'Handsome' 180-Year-Old Silver Cup Gifted By Queen Victoria

You've brought along a really good-looking piece of Victorian silver with silver gilt panels on it, and it's got some interesting initials engraved on it that appear to be the V for Queen Victoria, A for Prince Albert, and LP, which I think might be Louis Philippe, King of the French. Yeah. And it has a date, October the 14th, 1844. In 1844, there was a visit from the King of the French to the UK, a state visit. Upon his return, a storm brewed up, which is depicted in this print here. And he couldn't get onto the boat, so they put a call out, however they did it in those days, to the guy who lived in the house we bought, Thomas Grant, and he was told to boot out his guests because the Queen was coming for tea. So she came with her party, including Louis Philippe and Albert, and that was a gift that the Queen gave to Thomas as a thank you. Good heavens. Oh, extraordinary story. And you live in Thomas Grant's house? We bought Thomas Grant's house as a wreck about 20 years ago. Right. Now, he was a very, very good, if not famous, inventor. Is this the same chap? It is. The first thing he invented was a mechanised way of making ship's biscuits, which made the making of ship's biscuits 12 times more efficient than it had been, which was pretty important in those days. Then he did a number of other things, including inventing a way to desalinate water, which again was pretty useful. That was very important. And then he got his knighthood for bitchling the Navy at the Battle of Crimea. So how did you end up with this? My wife and I first bought the house. We went to a local gallery and got talking to the owner, and we told him we lived in Thomas Grant's house. He said, oh, I bought the cup a number of years ago. I'd love to have been able to sell it to you because it belongs in the house. He sold it to somebody else in the interim, or before I met him. But over the years, we badgered the guy who bought it, and one day he said, it deserves to be back with you. So he sold it to us for the same price he paid for it, 3,300. Right. OK. Well, let's take off the lid. It's got a set of marks in here for Robert Garrard, and Garrard's were the royal jewelers at the time. It has a date letter here for 1844, which ties in. And it's all in the very high Victorian style, but overall, a very handsome piece. The fact it's royal, the fact that Grant is a reasonably well-known character, if this came up for auction now, I can easily see it making 6,000, 7,000, 8,000 pounds. So I think you've done... Brilliant. Well, my wife did well. Yeah. Fantastic. You've reunited it where it should belong.