A new service for dating English furniture - Design Notes

Magazine Antiques, June, 2002 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

Account books for English furniture makers and their patrons survive, but primarily only for the grandest and most prolific makers who were commissioned to supply affluent owners with furniture for their palatial houses in London and the country These documents are replete with information, often very detailed, enumerating materials used and their cost, delivery fees, and important dates in the commission's progress. Consequently they are perfect for dating the piece of furniture in question.

Another way to date furniture, little known to all but a few furniture historians and dealers, is by researching the locks that were supplied to cabinetmakers. The Chubb Lock Company established in Wolverhampton in 1818, has been a leader in this field from its foundation. Until the mid-1930s every lock the company made bore a serial number that in most cases can be assigned a specific date. Chubb's records, which are largely complete, also contain information about the lock, the locksmith's name, and sometimes other details.

The company was founded by the brothers Charles and Jeremiah Chubb and received a royal license from George IV. Among its other notable clients were the Bank of England and Arthur Wellesley the duke of Wellington, who ordered four locks and a new key for Apsley House in London.

In 1984 the Chubb Company was purchased by Racal Electronics, which, in turn, was bought by Williams Holdings in 1997. At that time the offices in which Chubb's documents were stored were closed. The records were then donated to the Business Archive Council, a nonprofit organization devoted to the preservation of records of commercial concerns. Two years later they were turned over to the manuscripts section of the Guildhall Library in London. Unfortunately these papers, many of which are in a most fragile state, have not been catalogued or conserved, and it will be some time before they will be available to the public.

For those unwilling to wait, there is a welcome alternative. One of Chubb's former employees, Peter Gunn, developed a keen interest in the firm's history during the nearly four decades he worked in the sales department. He eventually became the in-house expert on its products and handled inquiries from owners of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century locks and pieces of furniture that incorporated them. Fortunately, he still has his enormous cache of detailed notes, which today are an invaluable stand-in for the firm's archives. Working with the permission of the Guilcihall Library and Williams Holdings, Gunn is now able to respond to inquiries from interested parties. His notes span the years January 1820 to June 1828 and August 1836 to December 1936. The original records for the missing years were destroyed in the blitz of London during World War II.

While his notes are extensive, in order to assign dates to the serial numbers, Gunn needed accurate calendars for each of the more than one hundred years covered by the surviving records in order to arrive at the number of working days in a given month. Without access to the relevant documents this was more than a trifling stumbling block Enter the Internet, which performed this Herculean task in seconds, providing him with an efficient way to use his notes.

As reported by David Moss in the December 15, 2001, edition of the British publication Antiques Track Gazette, a recent inquiry to Peter Gunn by a London dealer with a piece of furniture made by the Gillows firm, in his view about 1860, was met with the response that the lock was fitted on Tuesday October 28,1856. Eureka!

Mr. Gunn charges the reasonable fee of [pounds sterling]20 for an initial inquiry He has created an informative Web site (www.chubbarchive.com) or he can be reached at 44-1952-275543.