There is a case in the back of my shop that most people never see. The room it lives in is only half finished, so I keep the door shut and take folks in myself — which means by the time someone is standing in front of that case, we both know they are a serious person. The repeat offenders, I call them. You know the type. You are the type, or you wouldn’t still be reading.
The shelf is a gentlemen’s affair. An S.T. Dupont pen lying in its Paris box. Cut crystal. An inkwell. Pocket watches. A little brass crest from La Salle. It is the sort of collection a certain kind of man assembles on a certain kind of desk, and it photographs beautifully.
And tucked right in the middle of all that masculine ceremony is a small, dark, worn-out disc about the size of a nickel-and-a-half, that I put there entirely on purpose.
It is a medal. Silver plated — and I’ll be honest with you, the plating has given up in places and worn through to the copper underneath, with a few green freckles of age where the two metals have been arguing for ninety years. It is not valuable the way the Dupont is valuable. You could hold it and think well, that’s seen better days, and set it back down, and I would not blame you.
But turn it over and squint. The maker’s mark reads J.R. Gaunt — a British firm that stamped out cap badges and club medals by the barrowful, with a hand in Montreal. (The McCord Museum in Montreal has drawers full of the work, if you’d like to fall down that particular hole — I’ll wait here.) So half the regimental badges and society fobs in this country passed through their dies. And the front, under a little rising sun with maple leaves and Ontario trilliums around the edge, carries six initials: C.F.B.P.W.C.
The Canadian Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs.Founded in 1930 — which drops them into the long quiet between the first wave of the women’s movement and the second. (They’re still going, by the way.) Working women — at a time when the phrase itself was still an argument — banding together for equal pay and a seat at the table, decades before that fight had a tidy name. The style of the thing says 1930s or ’40s to me, which puts it right at the founding. So while all those gentlemen’s objects were sitting on their desks being important, this is what the women were doing.
I don’t know whose it was. Somebody earned it, or was given it, or wore it to the meetings where the resolutions got written. I like to think she’d be quietly pleased to find herself here — the one working woman in a case full of men’s things, not asking permission, just in the room. Seemed to me exactly where she belonged.
She’s not for sale to the first person through the door. But if you ask to see the back room, and you pick her up, and you turn her over — well. We’ll have something to talk about.
Leslie
778-708-0454
The Pound & the Provenance
7791 Steveston Highway
(northwest corner of No. 3 Road and Steveston Highway)
Richmond, BC, Canada
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Please Note: I am not an appraiser, a silversmith or a gemologist. I am an antiques dealer. A generalist with a love for things with a bit of age. I had a stroke, four years ago, and AI is helping me to do better than I would have. Nothing here is false, everything here is true. I hope you enjoy it and please leave a message.
Ref. no. 1191
