Vintage Tobacciana

Coops sends me a fantastic piece of ancient history – that is, an ashtray (classy looking in silver) with little cradles for cigarettes. This object occupies a vintage category called Tobacciana, and hails from that epoch when most of us smoked. This ashtray features a revolving roll top for discrete dispensing of ashes (if one would rather not sully the piece’s aesthetic beauty by simply tapping ashes onto its lovely dish-like exterior) and has a decorative gadroon or rope-style trim. The roll-top is removable for the presumed emptying of ashes. Coops’ grandparents smoked – she, cigarettes, he, a pipe – and they had this little silvery ashtray whose removeable attachment is not entirely explicable. 

Nothing I found resembled this ashtray. Coops showed it around the CALM antique show a few weeks back in Santa Barbara, and the consensus was that the attachment also held matches, and the slider on the side was a striking surface. It is also possible that the attachment held a lighter, and so could be removed for ease of use in that context; grandfather lighting grandmother’s cigarette. The ashtray is heavy even without the centerpiece, and the centerpiece has six lines of threading which requires several counterclockwise spins to undo from the ashtray. In any event it is a curiosity, and it is also curious to think that smoking-related objects are collectible. There are plenty of smoking related objects, so many that the context of collecting those is called Tobacciana, because by the 1960s, 65% of all American men smoked, according to the American Lung Association. My best friend Devi and I did too, sneaking around in high school. Women began to smoke almost as much as men after 1930-40, as the advertising world associated cigarettes with glamor and sophistication. Sometimes I miss smoking.

The attachment on Coops’ ashtray is a cavity 2.5” deep, and the center has little knobs on the side and screws that unscrew. It is hallmarked with two shield shapes; one bears a shape of a leopard’s head with a “V” mark. The leopard head is associated with sterling silver, and it has been since Edward I decreed it so in 1300, believing that leopards were lions. This piece is not sterling, but it is British. The only way it could be read as sterling is if the leopard’s head were accompanied by three other marks – a lion “passant,” a date letter in a box or shield shape, and a maker’s mark, usually initials. 

Coops writes that she can barely make out the “V” inside the shield shapes, and that tips me off that her little ashtray is electroplated nickel silver specifically created by Viners silver plate of Sheffield, England, a firm founded in the 19^th century by Emile and Adolphe Viener. using their special process to make silver plate which was called ALPHA plate. The British populace of the 1930s and 1940s LOVED silver plate because it looked like the Queen’s silver but
was affordable. 

I find it interesting that objects that were supposed to scream “upper class” were silver plated, even though it was not practical for them to be plated. For example, an ashtray that holds burning cigarettes and cigars should not be made of silver-plated metal. But it looked so classy! Imagine a hot piece of metal on your nice George III-style mahogany coffee table (George III [1738-1820] didn’t have coffee tables) in the 1940s living room and you will see what I mean. 

Viners Silver (notice the anglicized version of the name Viener) became the dominant maker of silver plate and only sold to the American firm Oneida as recently as 1980. Viners made tea trays, tea sets, coasters, and flatware, usually with fancy edges like Coops’ round ashtray, and were the lower-class version of the higher class silverplate firm, Mappin and Webb. 

Silver plated objects are not worth much unless you have Sheffield silver, a heat-based silver-on-copper bonding process that preceded electroplating (prior to1850). I love Sheffield plate because you can see the copper metal underneath the silver plating, and it has a warm glow. It’s called Sheffield because it hailed from Sheffield and grew to Birmingham. Post-1840s silver plate will bear the initials EPNS or EPBM for electroplated nickel silver, or electroplated Brittania
metal silver. 

The value of Coops’ little ashtray with roll-top might be $75. If anyone knows assuredly what the round thing is, please email me [email protected].