In Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter, jewellers, silversmiths and members of the allied trades have for centuries clustered skills, materials and demand in this industrial district. The Second World War disrupted these established relationships and routines, as jewellers utilised their tacit knowledge of small metalwork to adapt to production for the Armed Forces. This research project engages with debates in design history and anthropology that link skill and identity to investigate the enduring impact of this change in production on jewellers’ concepts of occupational identity in the 1940s and 1950s, when restrictions on gold made much of their work impossible, and even illegal.

This research takes a material focus, particularly following gold alloys (carats), to trace the impacts of these restrictions. Trade members instead worked through loopholes to turn to the jewellery ‘black market’ to maintain their skills, an option made available through the trade’s traditions of independent workshop spaces, tool ownership and discretion. Analysis of employee accident records, wages books, job adverts and new oral histories of trade members reinstates craftspeople to a production history that has previously focused only on industry leaders and managers.

By concentrating instead on workers’ experiences, this research reclaims the terms ‘flexibility’ and ‘adaptation’ from ontologies of efficiency and uses them to appreciate jewellers’ discretion in choosing how and with whom they worked in their occupational community. I carefully engage with these jewellers’ occupational legacies by recognising and utilising my position within the trade to work with the industry’s enduring principle of discretion – a knowing from within that traverses the time between the 1940s and the present. The trade structure is thus both methodology and conclusion: jewellers created and sustained their identity through their trade network and their material interactions, and these material interactions help us today to connect with their occupational legacies. Through this principle of proximity, this research proves the possibility and benefit of considering concepts of identity in the past and across a varied trade.