Greetings, regular blog-followers and readers.

Sometime back, you may remember a posting I did about my 1862 Toulmin & Gale writing-slope. And what a gorgeous thing it is, too!

Gorgeous, but incomplete. As the photos show, a number of the slots in the organiser-console were all empty.

Since that post I’ve managed to find appropriate, period items to fill out the gaps. Such as a pocket dip-pen, and the crowning glory, an antique ivory ruler.

The ruler was probably originally 12 inches long (1ft), but this one is only 11 inches. Not sure why. Maybe it was broken at one point and ground down to repair it. No idea. Maybe, maybe not. Either way, the end-result looks like this:

The ruler has some writing on it, which says…

It says: “LUND – MAKER 57 Cornhill, London”.

Haven’t been able to find anything out, but it’s definitely old. I love it, despite it flaws 🙂 Just something I wanted to share.

The Little Red Box

This unassuming red box was something I picked up from a local flea-market about two weeks ago. I thought it was rather cute, and after a careful examination of it, I decided to buy it. On the outside, it doesn’t look anything special, and its outward appearance certainly doesn’t provide any clues as to what’s inside the box. But when I opened the lid, I just knew I had to have it.

The box with the lid opened

And here we are! With the lid unlocked and folded down, we see that it doubles as a writing-surface, with tabs for holding in blotting-paper. Beyond that is a storage-compartment and inkwell-slot. With…the original inkwell! Whoo-hoo! Beyond that is the leather stationery console…

Top to Bottom: Photograph album. Order-booklet. Pocket calender. Dip-pen. Pencil. Bone-Folder.

…which pops up… …to reveal more stuff on the other side: Here we have even more of the box’s original bits and pieces. I believe most of these to be crochet tools. We have yarn in a variety of colours and various hooks and picks, together with hole-punchers, a file, and a paper-knife or letter-opener. They’re all made of ivory. Between the legs of the pop-up stand is a beautiful, red silk interior, for storing stuff like the needle-case, the pin-cushion and other stuff… The little bundle of sticks up the back are actually tiny, tiny, tiny pencils. I’ve no idea what they’re for. They came with the box. Here’s a closeup of all the cute things inside the box:

Hole-puncher. Hook (button-hook?). Crochet hook. Crochet hook. File and spike.

Itty-bitty pencils. Four dip-pens. Needle-case (on the right). Pin-cushion (or what i think is a pin-cushion) on the left.

I was able to roughly date the box by its contents. Inside were calenders, booklets and photographs, dating between 1891-1899. I took that to meant that the box was manufactured sometime in the 1880s, possibly before then. In roughly 10 years of collecting antique writing instruments and accessories, and roughly 20 years drooling over writing-slopes of various kinds, this is the first slope or box or desk of this kind, that I had ever seen. I was amazed at a number of things. The first was the design. I’d never seen something like this before. And until someone else showed me a finished eBay auction, I thought that it might even be unique. But it does seem to have been an established style in the 1800s. Albeit one that must be pretty rare. In my time, I’ve seen about half-a-dozen different writing-slope designs, but never something like this! The box has no manufacturer’s mark on it anywhere at all. Which I find odd. You’d think something of this quality would come with a mark or label somewhere. And perhaps at one point it did. But I can’t see it anywhere. Restomodding the Box When I purchased this box at the start of the month, I was more-or-less, thrilled by its condition. But there was one problem with the box that needed to be swiftly rectified. And that was the broken storage compartment, which looked like this, when I bought it:

The broken storage compartment. Awww…

The storage-compartment bottom or floor, was originally one long, length of wood, which ran from one end to the other, fitting in place between small, wooden supports. Unfortunately, this was broken at some point in the box’s history. As it was the one piece that held all the other pieces in the storage-compartment together, everything had since gone out of alignment. There was evidence of at least one attempt at a repair, but it obviously didn’t work! So I was determined to try and fix it. If I wanted to, I could easily just cut a piece of wood and slot it back in and reassemble the box as it was originally. But I felt that this created a huge waste of space underneath the storage compartment. So I decided to restomod (restorative-modification, for those who’ve never heard the term) the box. To rebuild the broken floor, as well as incorporate a secret storage compartment underneath it. To do this, I pulled the box apart…

The box in pieces

…then I glued in small, wooden blocks to act as supports… …after that, I cut out two pieces of wood. One to support the inkwell, and the original storage-compartment-inkwell divider, and the other to act as the base for the storage-compartment, and the false-bottom, and lid for the secret compartment, underneath. The finished product looks like this:

Everything back in place. The inkwell is up on its correct level, and the original lid is back in place.

And here we can see the new floor:

Covered in green felt

…and without the inkwell… And here’s what it looks like with everything in place:

Press down on the left and the false bottom pops up. Take it out, and then you can access the space underneath. Then just slot it back in and pop it back down.

I’m writing this post as a tribute to my grandmother. I did write another post about this, but it was too waffly and boring, and the photographs looked like crap. So I decided to rewrite it and use better pictures. Anyway, without further ado, this is the story of my grandmother’s silver Peranakan belts.

Grandma and the Peranakan

My grandmother grew up in Singapore in the 1910s and 1920s, during the heyday of the British Empire. Grandma was descendant from, and was part of, the vibrant Peranakan culture that existed in what was then called the Straits Settlements. It was for this reason that the Peranakan were also called the Straits Chinese.

My paternal grandmother. Bertha Fu Kui Yok. The original owner of these belts. 7th May, 1914 — 28th November, 2011. Aged: 97. This photograph was taken about six months before she died.

The Straits Chinese or the Peranakan were the descendants of trading Chinese, who migrated from China to Southeast Asia during the 1500s-1800s. They were traders and merchants, sailing back and forth between the Chinese mainland, and countries in the South Pacific, like Indonesia, Singapore, Malaya and Bali. Over time, Chinese traders colonised these parts of the South Pacific, intermarrying with the local indigenous peoples. The descendants from these unions were called “Peranakan” (which literally means: “Descendant of Intermarriage Between a Foreigner and a Local”)

The Peranakan were famous for intricately decorated works of art. Everything from their dresses, skirts, robes, slippers and shoes, furniture, floor-tiles, window-shutters, porcelain, tiffin-carriers, even their dessert-cakes and snacks, their dinner-meals, luncheons and houses, and especially their jewelry were all very intricately decorated.

Grandma’s Peranakan Belts

Although not wealthy, my grandmother was fortunate enough to grow up with a small selection of jewelry to her name. Sadly, most of this has now been lost. But the two items which have survived are probably the two most important, and therefore, most valuable and significant of them all.

Her silver Peranakan belts.

The gold and silver belts owned by Peranakan women (“Nyonyas”) were specially crafted to be worn with traditional nyonya dress – Sarong Kebaya – A light, form-fitting two-piece outfit consisting of the Sarong (wraparound tubular skirt), and the Kebaya, the short, close-fitting jacket or blouse. The belts were worn with Sarong-Kebaya combinations to hold up the Sarong and prevent it from unwrapping or falling down. Such belts were usually reserved for special events. Family events and such. Weddings, dinners, anniversaries and so-forth. Made by hand by Peranakan jewelers, these belts were works of art to be treasured and used only on rare occasions.

Here are some examples of Sarong Kebaya, which I photographed during a trip to the Penang Peranakan Museum:

The silver dress-belts would wrap around the top of the Sarong to hold it up and stop it from unwrapping accidentally.

Traditional Sarong-Kebaya. Photograph taken at the Penang Peranakan Museum.

This is probably why grandma’s two belts have survived for so long, despite the family fortunes and the trials and tribulations that attended them, because they were stored away and only brought out on extremely significant occasions.

And here they are: First up is the older belt. This one is of a more traditional, segmented design, with dozens of little silver pieces linked together by dozens of tiny silver rings. Each link has a small flower stamped into the silver. The whole thing is 35 inches long. The oval-shaped buckle is removable. If you were a rich Peranakan nyonya, then you would probably have multiple belts like this. Then you could chop and change and swap belts and buckles around, contrasing silver with gold, and favourite belts with favourite buckles and so-forth.

Solid silver Peranakan nyonya belt. Probably from my great-grandmother’s (ca. 1875-1970) time. This belt is the older one, and probably dates to the late Victorian era or early 1900s, ca. 1890-1920. I’ve seen Peranakan belts of similar style dated between the 1880s-1920s.

The (removable) buckle or clasp depicts a tiger and a monkey either side of a lotus bud. Above them is a butterfly, and surrounding them on all sides are lotus flowers, water and leaves.

Closeup of the links and details, showing the rings and panels, and the little silver flowers

The second belt dates to the 1930s. It’s comprised of silver chain, and a 1 Guilder coin (that’s Dutch, in case anyone’s wondering), from 1929. The coin itself is 75% silver, so the chain would also be silver. There are examples of Peranakan belts which are made entirely out of silver coins, taken from British or Dutch currency. As money the coins were then obviously useless, but the Peranakan wanted the silver value of the coins, not the face-value stamped upon them or what they could potentially buy with the coins themselves.

Silver guilder coin with a rod of silver (coiled into a setting) soldered onto the face of the coin. Silver chain is then run through the coin to make up the rest of the belt.

This belt is of course, adjustable, just like the other one, but it works in a different way…

The whole length of the belt

This belt has segments of chain connected with rings and the end of the belt has an S-hook on it. Adjusting the belt’s length is a matter of hooking the S-clasp onto one of the three belt-rings, to get the closest possible length to what is ideal. The belt is then wrapped around, and the coin clasp or ‘weight’ is slipped through the chain, looping around and holding everything together purely by gravity.

How They Survived?

Your guess is as good as mine!

These belts, at least 80 or 90 years old, lived through the Great Depression, the Second World War, the Japanese Invasion in 1942 and all kinds of other family hardships.

They were originally my great-grandmother’s. Then my grandmother’s. Then they passed down to my aunt. She had no interest in them at all, so when my father asked for them, she handed them over. That was a few years ago. But how did I come to own them? Read on…

The Finding of the Belts of Power…

A few years ago, I went back to Malaya for a family wedding. While I was there, we visited the Peranakan Museum in Singapore, where I saw this belt on display:

Solid gold antique Peranakan nyonya belt. Singapore Peranakan Museum

Walking a little further on, I came across this:

Solid silver antique Peranakan nyonya belt. Singapore Peranakan Museum

My father grabbed me by the arm and pointed at it, and said:

“Did you know that grandma has a belt like that?”

I was dumbstruck.

WHAT!? WHERE!? HOW!?…WHY!?

You have to understand that in our family, almost nothing of intrinsic value has survived. All our heirlooms have been lost. Grandpa’s steamer-trunk, grandpa’s pocket-knife, grandpa’s hand-engraved ivory chopsticks, grandpa’s Chinese encyclopedia from the 1920s. And almost all of grandma’s jewelry. All gone! The very notion that there was something THIS significant, THIS rare and THIS valuable still in family hands shocked me!

Then my father told me how he had retrieved the belts from his sister during a previous trip and that he’d taken them home! He knew she wouldn’t value them or look after them, and so had rescued them from her and brought them back with him. It took a lot of pleading, but I finally managed to get it out of his hands so that the belts could finally rest with a person who would take proper care of them, and cherish them, love them, and realise their rarity, and historical, cultural and familial significance.

Grandma’s belts, along with other documents detailing her life.

Here’s something you don’t see every day.

“High Class Hand Safe”

This beast is the “High Class Hand Safe”, although it don’t look that high class, and it sure as hell ain’t a safe!

I bought this at the local flea-market after managing to knock down the price from the seller who didn’t want to have to lug it all the way home again. This charming object is a solid steel, Japanese-made cashbox. Prewar, ca 1920-1930. It’s extremely solid and very strong. To unlock it, you need the key and the combination. It comes with space for banknotes, cheques, papers and cash. And two keys. One to unlock the box, and one to wind up the alarm-bells inside!

The box is extremely rugged and dare I say it, bomb-proof. The clockwork bell-alarm inside the box comes with two settings:

Setting #1: The bell rings whenever the box is unlocked. And that’s all it does.
Setting #2: The bell rings whenever the box is unlocked. Or, whenever the box is moved! So if you try and pick it up and run away with it, the alarm goes off, and it is LOUD! Kinda handy feature if I ever take this to an antiques fair and someone tries to steal the money I made from selling my bric-a-brac! Hahahaha!!

It’s an absolute charmer and certainly very cute. I’ve seen a similar one which belonged to a family friend, but they’re not as uncommon as the seller would have one believe. Although I have seen them in better, and in much worse condition than this, online.

Dad’s always wanted a safe – one of those huge old antique things which you could hide a dead body inside. Well it ain’t a safe, but it sure as hell is a strongbox. Without a key or some way to pick the lock, you couldn’t open this thing. And even then, you still need the combination (which thankfully, I do have!)

Maybe this’ll do until someone dies and leaves us a safe to inherit.

Curiouser and curiouser…here’s an identical strongbox owned by a family friend. I photographed this back in May, when I was visiting Penang, Malaysia:

Here’s something you don’t see every day.

“High Class Hand Safe”

This beast is the “High Class Hand Safe”, although it don’t look that high class, and it sure as hell ain’t a safe!

I bought this at the local flea-market after managing to knock down the price from the seller who didn’t want to have to lug it all the way home again. This charming object is a solid steel, Japanese-made cashbox. Prewar, ca 1920-1930. It’s extremely solid and very strong. To unlock it, you need the key and the combination. It comes with space for banknotes, cheques, papers and cash. And two keys. One to unlock the box, and one to wind up the alarm-bells inside!

The box is extremely rugged and dare I say it, bomb-proof. The clockwork bell-alarm inside the box comes with two settings:

Setting #1: The bell rings whenever the box is unlocked. And that’s all it does.
Setting #2: The bell rings whenever the box is unlocked. Or, whenever the box is moved! So if you try and pick it up and run away with it, the alarm goes off, and it is LOUD! Kinda handy feature if I ever take this to an antiques fair and someone tries to steal the money I made from selling my bric-a-brac! Hahahaha!!

It’s an absolute charmer and certainly very cute. I’ve seen a similar one which belonged to a family friend, but they’re not as uncommon as the seller would have one believe. Although I have seen them in better, and in much worse condition than this, online.

Dad’s always wanted a safe – one of those huge old antique things which you could hide a dead body inside. Well it ain’t a safe, but it sure as hell is a strongbox. Without a key or some way to pick the lock, you couldn’t open this thing. And even then, you still need the combination (which thankfully, I do have!)

Maybe this’ll do until someone dies and leaves us a safe to inherit.

Curiouser and curiouser…here’s an identical strongbox owned by a family friend. I photographed this back in May, when I was visiting Penang, Malaysia:

My eyesight sucks. 

I have Retinopathy of Prematurity. I have astigmatism. I have myopia. I have legal blindness. 

Glorious. 

When I started going out to the theater more often, I decided that I had to get a better view of what was happening up on the stage. Short of sitting up in a box, I decided to do the next best thing. And I bought theater glasses. Also called opera glasses or theater binoculars. And I thought I’d share them with you. 

My two sets of theater glasses. Blue cloisonne, and both with Mother of Pearl. Date: 1880s.

First, the one at the back…

Blue cloisonne theater glasses with Mother of Pearl around the edges of the viewing lenses. Engraved on the MoP: 

“T. Gaunt. Optician. Melbourne & Sydney”

I date these to about 1880. ‘T Gaunt’ was Thomas Gaunt, a watchmaker and optician operating out of Bourke St., Melbourne, from the 1850s until 1890. 

And here’s my other set: 

This set has absolutely NO markings on it at all. I assume they’re from roughly the same period given how similar they lok. 1870s-1890s. Fully clad in Mother of Pearl. 

Both sets work flawlessly. They extend and focus smoothly, and pack up smoothly. Their finishes are almost flawless  and they’re not broken or damaged in any way. 

About a week ago I was out on the town, running errands and attending to a couple of meetings and trying to get to the bottom of a couple of issues which had been bugging me for a while. After sorting all those things out, I decided to do a bit of antiquing on the way home. I stopped by a tiny little hole-in-the-wall antiques shop that I know of, on a tram-route home from the center of town. I stopped in, poked around, and found something sitting on a shelf…quite dark, dull, ugly, and frankly…unloved.

After some haggling with the shopkeeper he agreed to knock the price down to almost half. And I purchased this rather ugly-looking object, for what can only be described as a pittance – since I’ve seen these things selling for about $150-200 online (and up to $300 in other antiques shops I’ve visited!). Here it is:

My God it’s ugly! What the hell is it, and what swamp did you dig this up from?

What you’re looking at here is a Victorian (or possibly, Edwardian)-era counter bell. To say this was a diamond in the rough is putting it mildly. It was in horrific condition! It was ugly, brown, tarnished and looked like it had been sitting in a sewer for 100 years. But I had to have it.

Back in the days when ringing a bell like this actually provided you with customer-service, a bell like this would be found on every front-desk, lobby, shop-counter and foyer in the world. This particular bell is admittedly, quite plain – there are ones which are extremely elaborate and unique, and which come in all shapes and sizes.

The bell is of a more familiar push-button design, and something which we’d recognise more readily as a service-bell, than say, my other one, which is probably from the 1860s or 70s, and is of a more antiquated, side-striking spring-toggle design:

1860s/70s side-toggle service-bell

But it differs in one main respect. Like the 1870s one above, that ugly duckling in the first picture is a pedestal bell, a style which lasted well into the 1900s, not finally dying out, to be replaced by the more squat, low-based bells which we have today, until probably the 1910s or after the First World War.

Anyway. Back to the bell.

I’d figured out roughly how old it was, and also, how the gong at the top was correctly oriented…Yeah there is actually a way that it fits onto the stand! I didn’t notice it either at first! But if you look at the picture at the top, you’ll notice that the hole drilled through the gong for the stand is NOT drilled dead-center. It’s actually off-center, on an angle.

That is done deliberately – it’s not a manufacturing-fault.

Drilling the hole like that forces the bell-top to sit lopsidedly on the stand. This means that one side of the bell-rim is higher than the other. If you look close, you’ll see that there’s a slight angle, with the left side of the edge higher than the right. It’s made like this so that when the button at the top is pushed, and the clapper underneath swings up (and to the left) to strike the bell, even with your hand or finger still on the button above, the clapper won’t touch the rim of the bell, and therefore, mute the sound – it allows the ring to sound freely and resonate – something that it couldn’t do if the gong was oriented the wrong way around, with the low side of the rim to the left. This would cause the clapper to rub against the underside of the bell, dulling the sound and not producing as loud or clear a ring.

Once I’d screwed the gong onto the bell correctly so that the clapper would strike it properly to produce the best ring, I wondered what I should do next. It is brass…maybe I should polish it?

A bell like this would originally have taken pride-of-place on some shop-counter or hotel desk, its golden yellow brass sparkling in the light from oil-lamps, candles, or the flame of a gas-mantle or an early form of electric-lighting. And I wanted to restore that shine, sheen and sparkle to the brass.

So. Out with the Brasso. Invented in 1905 and still shining to this day, Brasso is probably one of the best metal-polishes in the world. It stinks like hell and it’ll leave your hands as black as coal, but it does the job! It took me AGES of scrubbing and rubbing, wiping, buffing, over and over and over again to remove decades of tarnish, which had built up in caked-on layers of oxidation. But I finally got it all off. And I’d restored a golden shine!

Here is Before:

Dull, dark, tarnished, crusty, rusty, eugh…

…And here’s After:

Golden, polished, shiny brass, scrubbed and buffed to a mirror-finish!

The problem with brass is that…it tarnishes. Left to its own devices, it will eventually turn back to that dull, unsightly brown, tarnished, oxidised appearance all over again. What to do??

Brass has been used for centuries. Its colour, shine, sound and the fact that it’s impervious to rusting has made it an extremely popular metal. And that means that there’s LOADS of ways to clean brass. Everything from ketchup to toothpaste to lemon-juice and baking-soda, crushed salt and Worcestershire Sauce! But the problem is that most of these POLISH the brass…but don’t do much else. Once it’s polished, it’s polished and it’s done.

Of course the way to give the brass any sort of long-term tarnish-protection is to spray-coat it with clear lacquer. I don’t have any, and I’m not about to go out and buy any. That’s when I realised you could use something else at home to produce a similar effect. Not only does it polish the brass, it also gives it a protective coating. It’s not as effective or long-lasting as lacquer, but it does the job if you take care of it.

Olive oil.

A small bowl of oil, a paper-towel, and some elbow-grease not only cleans the brass, but after a bit of rubbing, it gives it a nice, protective layer a bit like lacquer. Obviously since it’s a natural product it won’t last as long, but it does what lacquer does, which is what you want it to do – which is slow down the tarnishing process, which is what brass will do, if you leave it alone. You’ll know that you’ve polished it enough with the oil when the cloth comes away clean from the brass. The layers of oil should keep the brass shiny for a nice long time 🙂

What we have here is a beautiful dulled brass (bronze?) toggle-operated counter bell. Of an extremely old design, this bell dates to the 1870s or 1880s, and might’ve been found on any shop-counter or hotel lobby-desk around the world during the late Victorian era.

It’s very different from modern bells in that instead of being the now-conventional push-button design, it is instead of a spring-toggle design. The bell is rung by pressing the toggle at the base, to pull back the striking-hammer. Releasing the toggle strikes the clapper against the outside of the bell (as opposed to the inside, as is most common with counter bells these days), causing it to ring.

It’s a beautiful bell, about four inches high, and with a sweet, bright ring. It cost me a pittance! Just $4.00 at my local thrift-shop, and I’m thrilled to own something so old, unique, and beautiful 🙂