Vintage Ringtons Golden Jubilee Tankard Mug Queen Elizabeth II – Newcastle Tea Merchant Issue, Full Royal Arms, Gilt Cypher Reverse 2002

A Golden Jubilee tankard in fine bone china, and the name under the base belongs to a tea merchant rather than a pottery: Ringtons, a family business est 1907, printed around a small oval containing a horse and a covered delivery cart. Samuel Smith started the firm in Newcastle upon Tyne on £250, selling tea door to door — first from a hand barrow, then from horse-drawn vans painted black, green and gold that became a familiar sight across the north-east. Five generations on the firm still delivers to doorsteps, and the cart that started it is still in the mark.

It was never on a china-shop shelf; it reached households the same way the tea did, along a delivery round, and pieces issued that way have collectors of their own quite apart from those who collect royal commemoratives. Ringtons commissioned its china from the Staffordshire potteries rather than firing it, so the name under the base is the merchant's and not the maker's.

The decoration keeps most of the pot white. The full royal arms sit on the front in colour — lion and unicorn, the Garter band, Dieu et Mon Droit — over Queen Elizabeth II 1952 - 2002, with a gilt crowned E II R cypher on the reverse, drawn as a monogram rather than printed in plain letters. The form is a tankard rather than a teacup — straight-sided, on a low foot, with a broad loop handle banded in gold top and bottom, sized for a working mug of tea rather than for a display shelf. The weight of colour is all at the bottom, in a cobalt band lettered Golden Jubilee in gold and edged with gold lines, where most jubilee mugs would have run a band round the rim instead.

Twenty-odd years on the cobalt is even, the gilding unworn, and the cart is still going round.