Antique Lord Roberts Boer War Plate – Pre 1901 Soldiers of the Queen, Baden Powell Mafeking Roundel, Victorian Military Patriotic Ware 1900

A fluted earthenware plate with a scalloped and gilded rim, Lord Roberts at the centre in scarlet full dress, his medals picked out one by one and his name printed below.

About him stand the fighting men of that season, each pair flanking a royal shield: a Royal Navy rating captioned The Handy Man beside a Royal Marine, a Gordon Highlander beside an infantryman, all of them Soldiers of the Queen. Flags cross above and below, along the foot runs Britons hold your own!, and among the flags at the top sits a small roundel of Baden-Powell. The sailor's nickname was the phrase of the year: naval crews had lifted guns from their ships, mounted them on improvised carriages and dragged them inland to fight beside the army, and the country named them for it.

Three things on the plate date it more surely than a factory mark would. Soldiers of the Queen places it before Victoria's death in January 1901; Roberts held the South African command from December 1899 to November 1900; and Baden-Powell became a household name when Mafeking was relieved that May.

An antique of some hundred and twenty-five years, then, from the last great wave of patriotic pottery before photography took the work over. The pre-1901 wording is scarcer than the King versions that followed, and Roberts, ordinarily paired with Kitchener on ware of this kind, is here set beside Baden-Powell instead — an arrangement that brings Scouting collectors alongside the military ones. Nothing is marked on the back, as is usual for the class: prints came from specialist engravers, blanks were fired wherever there was capacity, and paper labels have long since washed away. Plates of this sort went up over the mantelpiece while the news was still arriving, which is much of why one that survived is worth the keeping.