Rare & Large Victorian Meat Platter; The Metropolitan Asylum Board C.1880

The very large and scarce late Victorian meat plate by Edge Malkin & Co, Staffordshire, stamped as such and with the logo of the Metropolitan Asylum Board to the top outer edge, the platter with a peacock blue rim and with a tree of life type channelled base whereby the fat and juices of the cooked meat are transferred to the pool through the main channel, the whole sitting on a footed base and surviving from the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

The platter is in fair overall order – one end has been cracked and repaired as per the photographs. The rest of the piece remains intact, with the foot in order and the transfers and blue detailing all slightly faded but still readable. There is a lovely honest all-over craquelure.

The construction of asylums was widespread in Britain following The Lunacy Act of 1845, which resulted primarily from the work of John Connolly and Lord Shaftsbury. This act professionalised the asylum and ensured that each institution was mediated by the local authority. It marked a paradigmatic shift, wherein ‘lunatics’ began to be considered as patients instead of prisoners.

Between 1867 and 1930, the Metropolitan Asylums Board (MAB) played a substantial and increasing role in the care of London's sick poor. During that period, institutional medical care for the poor was transformed from a system based on often squalid workhouse infirmaries, staffed by illiterate paupers, to one which included around forty general and specialist MAB establishments, many purpose-built, staffed by well-trained personnel. The institutions set up by the MAB came to be accessible by all the capital's inhabitants, not just the poor. By 1900 the MAB was responsible for 2,486 beds in smallpox hospitals in country areas and 6,108 beds in fever hospitals in London. During its lifetime, MAB set up around forty institutions. The Board can justly claim to have provided the nation's first state hospitals, and laid the foundations of what in 1948 became the National Health Service.

Edge, Malkin & Co. Based in Burslem, the company was founded by Joseph, William, and John Edge and James Malkin in 1870. They primarily produced blue, sepia and brown transfer-printed tableware, in typical Victorian styles. They made meat plates and chargers like this for steamships and ocean liners, such as Havelock Steamers, but this is the only example we can find with the asylum mark to it.

We cannot find another item having been sold with this stamp so this makes it a valuable piece of social history.