The Continuing story of the Mary Tin Replicas

Several weeks ago I wrote a couple of posts about Mary tins. Basically, in 1914 Princess Mary, daughter of King George V and Queen Mary, decided that she wanted to send a Christmas gift to all British troops on active service on the Western Front. When it was shown to her that she couldn’t afford it, the idea was to have a publicly funded appeal to raise the money to do so which was so successful that, eventually, the gift was given to everyone in the British and Empire armed forces, including nurses. The gifts were presented in a very fetching brass tin and these tins eventually became known as Mary tins.

Now, through a combination of things I have developed an interest in the First World War. For Christmas 2025 my younger brother bought me a Mary tin. I absolutely love it. Even without the history behind it I think it is a lovely object.

So, if you read my earlier posts you’ll know that I did a bit of research and found out that in 2014 the Daily Mail newspaper did a promotional offer whereby readers could save tokens to claim a reproduction Mary tin. I bought two from ebay. There’s still a large number of original tins out there. I think that lost of people kept them even after the contents were gone, but obviously they don’t have the same emotional value to the descendant of the recipients. There’s also quite a large number of the Daily Mail reproductions out there as well. I don’t think that you’d ever be able to pass these off as originals. The quality of the embossing on the design is much cruder. The tin is much lighter and feels more like coated tin than real brass.

Well, there we are, original and replica. I thought that was it. Only it wasn’t. You see, in the course of my research I found out about a variation. This was clearly a reproduction, but instead of having the head of Princess Mary embossed upon it, there is the date, 1914. I felt that this was strange, but eventually I found a post on a forum that explained it. It said that tins with 1914 were made as souvenirs of the Great War in the 1920s. The change in the design was because the Crown forbade the use of the image of a member of the Royal Family for commercial purposes. These were sold under the name commemorative tins.

The 1914 tin I had seen was not from the 1920s, but essentially a reproduction of one. So a reproduction of a reproduction. I wouldn’t say that it was difficult to get hold of, but I could only find one supplier. None to be found on ebay. Yes, of  course I bought one. It’s an interesting piece. I mean it’s clearly based on the design of the original Mary tin. However some of the embossed writing is not there. Only the lid seems to be barred, and it has a darker colour than the originals or the Dily Mail reproductions. The lid is not attached by a hinge and its dimensions are slightly larger than the others I have. The body of the tin has some kind of matt black coating. It’s quite tactile actually, and it’s pretty heavy. If anything I’d say it’s heavier than the original.

So there we are. Or are we?

Well not quite. In the course of finding out about the reproduction Mary tins I came upon a post that mentioned replicas made by the Daily Mail and Fortnum and Masons. I dived down this particular rabit hole and found out that in 2014 Fortnum and Mason’s in London had produced what I believe is called a Tommy’s tin to commemorate the centenary of the original Mary tins. Tins were gifted to all members of the Armed Forces serving in Afghanistan. Based on photographs I found, the tin was very clearly based on the Mary tin. It seems to have a helmeted head where Princess Mary’s was, and instead of being flanked by two Ms, the head is flanked by F and M. I did find one on ebay. This had the original contents, a mini pack of playing cards and as a result the price was rather more than I was prepared to pay.

Come this morning, I found another, empty F and M tin on ebay for a much more acceptable price. So I’ve bought it. Watch this space.

Derwent Academy A5 casebound hardback sketching journal - Completed. Verdict

As I write this it is 14:26 on Sunday 8^th February and I have just finished the last sketch in my Derwent Academy A5 sketchbook. Now, I did make a sketch in it back in August when I bought it, so in the interests of accuracy I must record that I have made 127 sketches to complete it. That’s 3.62 sketches per day on average. It also means that I’ve finished two sketchbooks since the start of the year, and 6 since beginning the sketchbook challenge in July.

So what can we say about the Derwent Academy A5?

Value – Well, mine was incredibly good value because Amazon were selling off their stock and I got it for a remarkable sale price of £4.99. That’s a ppp (price per page) of 3.89p. That’s extremely cheap. However, Amazon have not stocked this item since and on average other stockers ask an average of £9.99. That’s 7.89ppp. It’s okay but not outstanding, and comparable with the Seawhite, which is my favourite ‘jack of all trades’ sketching journal.

Durability – Throughout the 35 days it took to fill the sketchbook it lived in my rucksack, which I use daily, and suffered no noticeable ill effects. This is good because it’s cloth bound rather than vinyl/faux leather. The Canson and the Amazon Basics were also cloth bound, and the Canson showed wear and tear on the edges of the cover, while the Amazon basics covers began bowing outwards.

Paper Quality/ Versatility. The paper is very white, and amongst the smoothest of any paper that I’ve used. It is only 135 gsm which beings its own problems. When you use it for ink sketches you do get a very clear contrast between the marks and the paper background, and because the testure is smoother there’s no real resistance to the pen, which means it seems to skate across the page, and I like this. The sketchbook is clearly labelled as being for dry media and makes no claim to being any good for wet media, and this is just as well. I made a pretty OK watercolour sketch in it, but the paper pilled very badly and the waffling made the other side of the page a very difficult and unpleasant surface to work on. With coloured fineliners the dark blue bled right through the page.

Overall Verdict

I would be tempted to buy another of these and put it to oneside purely for ink, graphite or charcoal sketching, but only if I found it on offer again. For the money I think you’re probably much better off buying the versatile Seawhite journal.

This is one of the better sketches I made in the Derwent Academy and it shows that you can get pretty good results in it using dry media like fineliner.

Sketchbook Challenge Update

 Right then, I began sketching in the Derwent Academy A5 sketching journal on Sunday 4th January. By today 31st January I have completed 95 pages of sketches. If I'd started on the first I reckon I'd have managed 100. Nonetheless, considering that I've sketched every day since then, making at least 2 sketches on every day, I reckon that's pretty good going. After all that's an average of just over 3 and a half sketches by day.

By that reckoning I could finish in 11 days. Well, my target is actually just two pictures per day. Now, the fact is that I've exceeded this on each of the last 23 days, but what the hell, it's been working well with a target of two per day so what the hell. Here's a selection of the 95 that I haven't posted before

A few more pages from the Derwent Academy Sketching Journal

 

New Budget Sketching Journal - Shore and Marsh A5 hardback

Yeah, I’ve been buying again. It’s another A5 sketching journal. Well, look, I had to reward myself for finishing the Seawhite journal a couple of weeks ago.

So what is it? It is an A5 sketching journal by Shore and Marsh. Shore and Marsh. Shore and Marsh are a brand exclusively sold by Hobbycraft. Not surprising since Hobbycraft own the brand. I guess that they maybe think that Shore and Marsh sounds a little more exclusive and Arty than Hobbycraft does. But is the name the classiest thing about it?

Well, it’s a cloth bound hard backed casebound journal. It is a true A5 size. There’s no elastic fastening, no document wallet and no integral bookmark so if those are essentials as far as you’re concerned then this is not a sketching journal for you. The paper is 140gsm and there are – get this – 92 sheets which is 184 sides of paper for drawing on. So, on paper (should you pardon the pun) this looks like incredible value. Hobbycraft currently sell this at £6 a pop, although I have seen it said that this is a sale price , and the usual price is £8. Well, my calculations are based on the £6 I paid. This means that each side of paper costs you about 30p. Which is incredibly cheap.

Well, all I can give you are my first impressions. As has become my custom, I’ve christened the first page with a drawing. 

It’s ink fineliner – 0.1mm and 0.5mm. Bear in mind that for the last couple of weeks I’ve been pretty much exclusively drawing in my Derwent Academy journal. In that journal the paper is pretty smooth. The paper in this Shore and Marsh journal is a real contrast. It has a rougher texture, and I did find quite a bit of resistance to the pen, especially when I was using the 0.1mm pen. I don’t mind a little bit of resistance, but this seemed excessive to me and it meant that I didn’t enjoy making the drawing as much as I’ve enjoyed using the Derwent, When I finished the drawing  turned over the page and could clearly see some dots where the fineliner had come through. This is disappointing considering that both Seawhite and Derwent use paper that is no heavier than this journal, but neither of the has this problem. I will when I get a chance test coloured fineliner and watercolours, but I’m not hopeful that this journal will be able to cope.

It is a shame, because I do most of my drawing in fineliner. I would recommend this above the Crawford and Black (The Works’ own brand) journal, but that really isn’t saying much. Even if you’re only planning to use dry media and cost is an issue for you, I would still recommend spending a little bit more and buying something a little more forgiving and a little more easy on the pen.

Mary Tins Supplemental

If you’ve ever bought off ebay you may well have experienced what happened with me. So, a fortnight ago, just a few days after Christmas I ordered a replica ‘Mary’ tin from ebay. I posted yesterday all about this. Well, what I didn’t tell you was that I was messed around something rotten by Evri, the delivery company, so last Sunday I was looking at alternatives in case it never did get delivered before my nerve snapped and I claimed a refund. Well, one of the reasonably priced alternatives I looked at obviously alerted the owner and he offered it to me at a reduction. The price was so good that I felt, hmm, I certainly don’t mind having three boxes rather than 2, so I bought it. This was the one that arrived yesterday and the one in the photos with my post yesterday.

Later on yesterday, then, the first one I ordered arrived. Here’s a photo of the three together.

So, the genuine Mary tin is in the middle. The one on top is the last one to arrive, while the bottom one is the one that I wrote about and photographed yesterday. So let’s take my original away for a moment:-

The embossing on the lids seems pretty much identical, but of course there is one glaring difference. The top one seems much closer in colour to my original while the bottom one seems more of a coppery or bronze colour almost. There is one other even more obvious difference between the two tins which you can’t see from the photo. Compare the bottoms of the three tins :-

Yes, my first replica tin on the bottom does not have any writing on it, while the top is stamped with the Daily Mail. I don’t know why. There doesn’t appear to be any sign that the plain one has had anything done to it to remove the writing so that someone could try to pass it off as an original. Which I’m sure would be a forlorn attempt anyway because it doesn’t require any expertise whatsoever to tell the difference between original and replica. I guess its because they were made in different batches, and being promotional items, nobody was that bothered about each replica being identical to all of the others.

I do find the whole replica business quite interesting. During lock down I assembled a little collection of various models of trams and buses produced by Matchbox and a few of their competitors. In the process I obtained these two models –

The one on the left is an original Matchbox Models of Yesteryear London Tram. The one on the left is not – it is a promotional model offered by Typhoo tea in 1985 to celebrate their 80^th birthday. Apart from the advertising banner, they seems identical. But they aren’t – there is little or no plastic in the Matchbox model, while the roof, wheels and baseplate of the Typhoo bus are all made of plastic. My guess is that the plastic parts made it cheaper to manufacturer and lighter to transport.

Derwent Academy Journal - First Impressions

Yes, I know that it’s only been a few days but I bet you’re dying to know how the Derwent Academy Sketchbook is working out for me.

I usually make a sketch on the first page when I buy a new sketching journal, so the book already had one sketch in it. Since then I’ve made 2 on Sunday, 2 on Monday , 2 on Tuesday, 3 on Wednesday, 3 on Thursday, 3 on Friday and 4 today. That’s 19 in total this week – close to 3 per day.

Bearing in mind that the book has 128 pages I’m aiming (hoping) to fill it by the end of February. December was a month where I couldn’t really achieve very much with the sketching journal challenge because of other projects. But last week I ended up making over 20 drawings in order to finish my Seawhite of Brighton A5 sketching journal so I seem to be back in the groove with it. When I try to project how long it’s going to take me to fill a sketchbook I use a rate of 2 pages per day as a rough guide. With 108 pages left that suggests a finish on 5^th March. But then, if you go back to before December I was averaging more than 14 drawings a week, so I think that it’s a decent bet that I will be able to complete by the end of February. Barring unforeseen circumstances. I know that I’m committed to it at the moment because of what happened on Tuesday. I’ll try to explain.

On a week day/working day, part of my routine is that after finishing breakfast I can usually have between 45 minutes and an hour before I want to leave for work and in this time I try to make the first drawing of the day. Usually I do manage to do this and it means that I only need to do one more after work to hit the target. It often means I have the option of making a third drawing as well. On Tuesday, though, I decided to spend the time between breakfast and departure for work reading to the end of the John Grisham novel I was reading. There’s a fine line when you have set yourself a challenge. On the one hand you don’t want to fall behind if you don’t have to. On the other hand you don’t want it to start feeling like a chore. Okay, but there were a couple of complicating factors on Tuesday night, though. For one thing I wasn’t going to be home until later than normal, because I needed to visit the local library to photocopy my picture handout for Thursday night’s quiz. Then when I got home I really needed to write a review of Monday night’s University Challenge for my blog. I got into the habit of leaving these reviews before Christmas and they really started to stack up. It took a big effort to get myself back up to date. So it would have been easy for me to have just let it go on Tuesday. And I didn’t. I made one drawing, with the plan of calling it a day, but having completed one I found the oomph to do another.

So let’s get down to brass tacks and talk about my first impressions of the journal itself. When I’m trying out a new sketching journal there’s several things I’m looking out for. In no particular order these include

- Durability. I need a sketching journal to be able to stand up to living for weeks at a time in my rucksack.

- Design. Some sketching journals just look and feel nicer than others

- Versatility. Although the majority of my drawings in a sketching journal are done in fine liner pen, it’s also nice to know that I have the option of using coloured pens and even watercolour if I so desire. This leads on to the next criterion –

- Paper quality. Specifically, how pleasurable it is to draw on, and how well it takes black fine liner.

- Price. Specifically the price per page. I don’t like to feel like I’m paying through the nose for an inferior product. Likewise I don’t want to pay a premium for a well known name.

How does the Derwent seem to measure up in these areas, then?

Durability. The jury is out for a while on this one. When it’s had a few weeks living in the rucksack I’ll be in a better position to let you know.

Design. It’s a genuine A5 size, like the Seawhite. To be honest I don’t mind whether a journal is true A5 or slightly smaller like the Moleskine and Royal Talens. The hard covers are cloth bound, like the Canson and the Amazon Basics. I can’t say I have a strong feeling about this, but I do prefer the finish of the Moleskine, Royal Talens and Seawhite journals. Cloth often does feel a little cheap. The journal does have elastic fastening, but lacks an integral bookmark or a document pocket on the inside cover. That’s not necessarily a deal breaker for me, but I’d rather have them than not.

Versatility -The paper is 135gsm. That’s actually the  same as the Seawhite which copes well with watercolour, but then the paper in the Seawhite performs exceptionally well considering how light it is. The good people at Derwent do stress that this is for specifically dry media. I have used watercolour, with mixed results. I was surprised how nice the painting I made is – the colours combined quite nicely even if they are just a wee bit muted. The good news is there is no show through on the other side. However the paper is so waffled and buckled that it was difficult to make a decent sketch on the other side of the paper. I have tried using 0.4mm cheap and cheerful coloured fineliners. Curiously it was only the dark blue that came through in 2 places. 

Paper Quality - The pages themselves are quite a bright white, brighter than the pages in the Seawhite, and they’re pretty smooth. This worried me a bit at first. But I have to say I was very pleasantly surprised with the way that it responds to black fineliner. First impressions are that it’s not quite up there with Moleskine and Seawhite but it’s maybe just a bit better than the others. With a 0.1mm fine liner the lines that you get are very nice and crisp.

Price - In August I think Amazon decided that they were not going to stock this product any more, and so they were selling them off for a really good price. In terms of price per page it’s the cheapest pure sketching journal I’ve bought.