Silver plate: EPNS, A1, EPBM and Sheffield plate, and what each is worth

01

What the letters on the back of a spoon mean

Plated wares are marked, and they are marked in letters rather than in hallmarks, because a hallmark is not available to them. The Hallmarking Act 1973 is blunt about the reason: it is an offence, in the course of trade or business, to apply to an unhallmarked article a description indicating that it is wholly or partly made of platinum, gold, palladium or silver. A manufacturer of plated goods therefore stamped something that described the plating instead, and a century of those stampings is now in the drawers of this country.

EPNS

Electroplated nickel silver. A body of nickel, copper and zinc with a thin electrolytic coat of silver on it. Much the commonest mark on British cutlery and hollowware.

EP

Electroplated. The same idea, without naming the base alloy.

EPBM

Electroplated Britannia metal. Britannia metal is a tin alloy with antimony and copper, nothing to do with the 958 Britannia silver standard, and it takes plating well. Teapots and tankards are often EPBM.

A1, A1 quality, AA1, triple plate

Grades of plating thickness that makers used to sell their better lines. A1 is a maker's own claim about how heavily the silver was laid on, and it is not a standard of anything.

BP

British plate. A nineteenth-century plated ware on a nickel alloy body, made before and alongside electroplating.

Nickel silver, German silver, alpacca, alpaca

Different names, and spellings, for the same white base alloy. Icon's conservation guidance puts it plainly: German silver is a white alloy made from nickel, zinc and copper. There is no silver in any of them, plated or not.

Silver plate, silver on copper, plated, Sheffield plate on a modern piece

Descriptions of a coating. None of them is a fineness and none is a hallmark.

The names were chosen to sound like silver, and they have been doing that job since the middle of the nineteenth century. It is not a modern trick and it was not illegal: a canteen stamped EPNS was sold honestly as electroplated nickel silver to people who knew exactly what that meant and wanted a full service they could afford.

02

Why there is no silver to recover

The silver on an electroplated piece is real silver. The difficulty is where it is. It sits as a film a few microns thick over the whole outside of the object, and the whole outside of a canteen of cutlery is a great deal of surface and very little metal. Taking it off means dissolving it chemically, at a cost per piece that does not depend on how much comes back.

That arithmetic does not change with quantity, which is why a heavy box of plated cutlery is not a better proposition than a light one. It is the reason plated items are identified from photographs here and named as such before anybody packs them, rather than being taken in, weighed and sent back with an apology. The silver page and the cutlery page both say so on their face.

03

Old Sheffield Plate is a different material

Everything above describes electroplating, which arrived in the 1840s. For a hundred years before that, plated wares were made by a completely different process, and the pieces that survive from it are not electroplate in any sense.

The technique was discovered in Sheffield in about 1742 by Thomas Boulsover, a cutler. An ingot of copper was covered top and bottom with sheet silver and fired until the two fused, and the fused block was then rolled out and worked as a single sheet. The silver on such a piece is therefore a layer of real thickness that was worked along with the copper, not a film deposited onto a finished object. Production declined after electrolytic plating arrived in the 1840s and had all but ceased by the 1870s.

Sheffield's own Assay Office is part of the same story. It has existed since 1773, it moved in 1774 into a court off Norfolk Street lately occupied by Boulsover himself, and after the second Sheffield Act of 1784 it kept a register of makers' marks on plated silver wares made within a hundred miles. Marks on plated goods were a matter of record from the start.

Old Sheffield Plate and electroplate, side by side

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The wired edge is the single most useful tell, because it exists for a structural reason. A sheet of fused plate has a copper core that would show as a red line on any cut edge, so makers soldered a silver wire along the rim to conceal it. An electroplated piece has no such problem and no such wire.

Where a piece is early, or carries a plated maker's mark, or is an unusual form, it belongs with a specialist dealer or a saleroom rather than with a buyer of metal. The same is true of the better Victorian electroplate: a signed piece by a firm collectors follow is sold as that firm's work, and its value has nothing to do with the film of silver on it. Neither of those is a valuation this business is in a position to give, and you should not accept one from anybody who prices by weight.

04

Recognising plate with nothing but your eyes

You do not need an instrument, and in most cases you do not need the letters either. Three signals settle nearly everything on a kitchen table.

1. No hallmark among the marksBritish sterling carries a hallmark: a sponsor's mark, an assay office mark and a mark for the standard. On English silver that was a lion passant, a small lion walking to the left, until 1999; since then the figure 925 in an oval is the compulsory mark and the lion is optional. Scottish sterling shows a thistle or a lion rampant instead. Plated wares carry letters, a maker's name, or a row of small shaped stamps arranged to look like a hallmark without being one. If there is a row of marks with no lion, no 925 and no assay office mark in it, the row is decoration.
2. Colour break-through at rims and high pointsTurn the piece to the light and look at the rim, the foot, the edge of a spoon bowl, the crest of any raised decoration and the places a cloth has passed over ten thousand times. Copper blushing pink through the silver, or a grey-yellow metal showing, is plate. On fused plate the copper comes through as a warm patch rather than a scratch.
3. The feel of a seam and the weight of the thingRun a thumbnail around the rim and along any join. A wired rim on a hollow piece, or a seam you can feel that a silversmith would have planished out, points to plate. Britannia metal under plating is noticeably light for its size and dents softly; sterling has a different heft and rings when it is tapped.

Two things that do not work. A magnet is no help, because neither sterling nor most plated bodies are magnetic. And rubbing a piece to see what is underneath is a test that damages the object whether or not it turns out to be silver, which is covered in the guide to testing at home.

If you want a mark identified rather than guessed at, Sheffield Assay Office holds registers of sponsors' marks going back to 1773 and also compiles a list of electroplaters' marks and trade names, and will research a mark on a fee basis. That is the right route for a plated piece you think may be early, and it is a route nobody selling metal can offer you.

05

What to do with a plated canteen

A full canteen weighs several kilograms in its case. Packing it up and posting it across the country, only to be told it is nickel alloy, is a common and avoidable waste of an afternoon. Here is the order that avoids it.

1. Turn six pieces over, from different parts of the box, and look for a lion or a 925 beside an assay office mark. Canteens assembled over three generations are very often mixed, and a set that is mostly EPNS can still contain a dozen sterling teaspoons or a sterling serving spoon that came from somewhere else.
2. Photograph the marks on any piece that has no letters, and on any piece whose marks you cannot read. Those are the ones worth asking about, and asking costs nothing.
3. Leave the knives out of the count entirely. Sterling knife handles are hollow shells filled with pitch or resin around a steel blade, and plated ones are simply plated. The weighted and loaded silver guide explains why a knife weighs what it weighs.
4. Send only what has been identified as sterling. If that turns out to be nothing, you have spent an evening and packed nothing.
5. For the plated remainder, treat it as what it is: usable cutlery. A local saleroom will take a good boxed canteen as a lot, a house-clearance sale absorbs the rest, and a set that is still perfectly serviceable can simply stay in the house and get used.

The photo estimate exists for exactly this kind of sorting. What comes back is a written opinion saying which pieces appear to be sterling and which appear to be plate, before a label is issued and before anything is packed.

06

Seller risks and exceptions

• Selling an early piece of fused plate for its metal. There is no metal in it worth having, so a weight-based offer on it is close to nothing, and the object may be worth a great deal more to somebody who collects the material.
• Being offered money by weight for a boxed canteen. A buyer who offers you a figure by weight for a box marked EPNS is either not reading the marks or is relying on you not to.
• Assuming a row of marks is a hallmark. Pseudo-hallmarks on plated wares are common, deliberate and often convincing at a glance. Look for the lion or the 925 and an assay office mark, not for the pattern.
• Polishing hard to make the marks legible. Abrasive cleaners wear away the silver and any engraved decoration, and on plate they cut through the coating and expose the copper. See whether to clean before you sell.
• Splitting a set to test the water. A complete boxed canteen sells as a canteen; a canteen missing four forks sells as a job lot.
• Throwing the box away. On plated wares the case, the fitted tray and the maker's label are part of what a saleroom is buying.

07

When not to use this route

The guide to antique silver or scrap scores the same decision for sterling pieces, and valuation, appraisal or offer sets out which kind of opinion you actually need. What is taken here is set out on the tea sets and hollowware page, and plate is not on it.