General Metal and Holloware

Orme Evans & Co. Ltd.

Elgin Works, Great Brickkiln Street

The 1927 Catalogue

The illustrations on this page and the next are taken from the company's, dated May 1927. It is redolent of its age, still largely Victorian and quite different in many respects from the world that was ushered in by the Second World War. Most of Orme Evans' products in this catalogue were for domestic use, though they also have a large section on "Dairy Accessories". This catalogue enables us to wander through many of the rooms of a household of the 1920s.

Ormes offered several shapes of Dish Covers, available either in block tin or aluminium. They would not have been uncommon in middle class homes but, of course, much commoner, in silver or EPNS, in the upper classes. To-day we only see them in the catering trade.

This is a muffin dish, an item not much in use to-day. The dish is hollow and the cap at the front lifts off, enabling you (well, your cook) to fill it with hot water, to keep the muffins warm. This dish has an earthenware liner but there can be little doubt that part would not have been made in Wolverhampton.

This is a hot water breakfast dish, also with an earthenware liner. In higher class households breakfast was not at a set time and people were expected to come down when it suited them. So some way of keeping the various dishes hot was needed.

You could keep things hot with a breakfast heater, which had a spirit lamp underneath it. This seems to be identical to the item produced by Henry Loveridge & Co - which went out of business in 1927. Perhaps Orme Evans bought up their designs, or remaining stock - or just copied.

Orme's also offered a hot water steak dish and a hot water bacon dish, as well as seven different designs of hot water plates.

Hot water plates are usually associated with feeding children or invalids. The one exhibited here is in the all too familiar willow pattern.

Orme's also offered a coffee pot and two sorts of cafetiere and a tea and coffee urn, for really large households or for mass catering. They also had milk saucepans, a kitchener (a hot water boiler), fish kettles and fish slices.

Still in the kitchen, they have oven pans, baking pans, gravy strainers, colanders, egg poachers, 4 kettles, each available in several sizes and not one of them electric.

Amongst their dairy utensils and appliances there are milking pails, several milk strainers, cream skimmers, several types of "railway and lorry milk cans, designed to resist rough transportation", a plain delivery can, and this delivery can on the left with a tap.

Presumably the dairyman used the tap to put the milk in your own jug, but more usually he would dip in with a government stamped measure (right) and put it from there. These measures came in 1/4, 1/2, 1 and 2 pint sizes.

Many households, small and large, would have made their own butter. This is a three pint size.

Fruit bottling was still popular but Orme's may have been feeling the pressure of tinned goods when, having declared themselves to be "pioneers of domestic fruit bottling and largest distributors", they say that this is the only way to keep fruit and vegetables for winter use and "all other methods are substitutes".

After an icing syringe, with 42 patterns of icing tubes available to go with them, and the Never Burn round cake tin, we get to the more prosaic matter of hot water. These cans are available in several sizes, japanned in various colours or in an oak grain effect, or, like this one, finished in white cellulose. This is the only item in the catalogue which gets a black background and a cellulose finish. The design is practically identical to that of water cans produced in brass and copper by many makers.

When piping water round the house was uncommon, these cans would have been vital for bringing hot water from the kitchen to the bathroom or bedroom.

And you (or the maid - most middle class households would have had at least one "daily woman") also had to bring in the coal, in the days before central heating, electric heating and the like. This anthracite "server" would have done the job.

The coal would be in the cellar on in the coal hole at the side of the house. Using the two handles, you shoved this thing, nose first, into the heap, repeating the action until it was full, and then brought it in. (A lot of people called this object a coal hod).

This server is japanned black with brass or copper bands and probably looked quite respectable. You might therefore have left it in the grate, next to the fire.

Or you might simply have tipped the whole load into something more decorative such as this coal box. Ormes provided quite a selection of these and also a good selection of coal buckets and cauldrons, like the Wellington below, which all served the same purpose.

You would choose one which you fondly thought matched the decor of your home. Since fires would be lit, in homes which could afford the coal, in the kitchen, at least one reception room and one or more bedrooms, you might need more than one box, bucket or cauldron.

It might be worth mentioning here, for the benefit of our younger visitors, that whatever people now think of the visual effect of a coal fire, they caused an awful lot of work, lighting them, dragging the coal in, keeping them stoked up, then clearing them out and throwing away the ashes; and they caused so much soot and dust that a room with a fireplace had to be cleaned thoroughly every day.

Worse, they were not very efficient at heating the room. Next to the fire you might burn; over by the door you might freeze.

If you were using large lumps of coal you had to get them from the coal box to the fire, without getting your hands too dirty.

These coal tongs or, as Ormes called them, "The Perfect Coal Scissors", were supposed to help.

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