Vintage Canada 125th Confederation Plate Queens 40th Accession – Peter Jones Exclusive, Limited Edition Of 5000, Signed John Ball 1992

The Queen stands at the centre of this bone china plate in the scarlet uniform of Trooping the Colour. A cobalt border carrying six Canadian scenes runs around her, the Canadian coat of arms sits above between 1867 and 1992, and the rim is scalloped and gilded.

The back explains the two dates, describing the plate as celebrating the joint anniversaries of the 125th year of the Confederation of Canada and the 40th year of the Queen's accession to the throne. Confederation and accession have nothing to do with one another; they simply fell due in the same year, and Canada happened to have that Queen as its head of state. Peter Jones China of Wakefield commissioned the plate in an edition of 5,000 and had it designed by John Ball, who is named on the reverse. Peter Jones was a retailer rather than a pottery, and houses of that sort were how most commemoratives of the period reached the market: the retailer chose the subject, ordered a capped run from a Staffordshire works and put its own name on the back, which is why so many plates of these decades name a shop and no pottery.

That year reads very differently on either side of the Atlantic. In Britain it was the year the Queen herself called an annus horribilis, with Windsor Castle alight and three of her children's marriages ending. In Canada it was the anniversary year, and also the year in which the country voted that October on the Charlottetown Accord, a package that would have rewritten the constitution this plate is celebrating. Canadians turned it down, 54.4 per cent against.

So the plate marks a hundred and twenty-five years of a constitutional arrangement in the very season that the country declined to remake it. The edition figure has been printed on the piece rather than left to a certificate, and the designer has been credited, neither of which is usual on a souvenir plate.