A double-ended glass baby feeder with teat attached to one end. Top is embossed with the words "Meritor Dandy Feeder. Maw. Barnet". On the sides of bottle are displayed "Half Ounces" & "Tea Spoons" in graduated measuring scales. 

With industrialisation, working mothers had less time to breastfeed their babies as regularly as in previous years and many could not afford wet nurses. Prior to 1894, baby bottles were often known as the ‘murder bottle’ and had an unhygienic hose attachment, which led to many unexplained baby deaths. These designs were revised and in 1894 the first ‘banana’ shaped feeder, the Allenburys’ feeder, was marketed. The ‘Meritor Dandy’ Miniature Feeder dates from the early 1910s. 

The bottle is made from clear moulded glass. It has a flat base to keep it stable. It is banana shaped and fits into one hand, allowing the other hand to support the baby. At one end of the bottle there is a hole for pouring in the feeding mixture. To prevent it from pouring out, a metal cap is put on after filling but this is missing from this item. At the other end a similar hole, covered by a rubber teat, lets the baby suck out the feed. The teat regulates the flow of liquid into the baby’s mouth, ensuring it does not choke. S. Maw and Sons (S. Maw Son & Sons after circa 1918) were a medical instrument manufacturer based in Aldersgate, London. The company dates from 1814. Solomon Maw took over in 1835. Meritor was a trade name for a wide variety of medical goods supplied by the firm. 

The rubber component of this corking hammer shows a link to raw materials made available through the continued expansion of the British Empire. Rubber has a long connection to colonization. By the 1800s, with the huge world demand for rubber, Britain decided to grow plants in its tropical colonies. In 1873 Henry Wickham, a British planter living in South America, was hired to take seeds out of Amazonia to send back to Britain. Of the 70000 seeds taken only 12500 survived. Seedlings from British greenhouses were transplanted to British colonial plantations in Southeast Asia. 
By the 1890s 740,000 acres of rubber trees grew in Sri Lanka and Malaysia. In Africa Belgian administration of the Congo took place from the 1870s to the 1920s and was first led by Sir Henry Morton Stanley who explored under the sponsorship of King Leopold II of Belgium. Leopold extracted ivory, rubber, and minerals in the upper Congo basin for sale on the world market, formally acquiring rights to the Congo territory at the Conference of Berlin in 1885 and made the land his private property. On May 29, 1885, the king named his new colony the Congo Free State. The state would eventually include an area now held by the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Leopold’s reign in the Congo eventually earned infamy due to the increasingly brutal mistreatment of the indigenous peoples. In the Congo Free State, colonists brutalized the local population into producing rubber, for which the spread of cars and development of rubber tires created a growing international market. 

From 1885–1908, millions of Congolese died as a consequence of exploitation and disease. Failure to meet the rubber collection quotas was punishable by death. The Abir Congo Company (founded as the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company) also exploited natural rubber in the Congo Free State. The company was founded with British and Belgian capital and was based in Belgium.