Hamish Brae has owned the same ironmonger's shop on Easter Road in Edinburgh since 1981. The shop is one room wide. The pewter collection lives in the flat above it.
He bought the building, shop and flat together, for forty-seven thousand pounds in October 1981. He was twenty-eight. He has lived there since.
The collection now numbers 1,140 pieces of pewter, mostly British, mostly between 1680 and 1840. About nine hundred of those pieces came out of house clearances Brae attended himself, almost always within a forty-mile radius of the shop.
He began going to house clearances in 1987, on Saturdays, on the recommendation of a customer who had inherited his father's pewter and asked Brae what to do with it. Brae bought the lot for two hundred pounds. He still has eleven pieces from it.
His method has not changed in nearly four decades. He reads the Scotsman's classified clearances on Friday evening. He attends two or three on Saturday morning. He brings cash. He does not bid against dealers.
He has, over the years, developed a relationship with the four or five auctioneers who run regular Edinburgh clearances. They no longer call him a dealer. They call him by his first name. They tell him in advance if there is significant pewter coming.
His preference is for working domestic pewter — tankards, plates, porringers, salt cellars, and candlesticks. He does not collect church pewter, of which he says there is now too little outside institutions, and he does not collect Continental pewter, of which he says there is now too much.
The collection's strongest run is Scottish. He has 312 Scottish tappit hens, the lidded measure-pot used in Scottish taverns from about 1680 onward, ranging in size from the half-mutchkin to the gallon.
He has 47 examples of the Edinburgh touch mark of George Brown the Younger, working about 1745 to 1782, more than any institution in Scotland holds in a single collection.
He has identified, with help from Cyrus Peake of this magazine, fourteen previously unrecorded touch marks of small Edinburgh and Leith pewterers of the eighteenth century. Five of those identifications are documented in a paper Brae and Peake published in The Journal of the Pewter Society in 2022.
Brae keeps his collection on open shelving along the long wall of the flat's main room. The shelves are mahogany, salvaged from a Leith linen warehouse demolished in 1992. He fitted them himself.
There are no display cases. The pewter is in the room as pewter, dust included, hand-polished about twice a year with a mild non-abrasive cleaner Brae mixes himself from instructions Peake gave him in 2014.
It lived on shelves for two hundred years before me, Brae said. I am not going to put it under glass now.
His catalogue is in a series of school exercise books, one per year, in which he records every piece acquired, the clearance it came from, the price, the touch mark if any, and any conservation work.
There are now thirty-nine exercise books, kept in chronological order on a shelf above his desk. The most recent volume is about half full. He buys the same brand of exercise book — Silvine A4 ruled — from a stationer on Leith Walk.
He does not photograph the pieces. The touch mark is in the book, he said. A photograph is no better than the rubbing.
He has been visited, over the years, by curators from the National Museum of Scotland, the Pewter Society in England, and a private collector from Toronto. The Museum has, twice, suggested a long-term loan arrangement. Brae has declined both times.
His reason is plain. He still uses the tappit hens. He pours ale from them on Sunday evenings, one at a time, working through the collection in no particular order. He has used 287 of the 312, by his last count.
A measure pot that has not been poured from is a sculpture, he said. A sculpture is a different thing.
Brae is seventy-three. The shop is still open six days a week. He works the counter himself most mornings, joined by his nephew Callum for afternoons.
The collection will go, on his death, to the National Museum of Scotland, with the conditions that it be kept together, displayed without glass, and lent for occasional use to the Pewter Society's annual meeting. The agreement was signed in 2023.
They have agreed in writing, Brae said. I will be sorry not to be there when the conditions are tested. I expect they will be tested.