Vintage Stanley Fine Bone China Coronation Mug Elizabeth II – Full Sentence Inscription, Westminster Abbey, Royal Arms, Gilt Handle 1953

Stanley of Longton made this coronation tankard in bone china. The full royal arms occupy the front, a four-line inscription runs across the reverse, and the handle has been gilded from top to bottom.

The 1953 coronation was the largest single commemorative event the Staffordshire potteries ever worked, and the trade divided along the price of the body: earthenware for the council issues given out to schoolchildren, and bone china for the shops. Stanley belonged to the smaller end of the bone china business in Longton, and like most firms of that size it left no archive behind. The mark under the foot — Stanley, Fine Bone China, England, Est. 1875 — is very nearly the whole of what survives of it.

The arms were coloured in by hand, which is what sets the piece apart from the general run of its year: the outline was transfer-printed, and the enamels were then filled in by brush across the lion's mane, the quarterings of the shield and the Garter band. Full-colour transfers already existed by 1953 and were much quicker to apply, so filling the enamels by hand meant that every mug passed through a paintress's hands one at a time. On a subject the whole trade was hurrying to supply, this mug was not made in a hurry.

The wording was considered with the same care. Coronation china of that year almost always carries a noun phrase which functions as a label. This mug instead carries a complete sentence — Elizabeth the Second crowned in Westminster Abbey, June 2 1953 — which gives the person, the action, the place and the date in order and can be read without further explanation, and the name is spelled out in full rather than reduced to the E II R cypher. The wreath around it has been plaited from wheat as well as laurel, wheat being the emblem of plenty in a country that had only just come out of fourteen years of food rationing.