PhD Research

Tools, Skill & Identity

The work of Birmingham’s Manufacturing Jewellers, 1940-1960

Funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) through the London Arts & Humanities Partnership (LAHP)

Workshops in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter, 2020.Photo: Georgina Izzard

Workshops in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter, 2020.

Photo: Georgina Izzard

V&A/RCA History of Design, PhD Candidate

Royal College of Art, School of Arts & Humanities

Hockley, now known as Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter, is home to manufacturing jewellers and a myriad of allied trades. The cluster of skills, materials and demand in this industrial district has ensured Birmingham’s position as the UK’s largest producer of jewellery for centuries.

The 1940s recruitment drives and changeover of workers for equipment production for the Armed Forces during the Second World War disrupted these established relationships and routines. This research project investigates the enduring impact of this change in production on jewellers’ concepts of identity in the 1940s and 1950s. A focus on the jewellers’ identities reinstates craftspeople to a production history that has previously focused only on industry leaders.

The involvement of the late-1940s Labour government in assessments of industry efficiency, including that of the jewellery industry, highlighted the importance that policy makers and industry leaders beyond Birmingham attributed to the jewellers’ work. This research argues for a reclaiming of the term ‘adaptation’ away from ontologies of efficiency and improvement to better describe manufacturing processes and their place within jewellers’ experiences in the 1940s and 1950s.

A careful engagement with the jewellers’ system through understanding traditions of tool ownership and workshop space, coupled with analysis of small firms’ wages books and jewellers’ oral histories, creates links to the jewellers that rest on the principle of proximity in their established trade system – a proximity that traverses the time between the 1940s and the present.

Supervisors:

Dr Spike Sweeting, Victoria & Albert Museum

Jonathan Boyd, Jewellery & Metal, RCA

Dr Sarah Teasley, formerly V&A/RCA History of Design, RCA