Vintage Elizabethan Nova Scotia Tartan Teacup And Saucer – Provincial Flag Shield, Fine Bone China, Canadian Souvenir, England 1970s

An Elizabethan bone china teacup and saucer in the Nova Scotia tartan, with a gently panelled bowl and a gilt rim. The design runs as a ribbon of tartan looped around the provincial flag — the blue saltire on white — with the gold shield and red lion at its centre. The saucer carries the same device three times around.

The tartan is a printed decal, and it has to be: a woven sett must come out thread for thread, and no brush could hold that register around a curve. Turn the cup and you will find where the print meets itself.

What it prints is worth reading. The white ground and blue cross are the Nova Scotia flag, which flies the arms granted by Charles I in 1625, and the gold shield at its centre carries the red lion of Scotland. The tartan behind it has its own reading: blue for the sea, white for granite and surf, gold for the royal charter, red for that same lion.

The nineteen-seventies to the eighties. Both pieces are marked Nova Scotia Tartan over Elizabethan · Fine Bone China · England. Elizabethan was the trade name Taylor & Kent of Longton took up around 1960, and the firm renamed itself Elizabethan Fine Bone China Ltd in 1982; souvenir ware of this kind was busiest in between.

The tartan has a maker of its own. Bessie Murray, a handweaver, wove it in 1953 for the Sheep Association's stand at the Truro show, meaning it only for that week. It was adopted by Order in Council in 1955 — the first provincial tartan in Canada — and given its own Act in 1964. The sort of cup a Nova Scotian will pick up and start talking about.