Regarding the other piece here is some possible help...
Robert Welch - 50 years of design in a Cotswold workshop
In his final year at the Royal College of Art, London, Robert Welch designed a vegetable dish which attracted the attention of the only stainless steel tableware manufacturer in Britain, the Midlands firm of J&J Wiggin. On graduation, Robert became their first consultant designer. This precipitated events by which Robert Welch found a workshop and studio premises conveniently near the Midlands: on the top floor of the Silk Mill, Chipping Campden, in the Cotswolds.
Almost from the outset, Robert Welch worked with his assistant and talented Silversmith John Limbrey who hand made all the commissioned and ecclesiastical silverware and the majority of the models and production drawings for machine design. In Robert Welch’s words: “There can be no doubt that two people working in close harmony and understanding can more than match the creative output of larger units. We observe a steady disciplined use of time, regular hours through success and failure. Looking out of the windows there are fine views of Chipping Campden and the surrounding countryside and the rhythm of work continues to flow.”
Robert Welch worked in The Silk Mill throughout his career, making commissioned silver and designing for mass production. As he said: “I believe that it is possible to blend the best of two worlds, the old and the new, the unique and the multiple, hand and machine, to the mutual advantage of each other”
Robert Welch’s philosophy of balancing the individuality of the maker against the rationality of the machine enriched each area to a very important degree, helping to create products with a warmth of feeling and tactility that people enjoyed using, whether it was ceremonial silver or a kitchen knife.
50 years later, Robert Welch Designs is still a family company, maintaining the values of their founder: designing and developing products utilising traditional craft methods, machine production and a deep understanding of appropriate functional form.
To celebrate our half century we have commissioned fifty pieces of Robert Welch’s famous design The ‘Campden’ Candelabrum to be hand made in silver. Click here for more information.
http://www.welch.co.uk/news.asp?instanceid=352069The Old Hall Works of the Former J&J Wiggin Limited
Walsall has a centuries-old tradition of forging metal lorimery for horse harness and during Victorian times became the World’s near-monopoly supplier of such essential tackle. With the onset of the twentieth-century, road transport technology was revolutionized whilst most of Europe’s draught horses perished in the mud of Flanders, together with the continent’s key men. Walsall went into a sudden and steep decline from which it has never recovered. But Staffordshire at large had another ancient tradition: The manufacture of luxury consumer durables for the elite classes. Such included enameled vinegarettes, crystal glass, china, decorated jasperware, black japan, silk, dress shoes, hunting jackets, flush lavatories and a plethora of other Bond Street exotica, including proverbially if more prosaically, the kitchen sink. Even into the twentieth century strange synergies could crystallize.
James Thomas Wiggin and his son James Enoch lived in a row of eight terraced houses next to the former Free Methodist Chapel in Revival Street, Bloxwich. For some years the chapel had functioned as the local Salvation Army Mission Hall.
In 1893 the two James’s established the firm of J&J Wiggin to make hand-forged buckle tongs in their Bloxwich homes. The capital assets comprised a set of hammers, an anvil and a coke-fired hearth.
As the business grew, James Thomas’s four other sons joined the firm and in 1901 it became necessary to expand next door into the now-unoccupied old Mission Hall: The premises that was to give the company a name of world renown.
J&J Wiggin diversified into curb-chain making and nickel and brass casting. By 1904 thirty people were employed. In 1913 Wiggin acquired the nearby drop-forge works of V Broadhurst and Company that made bridle bits and stirrups. The Broadhurst arm later changed to making pipe flanges and was still functional in 1960.
It was also in 1913, in the Yorkshire town of Sheffield some seventy miles North of Walsall, that the metallurgist Harry Brierley invented a remarkable chrome-iron alloy that would not rust or tarnish and was immune to much other chemical attack. He called his creation stainless steel though it was initially marketed as “Staybrite”.
The First World War interrupted normal evolutions when, in common with all other British factories the works was greatly expanded and re-tooled to make arms and ammunition. It was in 1914 that the chapel and houses were quickly demolished and the current sheds and offices erected.
In 1920 normal service resumed with the manufacture of chromium-plated brass bathroom fittings. The plated brass was soon replaced with “Staybrite”. For the first time the firm used the “Old Hall” trademark to market this material. The eclipse of the horse necessitated further changes in the product range. The manufacture of roller skates was entered to cater to the new craze, and windscreen frames were made for Ford and Standard cars.
In 1928 a decisive event occurred. William Wiggin was by now in charge and had just celebrated twenty-five years of marriage to Nellie. The couple had received numerous presents of silver tableware, but Nellie felt that the expense of post-war service made this ( so to say ) a white elephant, in view of the continuous polishing required in the sulfurous Black Country atmosphere. She suggested to her husband that they make tableware of stainless steel. Experiments were put in hand. The first such product to go on sale was a toast rack, and then in 1930 the World’s first stainless steel teapot was born.
In 1934 The Daily Mail newspaper sponsored the Ideal Home Exhibition at Olympia in Kensington, West London. The Sheffield steelmakers Thomas Firth and John Brown occupied a part of the exhibition space they called “Staybrite City”. Wiggins sub-let part of this area to exhibit their “Old Hall” range of stainless steel tableware which was very well received and Dr WH Hatfield, Head of Research at Firth Brown, commissioned Harold Stabler to design a range of tea and coffee services for Wiggins.
During World War Two the Wiggin works re-tooled to make chains for The Royal Navy, but in 1945 the growing range of Old Hall hollowware resumed its rapid expansion.
In the 1950’s and 1960’s, Robert Welch was commissioned to design a toast rack, dishes and cutlery in the modern idiom. He won several awards for his Old Hall work and the pieces are now collectors’ favorites. In 1958 Wiggins won the contract to outfit the new P&O liner “Oriana” with Welch-designed hollowware. By then five hundred people crowded the small factory on the site of the old mission hall.
The stainless steel tableware seemed to last perpetually and had replaced silver as the usual form of wedding-present hollowware. J&J Wiggin was now the largest hollowware maker in the World.
Wiggins floated as a public-limited company in 1960 and its acquisition of The Cheltenham Tool Company in 1967 added “Lifespan” stainless steel cutlery to the product range. In 1968 it bought The Bridge Crystal Glass Company.
In 1970, Old Hall was itself absorbed into the Prestige Group of domestic metalware companies. But during the Seventies a decline in demand for UK hollowware, and indeed other British products, accelerated. British industrial concerns agglomerated into ever larger defensive combines in a largely futile attempt to resist foreign predatory behavior but in a shrinking world other governments were quick to assist native enterprise that promised to put an end to British competition once and for all.
By now, the American firm Oneida was the largest company in the field and sought to eliminate its World competition, by whatever means. In 1982 it purchased J&J Wiggin and on 29th June 1984, Oneida closed The Old Hall Works.
The surviving scion of the Wiggin dynasty lives in nearby Levedale and is president of a flourishing Old Hall collectors’ society. Members exchange pieces, and in addition there is no difficulty in purchasing Old Hall ware on the Internet.
The semi-derelict factory now accommodates the intermittently-active Tudor pine furniture workshop and a working automobile repair shop. A small annex warehouses spares for a discontinued commercial vehicle, the Ford Transit van. And the rest is a roost for feral pigeons.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/7382107@N04/1707000792/ROBERT WELCH
Robert Welch was one of the most influential British metalwork designers of the mid twentieth century and is best known for his stainless steel tableware and work in cast iron. “When I lived at home with my parents we drank tea from a stainless steel teapot with Old Hall stamped on the base and I have recently had the opportunity to revisit those things that I once took for granted. Robert Welch’s domestic designs have withstood the test of time to become design classics. His creative approach combining craft and mass production to bring well designed and practical objects to everyone is evident in the designs I have chosen to reissue.”
Margaret Howell Stainless Steel.
Welch attended the Royal College of Art from 1952 and undertook scholarships in Sweden and Norway where he first discovered the exciting possibilities of stainless steel as a material for tableware and cutlery. Following his graduation Welch became consultant designer for J & J Wiggin in Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire and worked on design developments for the company’s Old Hall tableware brand, adding a mustard pot, a streamlined triangular tray and toast rack to the original salt and pepper set. This was followed in 1957 with the design of Welch’s Campden range, a collection of satin finish stainless steel tableware including coffee and milk pots with tapered rosewood handles, a candlestick and condiment set. In 1958 Welch designed a vast tea service, Oriana, commissioned by P&O cruises for the liner SS Oriana with special design features adapted for use at sea. In 1962 Welch designed Alverston, a domestic tea service which included a range of cutlery intended for everyday use, later to become known as RW No1. With its distinctive tapered design the range of stainless steel cutlery was awarded a Design Centre Award in 1965.
Cast Iron
Robert Welch’s interest in cast iron began in 1960 when he was commissioned by Black County Foundry as a consultant designer. Welch soon realised the commercial benefits of designing in cast iron rather than silver as he was able to make his designs available to a much wider audience. Welch developed a range of tableware including various enamelled candlesticks, including the Hobart, produced in three sizes. Originally available in black and white the design has been reissued in a limited edition warm red.
A range of found and reissued tableware in stainless steel and cast iron is available from Margaret Howell stores at Wigmore Street and Richmond.
http://www.margarethowell.co.uk/house_rw.html(Photo is The Old Hall Works of the Former J&J Wiggin Limited)
Location: The Intersection of Revival and Woodall Streets
Bloxwich, Staffordshire, England, UK
Date of Photograph: am 4 September 2007
OS Grid Reference: SK000019
Co-ordinates: 52:36:56N: 2:00:04W
Elevation: 164 meters
