Avro Vulcan XM 652
In the early 1980s just before I relocated to Devon I was approached by a man who wanted two signet rings making for his sons and would it be acceptable if he supplied the gold. I agreed, drew him some designs of likely rings and when we met he chose two of these and gave me a bag of gold beads and snippings. He said he was the Managing Director of a scrap metal company in Sheffield and the gold had come from something he was dismantling. In the city at that time a scrap dealer wasn’t a Steptoe and Son concern - driving a pony and cart around the streets - they factored, sold on, dealt in and otherwise scrapped everything from five hundred miles of closed Australian railway track to old Malaysian suspension bridges. Very large items.
I made the rings and as payment he agreed to let me have what gold was left. The gold was almost pure – perhaps 22ct (.916%) but whatever it had been alloyed with made it very hard and difficult to work with no ductility. I got over this by melting it and casting into two cuttlefish moulds carved into the shape of the rings so little working was required, only filing, papering and polishing.
When he came to pick up the rings he was delighted but before he left the shop I asked where the gold came from, remarking that I thought it was either a dental or an electrical alloy. “Oh, it’s from an Avro Vulcan bomber I’ve got in my yard” he said, “the RAF obviously take out the engines, avionics, landing gear, things that are worth something to them or that can be cannibalised for parts and we scrap the rest”. He went on to tell me that even in an empty, light alloy shell there are still plenty of electrical contacts left - usually from where removable racked electronic components had been pulled out. However, they needed a lot of searching for and clipping out so he put on a couple of youngsters he could trust - his sons as it turned out.
I was intrigued by this story but at the time my wife and I were planning to move to Devon and I’d got a lot on so didn’t give it anymore thought. The gold remained in a box under my bench for years, occasionally coming out and being melted again with a little silver which hopefully would make it more workable but brought it down to maybe 14ct or so but eventually it got forgotten only seeing the light of day when looking for something else.
One evening in 2022 I was looking on an ‘Old Sheffield’ Facebook group and I was brought up short by a picture taken in 1983 of the front half of a Vulcan bomber sitting disconsolately on railway sleepers in the mud of a Sheffield breakers yard – Coopers (Metals) Ltd. I spent the rest of the evening going down internet rabbit holes and eventually found out it was XM 652 which had once been based at RAF Finningley near Doncaster. I may have even have seen it flying as my primary school was only twelve miles from Finningley and we could watch those bright silver triangles ten miles high from my school playground in the mid-1960s. Everything in the story now fitted in to place.
Over Christmas that year I was put in touch with writer Brian Carlin now living in San Diego who in the 1960s had been an electrician/ground crew on Vulcans and he suggested the gold may have come from the windscreen de-icing apparatus. Fine gold was rolled down to a two-micron thickness in order to render it transparent then laminated within the thick glass of the cockpit windscreen. All of the connectors to this were gold also.
The cockpit of this aircraft is now stored on a farm and caravan park near Welshpool owned by Roy and Sue Jerman.
In the meantime, just for fun I decided to make something out of some of the gold so I chose a nut (the non-edible kind) but as this gold is a finite resource I made it out of a laminate of the gold and some silver. Although I’ve never worn jewellery it’s now on a chain around my neck. I’ve also made a silver, 9ct gold and sapphire ring with the setting in Vulcan gold - soon to be heading to a client in Bulgaria and also a couple of wedding rings with tiny gold beads hammered into the textured finish.