Words Stephen Webster Image Janette Beckman In the summer of 1977, I left art school in Rochester, Kent and headed for London to embark on a five year apprenticeship as a goldsmith/jeweller. My art school tutor had previously taken me for my interview with the 150-year-old goldsmithing and watchmaking firm of Saunders & Shepherd (S & S). Pre-apprentices (as we were known then) were 16-year-old boys. An apprenticeship was and is a way to learn a craft or skill thoroughly with virtually no other distractions, unlike the other woolly option, “the university degree”. This, as we all know, is a chance to go to uni for a few years, take a lot of drugs, smoke, and drink too much cider, then get your shit together in the last half-year (in hindsight, probably a lot more fun). On my first morning, I headed to the old firm of S & S nestled in Bleeding Heart Yard, in the middle of Hatton Garden - the centre of London’s jewellery trade for over 200 years. I thought I was probably the luckiest 17-year-old alive. During my time at Medway College of Design, I had embraced the jewellery and silversmithing course with such enthusiasm that a potential career in
the trade felt like it would be money for nothing. That’s the way you do it. This was going to be the road to a glamorous life making trinkets for beautiful people! A workshop was an exclusively male place back then, rows of benches and equipment that looked one step away from being steam driven. Our particular workshop housed one of the last engine turners left in London. This is a process used to apply the very distinct pattern found on fancy cigarette cases. The actual piece of elaborate machinery that applied the patterns looked like a fantasy created by Jules Verne. The jewellers, I soon found out, weren’t great conversationalists. Words were kept for necessities, like, “Can you get us a sarnie, Steve?” or, “Any chance of a cup of ‘Rosie Leigh’?” Rhyming slang was used whenever possible; this was for the sole purpose of maintaining a barrier between the workshop and any kind of management including the workshop foreman who was
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