Vintage Royal Albert Memory Lane Fluted Bone China Mug – Blue Forget Me Not Sprigs, Gilt Rim and Handle, Matching Floral Wreath Mark 1960s

This fluted bone china mug carries Royal Albert's Memory Lane pattern. Sprigs of blue forget-me-nots are scattered around a plain band below the rim, and gold has been laid along the rim and the outer curve of the handle.

Royal Albert built its name on teaware — cups, saucers and trios, the things a household saved for and set out for visitors — and by the 1960s it was among the most widely sold English bone china names anywhere, carried there largely by Old Country Roses, which was introduced in 1962 and has long been described as the best-selling bone china pattern ever made. Mugs sat at the edge of that business. A mug was made for using rather than for displaying, and it was produced in far smaller numbers in any given pattern, which is why a Royal Albert shelf is nearly always made up of cups and saucers with only the occasional mug among them.

The pattern name does more work than most. Forget-me-not has meant remembrance in Europe since the middle ages, and the Victorians used it above any other flower on mourning jewellery and memorial cards; Memory Lane plants that flower along the road it names. The mark underneath says it a third time — instead of the plain crown-and-name stamp used across the range, the crown here sits inside a wreath of the same forget-me-nots. A mark like that had to be drawn and engraved for one pattern alone, and firms generally kept them for series they meant to run for years rather than for a season's line.

The copyright line reads 196–, the final figure lost under the curve of the foot, so the decade can be fixed although the year cannot. That decade was the period in which Royal Albert's floral output was at its widest and its marks at their most elaborate.