Page 34 - BBR magazine 140 - 30yrs issue

34
BBR a step back
in history
With this issue BBR is 35 years old but, as David Burton explains, the other BBR - ‘Berry Brothers & Rudd’ - is a little older!
Above: Image of shop in the early years ‘George Berry’s name over No 3 St James Street, c.1820’.
Left & far left: Interior views of the shop.
The business was established by the widow Bourne in 1698 at 3 St. James’s Street, London and is Britain’s oldest wine and spirit merchant, having traded
from the same shop for over 300 years (see box at end of article). In 1765 Berry’s supplied the fashionable coffee houses at the ‘Sign of the Coffee Mill’,
later to become private clubs such as Boodles and Whites. They weighed customers on giant coffee scales, a
practice still carried out today, and the past records of customers’ weights span three centuries -including Lord Byron, William Pitt and the Aga Khan. They shipped wine on board the Titanic, supplied smugglers running alcohol into Prohibition-era America, and sheltered Napoleon III in the cellars beneath the shop (BBR website http://www.bbr.com/about/history). I recall walking across the portal feeling as though I was taking a step back in history - felt I should be speaking in a hushed voice, as one does in a museum or church. I met Simon Berry, now chairman, and was shown around the ground floor where some of the bottles were on display in ancient cabinets, then taken down a wooden rickety staircase to the cellars. I went carefully down about four or five steps and happened to glance left to a space about 12ins high between the floor of the ground
floor reception room I had just left and the ceiling of the cellar I was about to visit. It was stashed with bottles, all shapes and sizes, pushed into a small elongated space that seemed to be bursting with history. I stopped and tentatively removed one of the bottles, an early shaft & globe c.1655-1660, and held it up to examine the seal ‘R/ R M’ (pyramidal format) surrounding an antelope, possibly guardant, within a slightly crimped border. “Do you know how much this
Left & below: ‘CR’ crowned, a King’s head, crowned and affrontée,1661 - shaft and globe bottle dated c.1670- 1675.
On Wednesday, 21 June 1933, a Loan Exhibition of English Drinking Vessels, Books and Documents was opened by HRH Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone, at Vintner’s Hall in the city of London. The Exhibition ran for two weeks until 6 July 1933 and was organised by Francis Berry who penned the foreword to the catalogue and arranged the glass, silver, horn, treen, leather and other objets d’art, and André L Simon, who arranged the books and documents. The catalogue is now a collector’s item. Many of the sealed bottles on display came from the Berry Bros. & Co collection, now Berry Bros. & Rudd, and when I was researching for my book Antique Sealed Bottles 1640-1900 and the families who owned them, this encouraged me to arrange a visit to BBR in the late 1990’s to catalogue, measure and photograp, the collection.
Left & above: Early shaft & globe c.1655- 1660, seal engraved ‘R/ R M’ (pyramidal format) surrounding an antelope.