This is a story of many little strands, but they knit together so please bear with me. My posts so far have focussed on the incomers; this one focusses on the working trades already resident in London during the early Georgian period.
I have written before about the Huguenots and their influence upon Georgian London. Not everyone took kindly to their arrival in the years following 1685, and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. A rash of petitions were presented to every public body in London protesting about the 'foreigners' who worked for less, undercutting British journeymen. The goldsmiths gathered together to sign their petition again the 'aliens' in 1697, and again a few years later. Amongst them was the English Catholic Goldsmith Anthony Nelme. The fact that he was a massive hypocrite, who bought cheap but excellent goods from the immigrant workers, and later replicated them himself seems to have escaped him.
Amongst Nelme's apprentices was a boy names Henry Jernegen. Jernegen was from a family of landed gentry and the apprenticeship with Nelme was probably a smokescreen to ensure the boy became free of the Goldsmiths' Company, and so would hold a prestigious position when he became a banker, which he rapidly did. Henry Jernegen was in no way a working goldsmith, but employed others to produce commissions for his clients (rather like ordering a set of cutlery from Garrards now). Jernegen was lucky, or unlucky enough to land Littleton Pointz Meynell as a client. Meynell was raised as a banker, but instead became a massive gambler, in a way only possible in the 18th century. His wins were mammoth, his losses, likewise. In between winning and losing, Jernegen made attempts to divert his client's capital into 'fashioned bullion', essentially works of art in sterling silver. This helped Jernegen in two ways: he could mitigate his losses through commission, and make sure his client had some money in commodities.
In 1730, Jernegen and Meynell (pronounced Men'll) came up with an astonishing idea: to create the biggest wine cistern ever. Wine cisterns are modernly called coolers, which is wrong. A wine cistern had a companion piece to a fountain which spouted wine into the cistern and into which guests dipped their glasses, rather than wait for a servant. (sounds an excellent idea) The largest ever cistern had held 20 gallons, made in 1721. The Meynell cistern was to hold 60 gallons and weighs over a quarter of a ton, making it the size of a bathtub (see the image in the gallery). I have posed for pictures in an exact copy of this cistern, and when seated on the bottom, you can just see my eyes over the top. It is enormous.
The silversmith commissioned to make it was Charles Kandler, originally from Saxony (an immigrant then?). At some stage, Kandler became a Roman Catholic, and married into a well-to-do Catholic family. He made huge amounts of silver for the Norfolk family of Arundel, indicating he was favoured by Catholic families. Charles Frederick Kandler is widely thought to be a relative of Johann Joachim Kandler, talented modeller for the Meissen factory, which explains the amazing handles on this piece.
Clearly, a piece of silver weighing more than a quarter of a ton takes time to make, and when it was finished, so was Meynell: he had no money to pay. Jernegen sued him, but had no luck, because Meynell was broke and Jernegen was stuck with this enormous White Elephant. It just so happened that the State was stuck for money at the time, and holding a lottery to rebuild Westminster Bridge. Jernegen offered the cistern as first prize, in hopes to avoid financial embarrassment, and was accepted (taking a percentage of the ticket sales and so recouping his losses). Not enough tickets sold, and it wasn't until 1737 that a second huge and prestigious state lottery offered the cistern as a prize in hopes to fund the bridge rebuilding (the image in the gallery details the catalogue for the cistern). A Dorset farmer won first prize, but there being little call for a rococo silver bathtub in Dorset, he sold it.
Another mystery ensues. No one knows who the cistern was sold to, but by the following year (1738), it was in Russia and forming part of Catherine the Great's collection. (My personal wager is on Paul de Lamerie, and his underground network. It was probably sold over lunch as soon as the lottery was drawn.) It remains in the Hermitage Museum, the largest extant piece of antique solid silver in the world. It is a huge folly, and a beautiful one: utterly dispensable yet extraordinary.
