Tools, Skill and Identity: The Work of British Manufacturing Jewellers, 1945-1965

Research focuses on the work of British manufacturing jewellers between 1945 and 1965 as they moved from production of Armed Forces equipment to renewed jewellery manufacture. The main research question asks how did the physical (machinery, tools, materials and jewels) and social (male and female; skilled, semi-skilled and apprentice workers) post-war workshop contribute to new methods of making and identifying as a craftsperson amongst jewellers? I will problematise workshops' repurposing of machinery to understand makers' distributions of roles and tools and their link to concepts of skill. I will ask how material restrictions, Purchase Tax and public approaches to consumption influenced makers and material and social networks. Research will question how workers responded to concepts of masculinity, class and education to understand the changes they helped enact. The research period closes in 1965 following the V&A and Goldsmiths' Company's pivotal International Exhibition of Modern Jewellery, which marked a shift in production.

Attention to these changes will contribute new knowledge to historiographies of post-war labour and British craft. Existing academic research focuses little on jewellers, whilst trade-led research emphasises design; this project unites both strands by focusing on makers. Research builds on the National Life Stories' Craft Lives, which includes oral histories of three designer-jewellers working post-war. New oral histories of jewellers from larger workshops conducted in this research are vital in understanding larger-scale production that generated most jewels in this period.

The research will provide insight for current production debates about the adoption of new technology and its impact on labour distribution, workshop social hierarchy and vocational education.

Research builds on my MA dissertation on British jewellers' adaptation of skills to war work, 1939-1945 and my professional research in the jewellery trade. My position in theory and practice communities shapes my methodologies: I will pursue object-based analysis of tools, machines, materials and jewels important to jewellers in the post-war period alongside archival research and oral history. Trade association and business archives and economic data of material supply reveal relationships between makers, trade councils and the government. I will interpret sources using theory from design history, anthropology and sociology, including Actor-network theory and 'deskilling' debates. These methods together reflect the many influences impacting post-war makers.

Location in the V&A/RCA PhD in History of Design, School of Arts and Humanities (SoAH), and a second supervisor in Jewellery and Metal (J&M), situates me within advanced historical and applied art practice-based research groups.