Vintage Hammersley Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Dish – Four National Flowers, EIIR Cypher & Crown, Dated Bone China, England 1953

A Hammersley bone-china dish for the coronation of 2nd June 1953 — the first coronation ever broadcast live on television, the event that put a TV set in half of Britain's living rooms and twenty-seven million people in front of them. Pieces like this went home in coat pockets that summer and spent the next decades in family cabinets.

The design is a small lesson in heraldic botany. At the centre, the sky-blue EIIR cypher under St Edward's Crown, wrapped in the four national flowers of the United Kingdom — Tudor rose for England, thistle for Scotland, daffodil for Wales, shamrock for Northern Ireland — with oak leaves and acorns, the old emblems of strength and endurance, arching overhead. A banner above reads Coronation – 2nd June 1953; one below, Queen Elizabeth II. The scalloped rim carries a garland of the same four flowers and a hand-brushed gold edge. The colours are hand-tinted over the printed outline — tilt it in the light and the purples and rose-pinks show the unevenness of a real brush.

Turn it over for the best part: the backstamp announces, in a ring of its own flowers, A Perpetual Coronation Memento Specially Designed by Hammersley, Bone China Made in England, 1953 — a piece that dates itself, from the Longton house known for its fine thin-walled china, with the hand-painted pattern number 4568 C beside it.

For the coronation collector, the Hammersley shelf, or anyone royal-minded who appreciates a dish that carries its own birth certificate.