Jack Spencer and the re making of his designs – a brief background.
Jack was born on Nethershire Lane, Sheffield in 1934 to John Henry Spencer, a steel strip hardener, and Winifred Gertrude Spencer who according to my father’s memoirs held no job but as a small child I can remember her working at Walker and Hall on Howard Street in the warehousing department putting the final polish on pieces of silverware and then wrapping them in acid-proof tissue paper to stop them tarnishing.
He passed his eleven plus exam and won a scholarship to the Junior Art Department of the Sheffield College of Art on Leopold Street in the centre of the city. Vocational training in silversmithing from the age of eleven. He went on to an apprenticeship with Walker and Hall which was interrupted by two years national service in the R.A.F. Next he teamed up with the Sheffield born industrial designer David Mellor whilst working at W&H and moved with him a little later to work full time for Mellor at his stylish new home/workshop on Park Lane.
(L to R. Jack and our seal point Siamese, Cleo. Jack, second from left at the Junior Art Dept. Blocking out a silver dish at David Mellor’s. Our shop at 545 Ecclesall Road Sheffield)
After a two year partnership with Keith Tyssen and periods teaching at Sheffield College of Art he started in the late 1960s to design a range of jewellery which proved immensely successful and today is highly collectable. This coincided with a time in the British jewellery industry when styles were jaded and flat, many harking back to the 1930s and only the Scandinavian design houses were producing exiting new pieces. Jack’s ethos was to produce high quality, handmade items at a price the average High Street shopper could afford. The emphasis was on handmade, as most Scandinavian jewellery, although marketed as such was in fact hand assembled out of cast or stamped components. The vast majority of Jack’s pieces were totally handmade from just two different widths and gauges of gold and silver wire.
(L to R. Altar cross in the chapel of Churchill College Cambridge. Three early designs - jewellery photos by John Kelly)
I went to work for my father as an apprentice in 1971 however I’d been helping him out in the workshop since the age of twelve.
Over the years I’ve been asked many times why I don’t make some Jack Spencer pieces and I’ve always answered that they were his designs not mine and in any case I was busy with my own career but lately I’ve been approached by so many people asking me the same question I’ve decided to have a go.
To say I spent the first three years of my working life making JS jewellery, starting again at a forty four year remove has proved remarkably difficult. Back in 1974 all of the designs were made in batches of ten, from start to finish by one person, myself included then that person would be moved on to a different design. This meant that the craftsmen were able to be very flexible and as an added bonus, although each finished piece looked superficially alike, there were the subtle differences imparted by a different maker. Colin Rockingham, our Marketing Director once told me of an experiment he’d carried out where three owners of the same design put their piece on a tray which he then covered with a cloth, shuffled them around and then gave them back. The three owners immediately picked out their own piece.
(Starting again after forty four years. The third picture is the first nebula pendant I re-created)
When I started recently to re-make some pendants, I had nothing to go on other than photographs from the internet, which, although gave me a design to work to, imparted no clue as to dimensions, and as the photographs tended to have been taken at an angle, made circular pendants oblique. The only way I could go forward was to reverse engineer the designs using copper wire and different diameter drill shanks to mock a piece up. When I was happy I could go on to repeat the process using silver wire.
My first attempt was on a design called Nebula, a simple uneven spiral tacked with solder at the joins - I say simple, Jack was the only person in the workshop who could make one successfully as the technique was in fact quite difficult to master. When I had a go I found I could do it, it must have been something in the family DNA. I have since re-created one or two more designs.
As the majority of pieces had components bent around jigs made of brass sheet screwed to wooden blocks my next problem is trying to remember what these jigs looked like. This is an ongoing project and I’ll post some more on this subject soon.
