stoat

It's good to have the stoat out again.  He was always in the centre of the mantelpiece at 20 Hillside - and certainly a presence before that, I'm sure.  I've always been very fond of him - technically an ermine, I suppose, since it's a stoat in his white winter coat.

But.  I always thought he was a Staffordshire figure - certainly, the pose on a little grassy outcrop is very much in mid-nineteenth century (let's say 1840s) style - a popular ornament for a cottage chimney piece.  I thought I'd better check underneath, though.  The inscription reads "Beswick" - and a quick online search reveals that, modeled by Arthur Gredington (who modeled most of the horses and cattle for which the firm was mostly known - indeed, I had a Beswick china horse or two), he dates from between 1945-1963.  I'm pretty certain he must come from the earlier part of that, and was probably found in a junk shop - with a broken tail, because like so many of the cracked, chipped, damaged objects that characterized the antiques (or in this case "antiques"... ) at 20, he was lovingly repaired - albeit with a tail that curls underneath him, rather than out at the back.  I guess my father didn't, of course, have the benefit of Google to see what the original tail position would have been.

Did my parents think he was Staffordshire, and Victorian?  Did I just assume this, because of some of the china company he kept?  I still am very attached to the piece, but of course I'm now seeing it, in historical terms, very differently - a case of very long-standing assumptions and associations having been rewritten by research.