The adventures of a Livery Button

Here's a little video of me, telling you about a little history project that we are working on whilst stuck in lockdown. It all started with a button and turned into the adventures of a livery button :) Take a look..

The first button, manufactured by Bullivant in Birmingham

The set of Livery buttons, the start of our collection

The Barker/Graveyard Livery Button

Follow up article about the buttons, written by my daughter:

​The Barker Button

It all started with my fifteenth birthday in 2017. Mum and I
had spent the day exploring Ickworth House, a unique
18th century hall with acres of land and gardens in Suffolk,
near Bury St Edmunds. It has always been one of my
favourite places to visit and choosing to go there on this
day lead to an amazing story of discovery and mystery.
On the way home, we drove through a place called
Kedington, a village that our ancestors the Binks and the
Bowyers had lived for hundreds of years before they came
to Cambridge. As we drove through we passed a
graveyard. I’ve always had a fascination for grave yards
as I grew up going to the Local History Society at St
Andrew’s Church in Cherry Hinton. I’ve always loved
walking around graveyards and reading peoples
gravestones, imagining who they were and what their lives
were like. Mum parked the car and we started to walk
around looking at all the decaying grave stones, hoping
we’d find relatives, then just gleaming underneath the dirt
was what looked like an old coin. She picked it up and
said it was a livery button, coincidentally she had only
recently learnt about them as the Bullivant’s (our main
family name) used to have a livery button company in
Birmingham. We said to the grave, that it was found at,
that we’d bring the button back and put it back, then we
took it home to research.

Livery buttons are about the size of a 2p coin.
We had forgotten about it for a couple of years until mum
found it the other day when she was sorting out her room.
Mum said she would give me £20 if I could find out what
family the livery button belonged to. I am a very
determined person, so I was up for the challenge and
started my research. Firstly, I researched the company on
the back of the button called Firmin and to my surprise,
Firmin and Sons head office in London was still active. I
emailed the company, inclosing pictures of the livery
button to see if they could shed some light and information
about it. Secondly, I joined the livery button Facebook
group and did the same thing and posted information and
pictures of the button to their group. I checked my emails
while I waited for comments on my Facebook post and to
my astonishment, a man called Tony Kelly from Firmin
had replied:

He then went on to recommend a book called ‘Fairbairn’s
Family Crests’ that he thought could have the family
name. Someone on the Facebook post that I wrote replied
with a link to a website of the books recorded families and
it came up with the exact livery button we had found. After
all the hard work of trying to find this button and feeling
like I was getting no-where, I finally felt like I was getting
somewhere. I emailed Tony from Firmin and Sons and told
him the good news, I had finally found the family, the crest
was the Barker family crest.
Tony helped me identify what was on the button, at first I
thought it was some sort of bird of prey standing on
something that looked like a ball. I later found out it was a
hawk, as I’d thought, with the depiction of a wreath,
sometimes referred to as a torse. He also told me
sometimes there’s a coronet if the coat of arms is that of a
Peer of the Realm like an earl, or a duke.

So the conclusion of this article shows that small choices
we make, like the one we made to stop at the graveyard,
show us that every decision make leads to an amazing
story.
We have so many more questions after finding one button,
where are the Barker family now? Is the button from the
grave we found it at, a family member or staff member
who visited the grave or was did it just fall from someone
passing through the graveyard? Did Firmin and Sons work
with the Bullivant family button making business, when
they were both in Birmingham or were they rival
companies? There is still a lot of good research to be
done.
Hopefully we can contact the family of who the button
belongs to and find out who’s grave it was and then return
their button to them.

Here is a picture of some other livery buttons that we have
now got to start our collection, some made by Bullivant
and some by Firmin.

By Charlotte Rose, April 2020

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