Hi everyone. I’m new here so hopefully I’m not asking a question that has been answered numerous times. I have a small condiment spoon bearing a George III duty mark, a lion passant, a date letter upper case U in a round bottomed shield with upper chamfered corners, but with no townmark. The makers mark is upper case GEC in a rectangle. I can normally date fairly well but the lack of a town mark has thrown me. My instincts tell me it’s around 1815 but the date letter shape is confusing. One chart I saw for York suggested 1786 showing the upper case U in the correct shape shield but other pages give a J for this year, I did find a maker GEC somewhere but it just said GEC with no makers name or company offered. Many thanks if anyone can answer this.
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Intriguing !! 
, I’ll be interested to hear how this one pans out 
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Please don’t reduce the size of the photo before posting it here - that makes it impossible for us to zoom in on it. Post the original image. Thanks!
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This appears to be London, 1815.
https://www.silvermakersmarks.co.uk/Dates/London/Date%20Letters%20U.html
(Phil - the entry on that page appears to have some problems. One of the dates for the 1815 hallmarks in incorrect - it says 1805 - and the multiple images, with their smoothly rounded bottom edges on the date letter punches, don’t match the punch shapes shown on the page. All very confusing!)
ETA: I may be wrong about this, but I believe the town mark was often left off small pieces. But from what I’ve seen, if there’s no town mark, you can almost bet that it’s London.
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The maker, GEC, does match the 1815 date, though the identity of the silversmith remains a mystery.
https://www.silvermakersmarks.co.uk/Makers/London-GE-GJ.html#GE
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That’s good enough! In this case, the marks are fairly clear. It gets more interesting when they’ve been rubbed to the point of being almost invisible.
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Some other reference sites show that 1815 punch having a very subtle, almost undetectable, point on the bottom:
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Yes I read that small pieces didn’t require a town mark. I did default to London but the date letter shield for 1815 looked to be pointed at the base and my spoon appears quite rounded. Thank you for your assistance.
The duty mark punch shape appears to tie it down to a definite two week period of 1815
(29 May 1815 - 13 Jun 1815). The bottom of the shield of the date letter U is most definitely round on my spoon however and definitely no angle. This is what threw me but I believe London 1815 is the most likely and as you sat corresponds with GEC from 1815.
Yes, I didn’t zero in on it until I saw the actual images, in which the punch shapes look like your marks.
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Thanks for spotting my (non-deliberate) error, Jeff. It must have been there for getting on for 20 years! I will amend ASAP.
London date letter punch shapes of the period did vary somewhat with a missing bottom “pip” at times - and for no fathomable reason.
Phil
George Edward Cramp?
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Wrong city, wrong punch style, and most important, 80 years too late.
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I give up… 
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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Who knows? Maybe Cramp had a very, very, very long career. 
I’ll see what I can find out. Thank you.
GEC in a rectangle is an overstrike of the original sponsor’s mark. You can see the remnants of the original oval mark peeking out from under the top of the GEC mark
So it might easily be someone much later. Although exactly what his incentive to overstamp would have been is tricky to tell. Sometimes when the maker or sponsor goes bankrupt somebody else buys up his or her stock.
Sometimes just about the time mechanical presses were taking over much of the base labor of cutlery-making, it was cheaper to buy stock off someone with enough product to make access to the Birmingham Soho Stamping mills viable than it was to hammer spoons out from scratch. Gray and Batemen are frequent examples of this perfectly legal subterfuge .
The Bateman’'s had this tiny workshop in London (less than 2,600 sq feet) and made this huge quality of silver. How did they do it? They didn’t. Hester Bateman’s business began in 1761 and she is considered one of the finest English silversmiths. But from 1774, she started buying mill-rolled sheet silver from Boulton & Fothergill, a Birmingham manufacturer, to assemble, decorate, and finish. All they did in London was the twirly bits and sometimes ship it over to the Channel Islands and back to avoid Stamp Duty. David McKinley writes well on the Batemans who he clearly regards as the Marks and Sparks of the late 18th century silver world.
So it is perfectly possible this is Crump over top of (find an oval or round mark of the right date that fits under “Capt Crunch”)
Here’s quite a useful thread on overstriking including a long blurb on why it was legal.
CRWW
Guildhall Antiques.
Toronto.
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“Perfectly possible” but on balance unlikely to be the Brummy ring-maker of the late 19th century with a similar mark registered in neighboring Chester.His mark is an oval not a rectangle. and by the time his mark appeared duty marks – the sovereign’s head were about to disappear as the duty on Silver was coming off.
I note Phil of www.silvermakersmarks.co.uk has Enoch James Trevitt trading as “G E Cramp”, manufacturing jeweller selling rings out of its Vyse St, premise in Birmingham, the marks in his fine repository presumably harvested off the inside of rings “not needed on the voyage” as Brummy ladies and gents shuffled off this mortal coil from Hockney to the Key Hill Cemetery up the street.
But those marks are oval and why would a ring maker suddenly decide his economic future depended on creating a separate rectangular punch and overstriking Georgian teaspoons?
So it’s someone else. Vyse Street jeweller and goldsmith records are remarkably obtruse. Today we would call them pop-up shops. Here today, gone tomorrow. You get a flavor of it in some of the street shots in the Netflix “Peaky Blinders” Series.
Phil has decided there is enough evidence to give it a tentative home in his pages at the London Assay Office, and he may well be right, he usually is, but he acknowledges Author Arthur Grimwade is no help/support
I suppose an enquiry directly to the Assay office would settle the question
The Library for the Association provides an online form:
If they have no record similar inquiries can be made of the Birmingham and other extant references and then there are always us pesky colonials. Usually we just faked the
UK marks. But who knows. Seems a lot of work for a teaspoon.
CRWW
CRWW
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