How old are my drawers? Researching second-hand furniture.
Over the time I spent living in furnished rented houses, I became very tired of cheap furniture. The kind of cheap furniture that only landlords buy. The kind of cheap furniture that IKEA makes for the sole purpose of making you buy the more expensive one because it suddenly seems like a good deal compared the the bottom-of-the-range model.
In other words, new cheap furniture.
I'm sure reasonable-value new furniture exists. I'm aware that there's a reason cheap furniture is the way it is: making furniture out of lightweight honeycomb materials or any of the wood-and-resin based particle boards is a more efficient use of materials, lighter to transport, and easier to manufacture than using traditional techniques. I'm sure that the wood resources of the world couldn't support the quantity of home furnishing we currently use if it was made from solid boards.
But I'd had enough of drawer bottoms made from what appeared to be cereal boxes, and objects that had been made at 3/4 scale, and I wanted to buy things made from trees that were cut down a long time ago - by keeping the furniture going, I could keep those trees in use. When the time came to buy furniture for an unfurnished rental place, I bought old, second-hand furniture.
Really heavy, brown, unfashionable second-hand furniture. From a second-hand shop that had no claims to 'antiques' and just prices things based on how much space the items take up in the warehouse.
Indisputably brown furniture.
This pricing strategy meant I got some fine prices on some 1980s cupboards, a reasonable deal for a bedside cabinet, and paid £65 for this set of drawers. Even before I bought it, I spotted some promising-looking joinery on the drawers, with dovetails that looked hand-cut. It seemed old, and well-made..
You don't get tiny, uneven dovetails with pencil markings from machine-made drawers.
Once I got it home, and cleaned it up (including binning the incredibly dusty bra that had fallen behind a drawer), I was even more pleased. The entire thing was made from solid wood, and it even came with a maker's stamp on the back: "Smith and Payne, Cabinet Makers and Upholsterers, Leicester".
The maker's mark - stamped in ink on the back of each drawer.
This isn't a name I knew, but I'm not a furniture expert. I turned to the infallible wisdom of Google and got... not much . At the time of my search, nothing actually relevant turned up that way - lists of cabinet makers in other locations (the common name "Smith" provides a lot of blind alleys), some current cabinet makers, but nothing that made any particular sense for the furniture in question. (A search now you get an antiques listing from Northumberland, but it doesn't give any more information on the makers).
It isn't a massively fancy piece of furniture - nicely made, but not elaborate, and the brass handles appear to be mass-produced parts. While the level of handwork is high for modern furniture, it doesn't seem to have been a high-end piece when new. My instincts said this put us 1930s at the latest - early enough that the middle-class would still be buying furniture from a local workshop rather than a distant factory. The style also isn't really right for a 50s or 60s piece either, which adds weight to this as a lower bound.
On the upper bound for age, the fittings are held on with machine-made screws, which puts us somewhere after the mid-19th century. I went down a bit of a rabbit hole writing this trying to find out exactly when the wood screw standardisation system was introduced, and didn't get far, so the most confident I can be is that it's after (and probably comfortably after, I don't think furniture is normally the cutting-edge of engineering) which probably puts us after 1841, when Joseph Whitworth proposed the first widely-adopted standardised system of screw threads.
But with a name and location, surely we should be able to do slightly better than a 90-year window? Searching archives for Leicester local history (this set of old local directories seemed promising) wasn't bringing up much useful, partially because I didn't know what years to search in - a bit of a circular problem.
Finally I realised that I probably wasn't the first person to have this question, I was just the first person to have it and have access to the internet (or at least no one had written about it in a way that generated search results). Pre-internet, where do you ask the general public this question? In the local newspaper, of course. Searching back-issues of Leicester newspapers on the British Newspaper Archive produced two brilliant results from three weeks apart in 1975. Firstly, on the 16th January, someone asks a familiar-looking question:
While Mr Phillip Tarratt (keen on double letters) doesn't have an answer, unlike the original asker we don't have to wait the three weeks it took for this to be published on the 6th February:
A shame that this isn't an exact match for my drawers, but very much the same enquiry.
Presumably none of these people are still around - props to all the archivists involved in ensuring this information wasn't lost.
"1890 to 1907" is a fantastic answer - a relatively small time window, it fits the initial hunches I had, and it means that the drawers are something like 120 years old. If the newspaper had access to modern archives in 1975 however, they would have found some even neater dating evidence for the end point of Smith and Payne. From the Leicester Chronicle, 22nd June 1907:
Tragically, history doesn't seem to record why Smith and Payne dissolved the partnership - I was hoping for some very old gossip.
Note that fantastically, this is the auction house of H and F Tarratt selling the stuff, which must mean that if Phillip Tarratt could have asked his father or uncle, they might have remembered dealing with Smith and Payne directly. It feels like 1975 was right on the cusp of the people who knew this information personally (or even second-hand) dying and making finding this out significantly more work, or even impossible. It's a great reminder of the power of writing things down, and of storing them in a searchable format.
Finally, the original unnamed questioner in 1975 might have been pleased by this advert from 21st September 1911, selling something that seems tantalisingly similar to what he owned six decades later:
Assuming an original purchase date of 1907, £16 is about £1600 in 2024 prices. My £65 drawers were a steal.
It'd be nice to think someone out there still has that walnut sideboard.