I have looked at an example of an Indian Army marked spoon on the blog before, here, today we are looking at another example, this time one which has been marked with the owner’s army number on the handle:

The number, 6194954, has been stamped in with individual punches and, it is fair to say, is not the neatest example I have ever seen:

The number is in the range allocated to the Middlesex Regiment which had numbers from 6,188,001 to 6,278,000.

The rear of the spoon is marked with the /|\ over I indicating that the spoon was procured by the Indian authorities and bears their ownership mark:

The SSP is the mark of ‘Sheffield Steel Products’ a massive conglomerate which had been formed from the amalgamation of many smaller companies to become, what the company described in 1920, as the “largest manufacturer of table cutlery in the world.”

It seems then that this little spoon had quite a journey around the globe, being manufactured in Sheffield, being sent out to India as an order for their military, being issued to a member of the Middlesex Regiment and then presumably returning to these shores when he demobbed.