What EPNS certifies
EPNS stands for electroplated nickel silver, and it certifies nothing that anybody tested. A manufacturer strikes those four letters on an object made of nickel, copper and zinc that has been given a skin of silver in an electric bath. No assay office sees the piece, so it carries no hallmark, no lion passant and no date letter.
The consequence is the answer most readers came for. The silver on an electroplated piece cannot be recovered at a profit, so plate is worth what somebody will pay for the object, and nothing at all for its metal.
| Mark | Stands for | What lies under the silver |
|---|---|---|
| EPNS | Electroplated nickel silver | Nickel, copper and zinc. The commonest base by far |
| EP | Electroplate | Base metal unstated |
| EPBM | Electroplated Britannia metal | Tin and antimony. Soft, and dents easily |
| A1 | The plater’s own grade | Any of the above. A claim about the thickness of the deposit, not a standard |
| Nickel silver, German silver, Alpacca | A copper, nickel and zinc alloy | The base metal on its own, with no silver deposited on it |
Why nothing marked EPNS is Georgian
Electroplating was patented in Birmingham by Elkington in 1840, and the firm licensed it widely in the years that followed. That date is the floor for the whole material: a piece stamped EPNS was made in 1840 or later, whatever the shape of it suggests, and a Georgian date on a plated tea service is an impossibility rather than a bargain.
Silver over copper before 1840 means something else. Thomas Boulsover, a Sheffield cutler, found in 1743 that a sheet of silver and an ingot of copper could be fused and rolled out as one metal, and the trade worked that material for a century until electroplate undercut it. The older material was fused under heat, while EPNS is deposited from a solution, and the two behave differently as they wear. The Sheffield entry covers the town where both were made.
What the law lets a plater print
Section 1 of the Hallmarking Act 1973 makes it an offence, in the course of a trade or business, to apply to an unhallmarked article a description indicating that it is wholly or partly made of silver. Schedule 1 sets out the exception that governs plate: “silver” is permissible if qualified by the word “plated”, and where the description is in writing the lettering of “plated” must be at least as large as any other lettering in it.
The same schedule carves out one phrase by name. A description of an article as “Britannia” is taken to mean silver of 958 parts in a thousand, except in the phrase “Britannia metal”, which is the tin alloy under EPBM and holds no silver whatever.
The row built to look like a hallmark
Victorian and Edwardian platers struck their own punches in a line the length of a real hallmark: a shield, a beast, a letter, sometimes a crown. These pseudo-hallmarks are legal, they are on a great deal of plate, and they are read as hallmarks every week.
Read them by what is missing. No lion passant, no figure of Britannia, no 925, no Scottish thistle or lion rampant and no Irish harp means no assay office was involved. A lion standing next to the letters EPNS is a plater’s lion, drawn to borrow the look of the real one.
What plate makes at auction
| Lot | Marks | Hammer |
|---|---|---|
| Set of six sterling teaspoons with an EPNS tray, mixed | Lion on the spoons, EPNS on the tray | £40 |
That is an illustrative figure from the price records. The six sterling spoons earned the £40; the tray travelled with them to the saleroom and added nothing to the total. A refiner would not have taken the tray either, because recovering a few grams of silver spread over a square metre of nickel costs more than the silver comes to.
Sort a box of plate by name, not by size
The heaviest thing in the box is rarely the one worth carrying. Elkington, Hukin and Heath, Mappin and Webb and Walker and Hall made electroplate that is bought as design rather than as tableware, and a complete boxed set of any of them beats a large worn tray by a distance. Everything else is valued as a used object in the condition it is in, and worn plate showing copper at the rim is worth less than the cost of taking it to a sale.
Work through the six tests on anything ambiguous before you sort. For whatever in the box turns out to be solid, weigh it and put the grams into the scrap calculator, which gives the floor that plate does not have.
