EP, EPBM and other electroplate marks

How to read it

Electroplate was sold in the nineteenth century by the base it was plated on, and the marks follow the same pattern. Walker & Hall of Sheffield used E.P. throughout its catalogue of about 1900 for plated pieces and parts (“Oak and E.P.”, “E.P. Mount”). The Victoria and Albert Museum explains that Britannia metal, an alloy of 92 to 97% tin with small amounts of antimony and copper, was used as a base for electroplate from the 1840s, and that an object marked EPBM is electroplated Britannia metal. EPNS is electroplated nickel silver (the Silver Society). A Sydney ironmonger’s catalogue of 1879, F. Lassetter & Co.’s, lists communion services “electro-plated on Britannia Metal” beside others “electro-plated on Nickel Silver”, and candlesticks in electroplate, white metal and brass.

Also searched as: ep, epbm, ep on silver, ep silver mark.

Britannia metal is not Britannia silver

The two share a name and nothing else. Britannia silver is a standard higher than sterling: the Silver Society records that it was introduced in 1697, at no less than 958.4 parts of pure silver in 1,000, to stop silver wares being made from melted coins. Britannia metal is a tin alloy with no silver in it. The V&A credits the Sheffield metalworker James Vickers with beginning to make it in 1769, and notes that it could be cast, spun, stamped and engraved in ways other metals could not, which made it cheap to work.

Why the base metal mattered

Arthur Hayden, writing on Sheffield plate in 1908, explains that German silver was harder and costlier than copper as a base, and that when the silver wore thin its light colour did not show the wear the way copper did. Howard Okie (1928) has a less happy story of Britannia metal: James Dixon & Sons of Sheffield, among the first to take up electroplating, stamped their base “Britannia”, and he says the alloy in time became porous and rotten and was given up for nickel silver. Electroplated Britannia metal did not end there. The V&A has a teapot made by Reed & Barton of Taunton, Massachusetts, in about 1892 in electroplated Britannia metal.

What the law says

No EP mark is a hallmark; the Silver Society says electroplated items will not have silver marks. The US National Gold and Silver Stamping Act covers articles of an inferior metal with a plating of silver, known in the market as silver plate or silver electroplate, and the FTC’s guides note that the Act bars the words sterling and coin from silver-plated articles, alone or with other words.

Look-alikes

EP marks are often struck in a row of small shields beside a maker’s name, as described on the EPNS page. Grade words such as triple plate, quadruple plate or A1 are a different kind of mark, a maker’s claim about the plating; see quadruple plate.