Lot #162. Tunbridge ware Cribbage Board

Tunbridge ware Cribbage Board.

Offered here is a unique triangular Tunbridge ware Cribbage Board, measuring 13-5/8″ on a side with a compartment for pegs on the underside. The inlays are Bone, Holly, Mahogany and Rosewood. Circa 1900.

Tunbridge ware is a form of decoratively inlaid woodwork, typically in the form of boxes, that is characteristic of Tonbridge and the spa town of Tunbridge Wells in Kent in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The decoration typically consists of a mosaic of many very small pieces of different colored woods that form a pictorial vignette. Shaped rods and slivers of wood were first carefully glued together, then cut into many thin slices of identical pictorial veneer with a fine saw. Elaborately striped and feathered bandings for framing were pre-formed in a similar fashion.

Early makers of Tunbridge ware, in Tunbridge Wells in the mid 18th century, were the Burrows family, and Fenner and Co. In the 19th century, around 1830, James Burrows invented a technique of creating mosaics from wooden pieces. Henry Hollamby, apprenticed to the Burrows family, set up on his own in 1842 and became an important manufacturer of Tunbridge ware, employing about 40 people.

An interesting website giving more information on Tunbridge ware can be found by visiting: http://www.tonbridgehistory.org.uk/made-in-tonbridge/tunbridge-ware.htm.

Cribbage, or crib, is a card game traditionally for two players, but commonly played with three, four or more, that involves playing and grouping cards in combinations which gain points. Cribbage has several distinctive features: the cribbage board used for score-keeping, the eponymous crib or box (a separate hand counting for the dealer), two distinct scoring stages (the play and the show) and a unique scoring system including points for groups of cards that total fifteen. The Rules and other Cribbage facts and information can be found on the Anerican Cribbage Congress web site:  http://www.cribbage.org/rules/

According to John Aubrey, cribbage was created by the English poet Sir John Suckling in the early 17th century, as a derivation of the game “noddy.” While noddy has disappeared, crib has survived, virtually unchanged, as one of the most popular games in the English-speaking world. The objective of the game is to be the first player to score a target number of points, typically 61 or 121. Points are scored for card combinations that add up to fifteen, and for pairs, triples, quadruples, runs and flushes.