Mary Tins

Okay, this is neither about art nor quizzing so doesn’t really fit  within the scope of either of my extant blogs. But what the hell, it maybe fits slightly better within this one.

I do find the First World War an interesting subject, and have done ever since reading some of the poetry like “Dulce et Decorum Est”, “An Irish airman foresees his death” and “The Soldier” when I was at school. It’s just as well considering how many times I would teach the poetry in my career as an English teacher. Then when I started researching my family history I embarked upon a quest to find out where and when my grandmother’s father had been killed and was buried. (This was my father’s mother.) It took a lot of time and some creative lateral thinking, but I found that he had been killed on the first day of the Third Battle of Ypres (Passchendaele) and that originally his body had not been identified. His name was inscribed on the Menin Gate, but then removed when it was identified and buried in Voormezeele on the outskirts of Ieper (Ypres). I visited in 2016, and found the whole experience very moving.

However, for all of my interest, I’m not really interested in building up a collection of memorabilia. However, for Christmas a few weeks ago my brother bought me a genuine Princess Mary Tin, and I loved it.

If you’re not aware of the story, in the early months of the war, 17 year old Princess Mary, daughter of King George V and Queen Mary, decided she would like to buy a present for every British soldier on the Western Front and every sailor on a Royal Navy ship. She was gently informed “Sorry, your Royal Highness, but you ain’t got enough lolly for that, but never mind, we’ll get Joe and Josephine public to pay instead” or words to the effect. A public appeal was launched that proved wildly successful, so much so that the scheme was extended to include everyone in the Armed Forces. Mind you, not everyone got these by Christmas 1914. The last were distributed as late as 1920. The majority of them contained tobacco and cigarettes, but there were a variety of different contents for non-smokers, nurses and Sikhs amongst others. The tins were made of brass and this is one of the reasons why it took so long for everyone to be given one. Brass was in short supply at times, for example, the Lusitania was carrying tons of the stuff when it was sunk by a U boat in 1915.

I think that the tin itself is a very desirable object and I think a lot of the recipients did too considering how many of them are still around. On the lid is an embossed design, which seems to owe something to art nouveau. In the centre is the profile of the Princess, white there are 6 roundels in the border containing the names of allies Belgium, France, Russia, Serbia, Montenegro and Japan.You can probably see from the photograph that my time seems to have been extensively polished over the years and this has rubbed away and flattened out quite a bit of detail. But I like it tremendously.

Being the kind of person that I am, over the next few days after Christmas I set out to find out as much as I could about the tins. One of the things I discovered was that in 2014 the Daily Mail made a promotional offer to their readers to provide a replica Mary tin – and a replica King’s Shilling. I think they had to collect tokens or vouchers from the paper. I immediately wondered just how good a replica they were. To cut a long story short I found one for a reasonable price on ebay and bought it. Here it is

 

The first thing you notice about the replica is not something you can see in the photos. It’s the weight. The original is much heavier, and feels far more substantial. If anything the replica feels even lighter than the Old Holborn tobacco tins my father used to use. The detailing on the lid, the embossed design is cruder than the original. The Christmas 1914 lettering is smaller, and further down the lid too. As regards the insides:-

The lids are very different. The original opens flat while he replica only opens through 90 degrees. The original‘s lid closes over the edges of the body of the tin, while the replica lid has a deep edge that closes inside the edges of the main body of the tin. In short, then, I don’t see any way you could mistake the replica for original if you know anything about what the original is like.

What will I keep in the tins? I don’t really know yet, but I do plan to use them both

As I said, I’m not planning to start a memorabilia collection. But I will admit that there is one other object that I am curious about. Sadly this is a little more macabre than the Mary Tin. This is the Death Plaque, also nicknamed the Death Penny. This was a circular bronze plaque which was issued after the war to the next of kin of every member of the services who was killed in service during the war. By that reckoning one must have been issued for my great grandfather, Edgar George Bennett. As next of kin, surely it would have gone to his widow, my great grandmother. The complicating factor is that she remarried in 1919. As it happens, although she passed away before I was born I do remember her second husband, who my Dad called Grandad. I’d just love to know what happened to Edgar’s plaque. I imagine that if it had been retained it would have passed to my grandmother, and then to my father or my Uncle Jim. I’m guessing it was either discarded or lost in the years following the war. I’d love to know what happened to it, but at this stage I think that’s highly unlikely.