Murray and Co. Glasgow Stoneware Ginger Beer Bottle, c. 1872–1897

The Piece

A Scottish stoneware ginger beer bottle from the Caledonian Pottery of Murray and Company, Glasgow, the standard bottle of the Victorian soft drink trade in its plainest and most honest form. The body is the classic tapered cylinder with a rounded shoulder, a short neck and a heavy blob top with a single raised ring below the lip, thrown and turned to take a cork and wire. The glaze is an all-over cream, slightly pink in some lights, with a soft satin surface, scattered iron specks that burned through in the kiln, and a few small glaze pops and brown flecks that are part of the firing rather than damage. The base is flat and unglazed, showing the buff stoneware body and a century of honest ground-in dirt.

Near the base is the pottery's impressed mark, a circular stamp reading Murray and Co. around the top with a size or batch number in the center, pressed into the wet clay before glazing and now softened under the glaze. There is no bottler's name, which means the bottle was sold unprinted to a small bottler or shipped abroad to be filled, as a great many Glasgow bottles were. The bottle is whole, with no chips to the lip or base and no cracks.

History & Provenance

The Caledonian Pottery was one of the great Glasgow stoneware works. Founded in 1800 at Garngadhill on the Monkland Canal, it passed to the Murray family in 1826 and from 1868 traded as W. F. Murray and Company. In 1872 Murray moved the works to a large new pottery at Rutherglen on the south side of the city, and from there turned out stoneware by the million: jam jars for the preserve trade, whisky flagons, hot water bottles, kitchen crocks and the ginger beer bottles that carried Glasgow's name around the world. Scottish stoneware ginger beers were exported in quantity to the United States and the colonies, where local bottlers filled them with ginger beer, root beer and small beer, and the plain unprinted bottle like this one was the export staple. The firm was liquidated in 1897, which sets the ceiling on the date; the Rutherglen form of the mark puts this bottle in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

The dating rests on the pottery mark and the construction rather than style alone: the Murray and Co. stamp, the thrown and turned body, the blob top for cork and wire closure and the plain cream glaze are all consistent with the Rutherglen years of 1872 to 1897. It carries no bottler's history of its own.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

A single Victorian stoneware bottle is one of the easiest antiques to live with. It holds a stem or two of dried grass on a windowsill, anchors a shelf of books or sits on a bathroom counter with a sprig of eucalyptus, and the soft cream glaze goes with everything from white plaster to dark paint. The marked Glasgow stamp gives it a real place and date rather than the anonymous look of the reproduction bottles sold in decor stores. For a shop or designer client it is the honest, marked, undamaged example that reads as a found object and dresses a vignette without competing with it, and a pair or a row of them on a mantel is a classic Scandinavian and English country look.