The spoon was bought for £3 from a charity shop in the West End of Glasgow in March 2026. The buyer, a retired schoolteacher named Catriona Ross, was looking for a Sunday teaspoon and noticed that the spoon she lifted out of the cutlery basket was unusually heavy for its size.
She took it home and washed it. She turned it over and saw three small marks on the back of the bowl, near the join with the handle. She did not know what the marks meant, but she knew enough to know that any hallmarked silver from a charity-shop basket deserved a second look.
She brought it to a Glasgow silver dealer named Iain MacCallum, who recognised the marks immediately and emailed The Pewter the same afternoon.
The spoon is a George III dessert spoon, Old English pattern, eight inches long, weighing roughly forty grammes. The marks are stamped in a vertical line: a castle (the Edinburgh assay mark), a thistle (the Scottish standard mark), the letter O in a shield (the date letter for Edinburgh assay year 1791-92), and the maker's mark WA.
WA in Edinburgh in 1791 is William Auld, who was admitted as a freeman of the Incorporation of Goldsmiths of Edinburgh on January 14, 1768, and who worked at premises on Parliament Close until his death in 1820. Auld is documented in the records of the Incorporation and his maker's mark is well attested in the standard reference, Ian Pickford's Silver Flatware: English, Irish, and Scottish, 1660-1980.
The spoon is, in itself, an ordinary piece of late Georgian Edinburgh silver. The interest is in the third mark.
Below the standard marks, near the tip of the handle on the back, is a fourth stamp. It is not an assay mark. It is a tiny rectangle, two and a half millimetres long, containing the initials JMcK. The lettering is finer than the official marks and the strike is shallower. It was added later, by an owner rather than by a silversmith, using a small stamping tool of the kind that was sold to private buyers in the early nineteenth century for marking household linens and silver.
JMcK in Glasgow in the early nineteenth century is a plausible owner's mark for the McKechnie family, a family of merchants in the Trongate. The McKechnies were prosperous; the head of the family in roughly 1820, James McKechnie, owned a substantial townhouse on Virginia Street and is recorded in the Glasgow Post Office Directory for 1821 as merchant in West India produce.
The McKechnie family records, held in the Mitchell Library in Glasgow, include an inventory of household plate prepared in 1833 for an insurance valuation. The inventory lists, among other items, twelve dessert spoons of Edinburgh make, by Auld, marked with the family initials, valued at £6 the dozen.
The spoon in MacCallum's hand is, almost certainly, one of those twelve. It is the only one that has surfaced.
What happened to the other eleven is unknown. The McKechnie family declined through the late nineteenth century — the West India trade had collapsed by 1860 and the family lost most of its money — and the household plate was probably sold piecemeal between 1880 and 1920. Some of the spoons may have been melted; some may be in private collections under indifferent attributions; some may, like this one, be in cutlery baskets in charity shops.
Peake in Sheffield has been compiling, over the last several years, a small database of Auld-marked Edinburgh silver in private and public collections. He has located three other dessert spoons of the same pattern and date in Scottish provincial museums, none of which carry the McKechnie owner's mark. Auld appears to have made dessert spoons in this pattern in some quantity through the 1780s and 1790s; the survival rate of the form is reasonable.
The McKechnie owner's mark is what makes this particular spoon worth more than its silver weight. A plain Auld dessert spoon of this date sells in the Edinburgh trade for roughly £40 to £60. A spoon with a documented family provenance, traceable through an 1833 inventory, sells for £150 to £200. The difference is the documentation, not the object.
Ross, who paid three pounds for the spoon, has decided to keep it. She has no particular use for a single dessert spoon, but she likes the idea that the spoon was in a household where it was once part of a set of twelve and that her morning Weetabix is now eaten with the surviving instrument.
Peake has asked her, if she ever decides to sell, to let The Pewter know. He would like to photograph the spoon for the Auld database and to publish a short follow-up note if any of the other eleven surface in his lifetime.
Ross has agreed. She has also, on Peake's suggestion, written a small note on archival paper, naming Auld and McKechnie and the 1833 inventory, and tied the note to the spoon with a length of cotton thread. The note will travel with the spoon when it eventually changes hands.
MacCallum, the dealer who first identified the marks, has been thinking about the broader question. He says that the Glasgow charity shops in his experience produce, on average, one piece of marked silver every six months, almost always identified by chance by a customer with a good eye. The system, he says, is inefficient but real.
The charity shop where Ross bought the spoon is a small Oxfam on Byres Road. The volunteer who priced the spoon at £3 did so on the basis of the weight, which she estimated by feel. She had no training in hallmark identification and she was unsurprised to be told, two months later, that she had sold a documented piece of Edinburgh silver for roughly two percent of its likely market value.
The volunteer's name is Joyce. She has been a volunteer at the shop for eleven years. She says that she will keep doing it the same way.
The spoon is in a small drawer in a kitchen in the West End of Glasgow. It is used most mornings. The McKechnie mark is still legible. The Auld marks are still bright. The piece is, after 235 years, doing exactly what it was made for.