How political is your bread board?

It’s not known which inspired Victorian first had the idea to take a chopping block and carve it into a circular ‘bread-platter’, as they were called, with a raised centre and decorated rim; but William Gibbs Rogers was the one to turn it into a craze.

In the mid-19th century Rogers was considered one of Britain’s most accomplished wood-carvers. An 1847 issue of The Spectator said he had single-handedly ‘restored to carving the same interest and execution which it possessed in the best days of Grinling Gibbons’. His long list of wealthy patrons included Queen Victoria, who commissioned a wooden cradle for the infant Princess Louise. At some point in the 1830s or early 1840s Rogers began to carve beautiful, elaborate bread boards for aristocratic clients, who would personalise their commissions, turning his work into a sort of heraldry. Coats of arms and family mottos were whittled into oak, mahogany and — most commonly — sycamore.