Tales From The City - Inside The Silver Factory

Researching cultural things to do in Birmingham, I'd found a factory tour that sounded just up our street. Normally we'd catch the train and walk the rest of the way but with the Baltic temperatures, we decided to take a tram (aka The Midland Metro) directly to our destination.

Despite running since 1999, I'd never been on the tram before. This isn't as strange as it sounds, although on the proposed route, the Metro never actually made it to Walsall. Our nearest tram stop is in Wednesbury and although that's just three miles away, with regular bus and train connections to Birmingham & Wolverhampton within walking distance from home, it makes more sense for us to use those. 

It was all very straightforward. The trams run every 10 - 12 minutes, car parking is free and a return ticket is a very reasonable £5 (payable to the conductor by cash, card or contactless). We reached our destination in just 19 minutes.

Hockley, best known as Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter, has been home to the city's gold and silversmiths since the 16th century. The area thrived during the Industrial Revolution and by 1880 there were over seven hundred workshops registered. Business continued to boom during WWI with the demand for military medals, buttons and badges but was hit hard by the Great Depression. Back in the 1980s, when I worked here, it was a rundown suburb, still bearing the scars of the WW2 Luftwaffe raids during the Birmingham Blitz. However, after being designated an Industrial Improvement Area and awarded grants by English Heritage, the Georgian buildings were restored and many jewellery businesses returned. Once again there are over 700 jewellery businesses in the area, making up over 40% of the British output.

You may recall me visiting The Coffin Works with Nikki last year (HERE), a former factory frozen in time. Yesterday it was the turn of its near neighbour, The Silver Factory. 

 As a teenager, Welsh-born Jenkin Evans was apprenticed by the renowned Birmingham silversmiths, Levi & Salaman. Recognising the young man's extraordinary talent, his employers paid for him to attend Birmingham Collage of Art and on graduation, concerned that if they offered him full-time employment he'd be poached by a rival, took the unusual step of setting him up with his own factory, a converted terraced house at 54, Albion Street. The premises opened in 1881 and by 1908, JW Evans proved to be so successful that the premises had extended to four neighbouring properties and Jenkin had bought out his former employers, owning the business outright. Originally, Jenkin and his family lived in the rooms upstairs but as the business grew, they were able to move to the affluent suburb of Kings Norton.

The years up to the First World War were the heyday of JW Evans with a rapid increase in trade and employees. Account books show 48 employees in 1896 and record the production of over 100 dies annually during the early years of the business. Products were sold to luxury good sellers and high-end manufacturers such as Mappin and Webb & Asprey’s, numerous smaller manufacturers in Birmingham & London and even as far afield as America and Australia. 

Taken in 1881, before the bay windows were installed.

 In 1908 Jenkin's oldest son Harold joined as a partner. A keen amateur photographer, Harold took photographs of the workforce, made up of generations of the same families from the neighbouring slums. However, Harold's heart wasn't in his father's trade and although he remained a partner, he left to become a successful magician and was one of the founders of The Magic Circle, leaving Jenkin's younger son Austen to take the reins. The business then passed to Tony, Austen's son, who started working at the factory in the 1950s. Sadly, by the start of the 21st Century, fashions had moved on, leaving only a very small market for the elegant silver tableware popular in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. With production of these items either moving to the Far East or been replaced by modern technology, JW Evans was no longer viable. ‘We made things we were proud to sell’, Tony was quoted as saying, but ‘generations were growing up without silver in the house.’ Operating with only a handful of staff, the factory ceased trading on 31st March, 2008 & Tony Evans sold the premises to English Heritage. Tony died in November, 2024.

Although child labour wasn't strictly legal, most factories employed their workforce's children. 

Fathers and their sons. Both of the young men pictured died in WWI

Thanks to the business staying in the family for three generations, all 15,000 dies, cutting tools and minutiae have remained on site. The workshops of the JW Evans Silver Factory are left as if the original workforce might return at any minute but the skills of the specialist craftsmen who worked here throughout the late 19th and 20th centuries are now almost an forgotten memory.

Our guide was Mark who'd also shown Nikki & I around The Coffin Works. Witty and knowledgeable and full of fascinating facts, we was at pains to highlight how grim Victorian factory life was. No heating, gas lights, twelve hour days, conditions so unforgiving that death and serious maiming were commonplace. Pencilled on a wall, he pointed out how the workers kept a tally of the rats they'd killed.

 

Two linked manufacturing processes, die-sinking and drop-stamping, underpinned much of the Jewellery Quarter’s industry. Die-sinking involved hand cutting a pattern out of a solid block of steel. Each time a new article was designed, a new set of dies had to be made. This was highly skilled work, which required many years of apprenticeship. The deeply cut, three-dimensional patterns, like those needed for candlestick bodies or pepper pots, were especially challenging. But once made, the die could be used to create thousands of patterned parts in silver or base metals.

JW Evans specialised in ‘deep work’ for table silverware – items which had deep bodies such as gravy boats and took more steps to ‘sink’ the metal to the required depth. A huge variety of designs were produced and the stock became a treasured resource. Even after the firm invested in a newly invented die-copying machine in 1911, most of the work was still done by hand.

And despite all the filth and misery, things like this exquisite pepper pot were created.

These nightcaps were novelty drinking vessels, designed to hold a gentleman's bedtime whisky then, once the contents had been consumed, would be used to snuff his bedside candle.

 

Silver factory is in fact, a misnomer. The goods that JW Evans designed and produced were cast in brass, sold to the trade and then silver-plated by the companies who bought them.

Yes, the factory is left exactly how it was on the day it closed, even the worker's mugs are lined up ready for the tea break. 

Entry to JW Evans is by guided tour only which can be booked through English Heritage on their website HERE. The factory is open on alternative Fridays and Saturdays and tours, with a maximum of ten people run at 12.30pm and 2.30pm. JW Evans is not suitable for under 16s or those with limited mobility.

I can't recommend it highly enough, its well worth a trip to Brum.

Despite dressing in all the layers after a couple of hours inside the factory we could hardly feel our feet! 

And now you know why I wanted to wear some antique silver with a Birmingham hallmark. In the end I went for three of my pieces...if it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing!

 

Thanks for reading and enjoy the first weekend of 2025. We've got an amber weather alert for snow this evening, lets hope it doesn't hang around for long!