Georgina Izzard
Tools, Skill & Identity: The Work of Birmingham’s Manufacturing Jewellers, 1940-1960

As a design historian, I question the designed elements of all my 'sources' to find the people that created them. My work takes me from the archive to the jeweller's bench and through the streets of Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter.

I am searching for the experiences of workers, as opposed to their managers and business owners, who have been prioritised both in formal archives and in existing histories. I look for the employed and self-employed jewellers that continued to re-size wedding rings, repair brooch pins and set stones in engagement rings at a time when government restrictions ensured that gold was largely inaccessible and that your age and skills defined whether your labour was 'essential' or 'non-essential'. As regulations changed quickly and unexpectedly, the jewellers toed a fine line between their work being considered 'legitimate' one day, to illegal the next; just as they worked through loopholes in the system, I use archival loopholes to trace this black/grey-market trade. In an industry based on discretion, it is these jewellers that have hidden in the shadows, but whose work underpinned the British jewellery industry in the mid-twentieth century.

Instead of focusing solely on the jewellery and its consumers, or on employers and industry leaders, I employ design historical research methods and methodologies to refocus attention on these makers. In business archives, I look to employee accident cards to find their names, ages, home addresses and the processes they carried out daily. Their injuries, and the insurance company's approach to them, help me to understand how concepts of skill pervaded day-to-day workshop life. Similarly, as I flick to the 'Situations Vacant' and 'Situations Wanted' columns of the Birmingham Mail, I consider the jeweller holding this newspaper everyday during their hunt for work and the systems in place that asked them to assess whether they were a 'medium-', 'good-', or 'best-class worker'.

Through oral histories, both those collected by other projects and those I have collected myself today as a member of the British jewellery trade, I recognise the jewellers' language of making - how they relate gold to ribbon, copper as 'awkward', gold with silica that can 'actually crack like it was made of porcelain' - and I ask how design history can help us understand, and even write about, this tacit knowledge. Tracing tool use and ownership can help us understand manufacturing networks and particularly locate this generation of craftspeople that are absent in most histories.