“There was never nothing exported from Britain that there wasn’t a factory in Birmingham that manufactured it, you know.” proclaims a sign in the Birmingham Museum. Late in the 18th Century Birmingham’s “Golden Boys,” Matthew Boulton, William Murdoch and James Watt, transformed the city into a manufacturing powerhouse, “The Workshop of the World.”
A worker’s life during the Industrial Revolution was a hard one; the hours were long, the pay was low and the work was dangerous. In the northern textile factories unskilled men—and women and children, too—worked long hours at machines they did not own producing a single product like cotton fabric. In Birmingham skilled craftsmen also worked long hours but in small workshops, often in their homes. Each worker would carry out one process—drawing designs, making dies, forming the pieces, then assembling, plating and polishing them. Small factories emerged in the 19th century, bringing processes together under one roof. They specialized in finished, high-value metal goods, including guns, buttons, “toys,” brass, electroplating and jewelry, making Birmingham the “City of a Thousand Trades.”
The J.W. Evans Silver Factory English Heritage Site is the reason we are in Birmingham. It was—and still is—located in the Jewelry Quarter, a neighborhood of ordinary 1830s homes with workshops extending unseen from the rear of the houses. The founder, Jenkins Jones Evans, began as an apprentice with a firm that recognized his potential, sent him to art school and loaned him the money to start his own business in 1881 as one of their suppliers. Evans extended his shop into the backyard, bought three houses next door and by 1900 was employing 60 men, women and children.
J.W. Evans specialized in silver and silver-plate tableware—candlesticks, sauce bowls, grape scissors, candle snuffers and much more for Edwardian families who were keeping up appearances. Each piece required a specific “die,” a relief mould of steel with the pattern painstakingly chiseled into it—JW Evans has 15,000! A silver sheet placed above the die was then“sunk” into shape by a guillotine-like drop stamp whose heavy hammerhead with the reverse image of the die is dropped repeatedly pressing out the final shape.
The component pieces then had to be soldered, filed, cleaned and polished. Less expensive pieces that were made with a base metal rather than silver were electroplated with a silver finish. The women that Evans employed used the lighter fly presses for the cutting of designs and intricate patterns.
Business slowed after the Great War when the number of “stately homes” declined due to the high upkeep costs. Inexpensive mass-produced stainless steel items began to replace silver tableware while washing machines, cars and vacuum cleaners became the new status symbols.
Jenkins grandson, Tony, kept the business alive from 1955 until 2008 when J.W. Evans ceased operations. English Heritage stepped in and with Tony’s assistance, the J. W. Evans Silver Factory became an English Heritage Site, one of the most complete remaining factories in Birmingham’s historic Jewelry Quarter. After extensive but necessary repairs—a leaking roof, structural supports, reconditioning the drop stamps, removal of hazardous materials and the like—the decision was made to “conserve as found.” After everything was examined and catalogued it was left just as it was when Tony closed the shop for the last time—tools, dies, sketches, invoices—EVERYTHING!
The second rule for visitors is “Don’t Touch!” The first rule is dress warmly. There was no heating in Edwardian times—and there ain’t none now!
