Late Victorian Aneroid Barometer on Stand by Hall & Co of 56 King St, Manchester

For sale, a Late Victorian aneroid barometer on stand by Hall & Co of 56 King Street, Manchester.

This wonderfully designed piece is comprised of a large 6.5” dial aneroid barometer with silvered dial and scale to the upper half divided for 28 to 31 inches of barometric pressure. Standard weather indications in lovely gothic typeface are provided within the inner arc of the scale.

The lower half has a curved thermometer with Fahrenheit scale. The centre dial is reserved for a beautiful rose-turned decoration with the maker Hall & Co, 56 King St, Manchester below and a registered design no: 50992 above. The exact detail of this registered design has not yet been digitised but its number was allocated between June 8th and June 29th in 1886, just prior to Hall & Co’s appearance at the Royal Jubilee Exhibition in Manchester in 1887. I suspect that this design alongside other preparatory products such as the company’s “jubilee watch” were produced specifically for this important trade fair. The stand’s horseshoe design and its relationship with luck and good fortune is also another indication that it may well have been considered appropriate for the Jubilee celebrations for the 50th years of Queen Victoria’s reign.

Comprised entirely of oak, the graduated plinth base holds a large horseshoe design with brass studwork around the circumference imitating horseshoe nails. The top is completed with a decorative brass finial. Within the horseshoe shape a hook is centred at the top of the arc onto which the barometer can be suspended by means of an unusually robust brass reeded design hanging handle.

A very pleasing example created at the time of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee year with both equestrian themes and themes of good luck and fortune.

John Hall and William Hatfield commenced business in 1831 as silversmiths, watchmakers & jewellers at 56 King Street, Manchester. The partnership seems to have been a successful one since it is also recorded at both Swan Street and on Montague Terrace, Bury New Road in the first half of the 1840’s.

The partnership was dissolved by 1845, and Hall’s obituary suggests that he formed a partnership with an ironmonger William Wilson to form Hall & Wilson. Whilst I can find no specific record of the partnership, a business named William Wilson & Co traded variously from 50, 52 & 54 King Street and exhibited stoves and interior decoration at both the 1874 Manchester Exhibition and the 1887 Royal Jubilee Exhibition Manchester. It is therefore likely that 54 King Street expanded its stock to include numerous decorative items manufactured by Wilson. A biography suggests also that Hall exhibited a watch at the 1887 Exhibition which took six years to manufacture at the huge cost of £500.

Given the evidence, my suspicion is that John Hall & Co came into existence in 1845 upon dissolution of the original partnership, but he maintained a close and complimentary relationship with William Wilson’s business. Hall would have been seventy by the time of these exhibitions and he died in the same year as the Jubilee (1887). It is likely then that Hall played less of a direct role by this point, he is also known to have been a partner in the cotton spinning business of Hall, Poole & Co in Salford.

Hall died a very wealthy man but there is little information about the successor of the company, we can be sure owing to the company’s extant products that it continued well into the Twentieth Century with some suggestion that it eventually became a firm dealing in antiques. It finally closed its doors in 1957 after one hundred and twenty-six years of trading.

Circa 1887