Baron North, Prime Minister – A rare George III sterling silver table fork, London 1774 by Christopher Fly Woods and Thomas Filkin (active circa 1771-1775)

Baron North, Prime Minister – A rare George III sterling silver table fork, London 1774 by Christopher Fly Woods and Thomas Filkin (active circa 1771-1775)

Hanoverian pattern, three pronged, engraved with a contemporaneous crest of a dragon’s head erased, ducally gorged, all surmounted by a Baron’s coronet. Fully marked .

Length – 19.8 cm / 7.8 inches

Weight – 66 grams / 2.12 ozt

The crest is for North

For Frederick North, 2nd Earl of Guilford (1732 –1792), known by his courtesy title Lord North, which he used from 1752 to 1790, was Prime Minister of Great Britain from 1770 to 1782.

Lord North is today predominantly remembered as the Prime Minister "who lost America". The American War of Independence broke out in 1775 with the Battle of Lexington. Following the Boston Tea Party in 1773, Lord North proposed a number of legislative measures that were supposed to punish the Bostonians. These measures were known as the Coercive Acts in Great Britain, while dubbed the Intolerable Acts in the colonies. By shutting down the Boston government and cutting off trade, he hoped they would keep the peace and dispirit the rebellious colonists. Instead, the acts further inflamed Massachusetts and the other colonies, eventually resulting in open war during the Boston campaign of 1775–76. In October 1781, British forces under Lord Cornwallis surrendered at the conclusion of the Siege of Yorktown, North was the second British Prime Minister to be forced out of office by a motion of no confidence; the first was Sir Robert Walpole in 1742. Lord North resigned on 20^th March 1782 on account of the British defeat at Yorktown the year before.

Christopher Fly Woods (1746-1807), a rarely encountered maker, apprenticed to Paul Callard and was his son-in-law, from his marriage to Marqueritte Callard (b.1749). He inherited the business of Paul Callard (d. 1768) and Isaac Callard (d.c. 1770). He is recorded as being a spoon maker in partnership with Thomas Filkin in Battersea in the 1772 parliamentary report. This is mark is not recorded in Grimwade. Woods’ mark alone registered on 12^th June 1775 as number 427 is extremely rarely encountered, thus one can assume this partnership mark is also as exhaustively rare.

A pair of tablespoons of 1771 by these makers was sold these rooms, 21 June 2023, lot 225 (£250 incl. prem)

A tablespoon of 1775 by Christopher Fly Woods was sold these rooms, 23 June 2022, lot 411 (£125 incl. prem).