Ancestors At Work
Mike Sharpe reveals the working life of the artisans who made everything from brooches to bracelets
Did your relative work as a jeweller?
The origins of jewellery as an industry can be traced to about 1660. Charles II brought back fancy necklaces, buttons and shoe buckles on his return from exile in France, and these began to be copied by British craftsmen. With the rise of an affluent middle class, demand for jewellery continued to grow throughout the 18th century. The Victorian period brought a huge proliferation in styles, products and techniques.
While ‘proper’ jewellers worked with precious stones, jewellery production involved many different trades and skills. Workers would specialise, for example as diamond cutters, stone setters, engravers or polishers; others worked as goldsmiths and silversmiths. One craftsman would seldom work on a piece from start to finish. This need to access complementary expertise encouraged many of the highly skilled artisans to work from their own homes. Living ‘above the shop’ also offered jewellers greater security, given the value of the items they manufactured. And as jewellers often operated as family businesses, working from home kept costs down.
The trade was divided into manufacturing and nonmanufacturing jewellers. The former provided raw rings, brooches, chains and so on for the non-manufacturing jewellers to transform into finished items. The working environment varied depending on the requirements of each trade. A maker of rings,
for example, needed to have little more than a bench, but the silversmith required a small workshop. Batch production of imitation jewellery necessitated a fairly large space in order to gain economies of scale.
Artisan jewellers could be found across Britain, but two centres – London and Birmingham – came to dominate the jewellery trade. In London, the area around Clerkenwell was the main hub, until businesses began to migrate to nearby
Hatton Garden in the 1870s. In Birmingham, craftsmen congregated in Hockley, north of the town centre, which became known as the Jewellery Quarter. Its growth was boosted by the opening in 1773 of the Birmingham Assay Office, which avoided the need to take items to London or Chester to be hallmarked.
The situation described by Birmingham jeweller John Bragg was typical of the 1830s: “My father, Thomas Perry Bragg, was a manufacturing jeweller, his little workshop and warehouse being at the back of his dwellinghouse. He employed about 10 or a dozen men and boys. There were several such manufactories in the immediate neighbourhood.”
Fashions And Slumps
Jewellery is not an essential of life, and a trade that deals in luxury goods always experiences peaks and troughs according to the prevailing economic circumstances of the time.
The depression that followed the Napoleonic Wars caused a major slump, and by 1825 the industry was close to extinction. However, Queen Victoria’s accession in 1837 popularised jewellery again and revived the market. A flood of cheap gold from California and Australia after 1849 brought an insatiable demand for items that previous generations could not afford.
A technological milestone in the trade came in 1840, when George Elkington developed a new method of electroplating silver. This patented process, which Elkington used at his works in Birmingham, soon replaced the old method, which was very unreliable and – because of the use of mercury – hazardous. Elkington used the new technique to market affordable gold- and silver-plated jewellery, which became known as ‘Brummagem ware’.
The period from 1866 to 1886 is known as the Silver Jewellery Period, when silver was more popular as a raw material than gold. A great deal of civic regalia was produced, and diamonds were increasingly used. Decorative boxes and household items such as brush backs in silver were also popular. The Arts and Crafts Movement provided inspiration for many jewellery designers and manufacturers.
Barriers to entering the profession were low. Economist JS Wright observed in 1866: “All that is needed for a workman to start as a master is a bench and a leather apron, one or two pounds’ worth of tools, and for material,
‘Barriers to entering the profession were low’
a few sovereigns and some ounces of copper and zinc.”
Having served an apprenticeship, a journeyman jeweller could set up a workshop in the top room of his house or a small building over the washhouse, at a rent of about
2s a week. From there he could produce rings, bracelets, lockets, brooches, scarf-pins, studs and links, all of which would find a ready market on a Saturday morning among the numerous ‘factors’: the middlemen who supplied shopkeepers throughout the country.
Women only worked in low- skilled areas, such as the production of ‘guard chain’ – basic chain used for lockets and similar items – and using presses to create ‘roughs’ or blanks. With increased mechanisation and the rise of larger manufacturing enterprises, by the late 19th century women had become an integral part of the workforce.
When factory inspector TJ Howells visited Birmingham in the 1830s he observed many children working in jewellery workshops. The 1833 Factory Act outlawed the employment of children under nine in factories, and limited the working hours for those under thirteen. However, since most jewellery businesses were family concerns, they were exempt from these requirements.
In a sector that was cyclical and prone to fashion, life for our jeweller ancestors could be precarious. When times were good, jewellers enjoyed a reasonable income. But during slumps they were among the worst affected of any workers.
An Ingenious Theft
Perhaps it is no surprise that working with precious metals every day provided too much temptation for some jewellers. A story frequently cited from around 1900 is of a gold worker in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter who was noted for continually rubbing his fingers through his greasy hair. When watched, it was discovered that his nightly hair wash involved allowing the dirty water to run through a flannel that he used to catch the valuable gold dust.
Mechanisation had an increasing impact on artisan jewellers. An 1884 trade journal noted: “Machinery has been largely introduced, with the result that a piece of work by which a man could once earn 1s. or 1s.6d. – say the ornamenting of a brooch – is now done by one stroke of a die.”
Employment in the trade peaked just before the First World War. The interwar years saw many firms close, and after 1945 jewellery emerged as essentially a retail sector, selling wares that had been made abroad.