Two Birds

In amongst the many souvenirs which have followed us around on our travels is this little pair of birds. They're made of metal but in such a way as to bring out some beautiful colours in the metalwork. The piece is small, 40mm long, and finely detailed.

It came from Mrs MW's mother's family, and the story that came with it, as told by her Granny Mitchell, was that it had something to do with her Grandad who worked in RAF maintenance through the war, the suggestion being that someone there had made it - see earlier post here.

This seemed unlikely as there are letters and numbers stamped onto its base. The numbers are easy enough to read but the word, or words, are more difficult, but we finally came up with GESCHUTZ. However, when we put this into a search engine it corrected it to GESCHUTZT. A helpful website explained that the term is an abbreviation of gesetzlich geschutt, a German phrase that translates as "legally protected", "copyrighted" or "patented". Sadly, we couldn't find any reference to a number but this could be the copyright number or the factory item number.

The internet helped us further by featuring these three small birds, much the same size as ours, for sale at £275. They are described as, "19th century Geschutzt cold painted bronze group of three quail birds" coming from Austria. However, another site tells us that the Geschutzt system only came in in 1899 so these are unlikely to be "19th century", but we now know that the bird are quail, not, as we identified them before, partridges.

If we now know a little more about their origin we have no idea how Mrs MW's grandparents acquired them. Grandad came from a very modest background and, while some of Granny's family were well-off, her particular branch of the family weren't.

Many questions remain, and there's probably now no-one alive who can answer them. Does this make any difference? Well, to me, yes, because if something has been kept as a souvenir then it ceases to have purpose if its associated memories are lost.

There's more about the cold painted bronze process here.