Edinburgh silver teaspoons, need help to id.

[niceguy1]

HI

I have this made-up set of 10 Edinburgh silver teaspoons. 3 are hallmarked with A W which i assume is Andrew Wilkie & the letter D for 1835.

The other 7 are hallmarked S W & what i think is the letter U for 1852, they also have a number engraved next to the makers mark but that might of been added by the owner.

It's easy to see the similarities between the 2 spoons as besides for a slight difference in the floral design at the top they are identical. I have searched this site as well as the Edinburgh assay site & cannot find a S W, does anybody know who that might be?

Also how common is it to find a set of 10 of these?

THANKS ALOT.

[silvermakersmarks]

The Edinburgh Incorporation of Goldsmiths site has two similar SW marks, one noted with an 1854 date and the other with an 1881 date. Both are "Unidentified". The 1854 one is probably the same as yours (which is actually 1851, not 1852).

[niceguy1]

Thank you!
is it safe to assume that a w & s w are related? i wrote 1852 because the letter doesn't match up exactly with the u of 1851 or the v of 1852.

[silvermakersmarks]

I don't think there is any basis for expecting AW and SW to be related. The pattern is not especially rare and the monograms do not seem to be the same so the different pieces were not necessarily bought by the same family. Looking again at the date letter I think you were right that it's 1852 - so V not U.

[MCB]

A candidate for the SW mark applied to the spoons assayed in Edinburgh in 1852 is Samuel Weir.
Edinburgh AO website identifies him active from 1847-63 after which Samuel Weir and Sons took over. The website also records that Weir entered a maker’s mark on 2nd March 1847 but does not provide an image. Circumstantially that mark would have comprised his initials SW and he could have registered the unidentified mark of 1854 mentioned above as a replacement in similar form.
The 1851 Census records him at Chalmers Close, 81 High Street, Edinburgh employing 10 men which would indicate that, like his master the spoon maker Alexander Henderson to whom he was apprenticed in 1817, Weir was engaged in quantity production. Such volume would have been necessary to justify the expense of obtaining the dies to form the patterns on the items pictured.

Mike