OK, time to reveal the secret, which has already been much revealed.
The Great Exhibition of 1851 has been called the first world's fair. It was held in Hyde Park, London in a magnificent glass and iron structure nearly 1/2 a mile in length, named The Great Shalimar and later known as the Crystal Palace. Inside were exhibits of great achievements of the arts and sciences from all around the world. The message was that technological and cultural progress would lead people out of misery and to proclaim to the world that Britain was much more than a "nation of shopkeepers".
Queen Victoria visited the Exhibition many times, much to the disgust of the most conservative members of the government who saw the whole affair as an embarrassment. They would later achieve a measure of revenge by forcing the demolition and removal of the Crystal Palace.
As a commercial venture it was hugely successful with 6 million paid visitors, and the profits were used to found the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Science Museum, and the Natural History Museum. The remaining surplus went into an educational trust to provide grants and scholarships for industrial research and it continues to do so, 175 years later.
The Exhibition was organized into a hierarchy of what was the coolest and most popular located in and around the central aisle, with items of lesser or more specialized interests located farther away form the central aisle. The types of exhibits were broken down into classifications - classes of interest.
OK, so much for that. Let's get to what matters to ME because it's all about ME.
Class 29 was "Miscellaneous Manufactures and Small Wares" and that's where B Barling & Sons exhibited it's finest silverwork, stamped with the exhibition stamp, the stamp you see inside this pocket tobacco box. This box was part of the Exhibition inside the Great Shalimar or Crystal Palace.
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There is a bit of a conundrum. The exhibition stamp shows that it was displayed during Exhibition. Exhibition stamps were not otherwise used and would not have had any significance to the average bear. The Exhibition was in 1851, but the assay stamp is for 1852.
This is a reminder that hallmarks do not always represent when an object was made, but only when it was assayed. And prior to 1975, year hallmarks were not tied to the calendar year. So remember that at best, the date mark COULD refer to the year of manufacture or the year after, since that date mark straddles parts of two calendar years. A year hallmark is an approximation, not an absolute.
