CITY ARTS

Book tokens of the Past

DUNCAN CAMPBELL HAS BEEN DEALING IN ANTIQUE SILVER SINCE 1986

The Silver Cup

Have you ever wondered why so many sporting and other prizes take the form of a silver cup?

Perhaps passing around a two handled vessel makes sense to toast a great victory and it is certainly true that a glass trophy wouldn’t have survived the Scottish Rugby squad dropping the Calcutta Cup (made not in Calcutta but in Srinagar - just sayin’) while passing it around at 2 am in Princes street.

Dents can easily be removed from silver cups, but that is not why they have become the default award for victory.

The tradition for giving large trophy cups goes back centuries and many of these ancient cups have now taken on a ceremonial function that has overtaken the real reason for their existence.

Can you imagine the cries of horror if next year the Wimbledon Men’s Singles trophy cup were to be weighed in for scrap and the cash paid out to it’s winner instead?

This may sound like the worst kind of vandalism but to our ancestors it would have been perfectly normal.

The reason silver was chosen as a gift or a prize is because it was literally made of money. In the past, as now, it may be seen as a little vulgar to hand over cash where somehow giving a book token or gift voucher isn’t. Silver cups and trophies were the book tokens of their day, always intended to be converted into something more useful once the celebrations were done.

Despite the often skillful hand work applied to trophy cups, the value was all in the weight, generally 6s. an ounce for the metal and another 1s./oz. for the manufacture. There are any number of old news reports covering some horse race or other which describe the prize cup simply by its mass, without any discussion of what it might have looked like. Old inventories of house contents rarely give any detail for silver, “a cup” or “a dish” is about all you get, but the weight is always specified to the nearest pennyweight to allow for a very quick and accurate valuation. In the days before eBay only by giving silver could you be sure that, if the receiver didn’t want their carefully chosen gift, they could get the money back. n

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