dickens. 'Pleasantry, sir!' exclaimed Pott with a motion of the hand, indicative of a strong desire to hurl the Britannia metal teapot at the head of the visitor. 'Pleasantry, sir! - But - no, I will be calm; I will be calm, Sir;' in proof of his calmness, Mr. Pott flung himself into a chair, and foamed at the mouth. ('The Pickwick Papers', Chapter 18)

Britannia Metal is therefore developed in Sheffield, a place with no distinctive pewter history, to harness the new factory machinery developed by the Sheffield Platers and becomes a national industry until the early decades of the twentieth centry. The Britannia Metal makers could reach a much wider market with the same equipment. Britannia Metal was not as valuable as silver, not as convincing as Sheffield Plate, not as historic as pewter and not as robust as nickel silver but, industrially, was easier to produce than all of them. It combined the cheapness and accessibility of pewter with the state-of-the-art mass manufacturing methods of Sheffield Plate.

BRITANNIA METAL TRADE

Britannia Metal's cheapness and ubiquity have led to its neglect by art historians but it was subject to all the same design influences as other metals and ceramics and put mechanised product-design on more tables than ever before. Britannia Metal was the first metal developed during the industrial revolution to reach a wide cross-section of the population. The democratising elements of Sheffield Plate are too often overstated given the number of items that still included space for family crests. Within a few decades of its invention, Britannia Metal tea and coffee sets served travellers on railways, ships and stagecoaches and in the hotels and inns where they stayed. They smoked tobacco stored in Britannia Metal boxes. Taverns and restaurants served beer in Britannia Metal mugs. Communion services in less wealthy parishes used Britannia Metal cups during religious ceremonies.

The prevalence of tea and coffee services as early products of Britannia Metal, always with a sugar bowl, reflects the nation's sweetening tooth. It is also another expression of the growing demand for the products of empire, the market for sugar being one of the primary drivers of the transatlantic slave trade. Britannia Metal production helped put sugar bowls on more tables than ever.

The Britannia Metal trade was not regulated in the same way as silver or pewter which were both controlled by guilds that kept a close eye on quality of alloys and production. It came to occupy a grey area with much more freedom. Single workshops might use a variety of alloys for the different parts of objects they suited best.

When Elkington of Birmingham developed their patents for electroplating and electrogilding from the 1840s, Britannia Metal became a substrate along with nickel silver for electroplate. This technological advance was significant enough for James Dixon & Sons to show this coffee pot at the Great Exhibition of 1851. It was the growing ubiquity of materials like Britannia Metal that extended the reach of commercial product-design, a development that by the 1840s encouraged the early art educators of the Department of Science and Art, who later oversaw the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A) to take popular design seriously. Early Britannia Metal is a little-heralded but profoundly democratizing force in the history of product design.

It was not to everyone's taste however. Britannia metal was not as durable as other silver substitutes such as German or nickel silver. 'A teapot ... costing seven or eight shillings, will probably not last twelve months, while a teapot of German silver, costing about three pounds, will last fifty years,' claimed the publication 'Cookery and Domestic Economy for Young Housewives' in 1845.

TRADEMARKS AND ADVERTISING

Britannia Metal makers were great markers of their products. Their marks were not a legally controlled guarantee of quality but an opportunity to advertise using and expanding on established conventions around assumptions of quality.

The tradition of using marks and advertising on the bases of their products owes more to pewter history than to the Sheffield Platers who rarely marked their products and were only obliged to for a brief period in the 1770s and 80s. The 'maker's mark' on a piece of Britannia Metal recalls the pewterer's 'touch mark', their legally enforceable guarantee that they would produce high quality metal with no lead it. The Britannia Metal maker's mark was not a personal mark of quality but a legal guarantee. The habit many Britannia Metal workers had of changing their maker's mark every 15 or 20 years enables Britannia Metal products to be dated within accurate and narrow margins.

Like the pewterers, Britannia Metal makers also stamped on advertising slogans championing the quality of their products. Throughout the nineteenth century this advertising became more expansive. Many of them laud the technological miracle offered by a product. Philip Ashberry and Son's 'PATENT NON-CONDUCTING HANDLE' on a teapots of around 1850 offered tea drinkers the promise of a cup of tea without blistered fingers. Broadhead & Atkins sold small, bachelor teapots for one with an 'ANTICALORIC HANDLE', a more obscure but convincingly technical way of making the same promise to its lonesome user. And from 1886, there is James Dixon & Sons 'J.J. Royle's PATENT SELF-POURING TEAPOT' with its oddly constructed spout that pours the tea when you press the lid, a precursor of the modern-day percolator.

OLD BRITANNIA METAL

As Britannia Metal ages it dulls to a matt grey but when new was a reflective 'white metal'. It was not necessarily a substitute for silver but it catered for the same aesthetic for white metals. Lift the lid or peep under the foot of a dark grey Britannia metal teapot and areas that have been protected from the air or from damp will retain the lustre they had on the day they left the factory.

The wear and tear on antique Britannia Metal often reveals a long history of use. As it darkens it also reveals the tell-tale signs of manufacturing practice. Seams are visible on the bodies and spouts of teapots revealing how they were stamped in sections and soldered. Pierced sugar bowls and salts cellars show the use of the Sheffield Platers' fly press. Pear-shaped teapots and coffee pots from the 1840s show the advent of spinning on high-powered lathes as a method of production. These features enable close comparisons between matching models in silver, Sheffield Plate, brass, copper, pewter, Britannia Metal and electroplate. Britannia Metal, therefore, wears its construction processes openly enabling a history of mechanised metal manufacturing to be charted over the 150 years or so that it was in production.

Reason For Production: Retail

M.23-1999