Antique English Brass Wire-Haired Terrier Corkscrew, Regd. 1922

The Piece

A cast brass corkscrew in the form of a wire-haired fox terrier standing in show pose, modelled in full profile with the coat worked in fine broken texture, the ears folded forward, the tail carried upright. A cast ring rises from the dog's shoulders to serve as the finger pull. Beneath the feet a flat bar carries the breed name in raised capitals: WIRE-HAIRED TERRIER. A turned brass shank drops from the centre of the bar and holds a steel helix worm with a sharp point.

The brass has separated into two tones with age. High points and edges are bright gold where hands have polished them over decades of use; the recesses, the flat reverse and the underside of the bar carry a dark, close patina with scattered green. The worm is oxidised steel throughout, with the original point intact and no bend along the helix. The reverse of the dog carries the registration mark, impressed across the flank: REGD No 692112.

History & Provenance

That number dates the design exactly. From 1884 the British Board of Trade issued design registrations in a single running sequence, and because the sequence is continuous the published tables convert any number straight into a year. The standard tables place the start of 1922 at 687144 and the start of 1923 at 694999. At 692112 this design falls between them, and was therefore registered with the Designs Registry during 1922.

A registration is a floor rather than a window. It fixes the earliest moment the pattern could be cast, so this corkscrew cannot predate 1922, and design protection ran for an initial five years extendable to fifteen, which puts the commercial life of the pattern between 1922 and the later 1930s. On that evidence it is offered as c. 1922–1935, with 1922 documented rather than argued.

The registration also explains what the object is. Breed-named brass figural corkscrews were protected commercial designs sold as barware through the 1920s and 1930s, not one-off foundry work, and the breed is cast into the frame bar rather than left to the buyer to identify. Surviving registrations across the family run through the same decades, a greyhound registered in 1922 and an Airedale in 1933 among the documented examples. The wire fox terrier was among the most fashionable dogs in Britain and America in exactly those years, which is why a maker registering a dog corkscrew in 1922 reached for it.

The modelling is knowledgeable rather than generic. The stance, the head and the broken coat all read as taken from a dog the modeller had seen, and at a little over four inches the whole thing is a competent small sculpture before it is a tool.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

It works, which is most of the pleasure of it. The ring takes a finger, the worm bites, and a small brass dog comes up out of the drawer whenever a bottle needs opening. Left out on a bar cart or a kitchen shelf it reads as a sculpture rather than a utensil, four and a half inches of good English casting with a century of handling in the surface.

It is also that unusual thing, a small antique that can be dated to the year from a number on its own back. For a terrier household it is the obvious gift, and for anyone building a bar it is the piece that gets picked up and turned over by every guest who notices it.