A cluttered and closed Birmingham silverware factory stands testament to a noble time
Next week in Birmingham a chaotic memorial to British manufacturing will be unveiled. It isn't easy to know how to describe it. JW Evans's old silverware factory can hardly be called a museum – there are no labels next to the objects, no demonstration models, no gift shop. It has neither been restored to how it would have looked in its heyday nor has it found a new use – another "cultural centre" or "fabulous exhibition space". A freshly opened tomb might be nearer the mark, or an inland version of the Mary Celeste.
Everything lies as it was when the factory finally closed in 2008: machines, tools, invoices, dust, a heavy electric typewriter, the clocking-on machine. "Remember, you mustn't touch anything," is the instruction to the visitor, but the truth is that you could rearrange a bench or a shelf and nobody would notice. Who would remember the exact position of a half-finished sauceboat or the angle of a spanner? The jumble stretches through dozens of little workshops, along corridors and up staircases. Tracey Emin's bed is in apple-pie order by comparison. Other than major repairs to make these ramshackle buildings weatherproof, the internal rot and ruin have been stemmed, rather than removed or cleaned up. Machinery will get no more or less rusty; damp walls no more or less stained. English Heritage calls it "minimum intervention conservation". The total cost so far of buying the factory and preserving it more or less exactly as found comes to £2m.
At first, the notion seems too rarified and precious. Why not go the whole museum hog? A working die stamp that children can operate, a video on a loop, different soundtracks (of chisels, hammers, Beryl Reid, Slade): these things might set the tills ringing in a way that the present arrangements – open two days a fortnight, guided tours only – is unlikely to do. After an hour or two inside JW Evans's factory, you realise how ghastly and invasive such half-instructive amusements would be.
With the help of Tony Evans – the factory's last owner, now employed as a curator and guide – a story of ingenuity, enterprise and failure rises out of the silence and clutter. English Heritage describes the works as "probably the best-preserved example of a manufactory based in what were initially domestic premises in [Birmingham's] internationally important Jewellery Quarter." The definition may be accurate, but what it can't capture is the factory's Ozymandias atmosphere, of how things ended as well as how they flourished and began.
Evans's grandfather, Jenkin Jones Evans, opened his works in Albion Street, Hockley, in 1881. A typical Birmingham story: Evans had learned the basics of the craft with a firm called Levi & Salaman, who recognised his promise and sent him to art school to perfect his drawing skills and trigonometry, and then loaned him the money to set up on his own as one of their suppliers. Evans's factory was also his home. He extended the shopfloor into his backyard and bought the three houses next door, so that by the start of the 20th century four houses and their gardens had been turned into workshops that employed about 60 men, women and boys.
All over the city, artisan-businessmen had been doing the same since the 1700s, turning out the metal "smallware" that included buttons, badges and buckles. Evans specialised in sterling silver and silver-plate for the table; not cutlery, which was a Sheffield trade, but in ornamental objects that many of us would now struggle to identify.
The manufacturing techniques belonged to the last half of the 18th century, when industrialists such as Matthew Boulton introduced elements of mass production to what had been a handicraft. The great innovation was the drop stamp, launched from a height rather like a guillotine (which Birmingham believes it predated and inspired) on to a silver sheet above a mould impressed with the desired pattern, sunk to match the stamp's relief. These moulds were the dies, and the Evans works has thousands of them lined on shelves, some said to have been made for the Soho factory of Boulton himself. To make or "sink" a die was a formidable skill. The diesinker had to translate a drawing – it might be for a candlestick in the form of a Corinthian column – into three dimensions, in reverse, chiseling it into hard steel and then smoothing it with emery cloth. At JW Evans, a new die (vine patterns, lion heads, round-bellied sauce boats, all in a dozen different sizes) was made every day. This was during what Evans calls "the Edwardian silver boom" when families displayed table silver "to show their friends they'd come up in life". The Evanses came up, and moved to the suburbs, but the firm continued as a family enterprise from 1881 to 2008 and nothing got thrown away. When Evans shut up shop, the machinery he left behind had changed hardly at all since the 19th century.
He showed me round. I asked the same question often: "What's that?" The answers showed the tremendous variety of once-common ornaments and utensils. Dies and finished pieces lay around for swing-handled cake plates, inkstands, decanter labels, candelabras, sugar shakers, ashtrays that could cope with a Woodbine or a Havana, tea caddy spoons, "silent butlers" for table crumbs, tiny butter knives, sugar and sandwich tongs, grape scissors, envelope knives, cases for gentlemen's visiting cards, larger ones for ladies' visiting cards, candle snuffers, topping-out trowels, badges that were sold in military canteens (HMS Rodney, Royal Highland Fusiliers), plaques for pubs decorated with galleons and country hearths. A showroom cabinet had as its centrepiece a convoluted structure of dishes and stalks. "An epergne," Evans said, smiling at the extravagance of it. "You could fill it with a mixture of sweets and fruit."
The object I liked best was a "match safe", a decorative matchbox inscribed with the letters BILST/UM/PSHI/SM/ARK, which appear on a stone in The Pickwick Papers to confuse and excite an antiquity-minded Mr Pickwick, though they turn out to have been written by an illiterate (Bill Stumps, his mark"). This, too, had been a popular Evans product.
The glitter had already faded from the silverware trade when Tony Evans joined the family firm in 1955. Silver needs cleaning; domestic servants vanished from many middle-class homes in the 1920s. Around the same time people began to show off their status with cars, vacuum cleaners and washing machines. "We made things that we were proud to sell," Evans said, but a truth had to be faced: "Generations were growing up without silver in the house."
What was it like, Britain, in the silver age? It smoked, drank spirits from decanters, ate cakes, wrote with pen and ink, opened letters with special knives, shook sugar over strawberries and transferred sandwiches and grapes from serving dish to plate without the touch of a human hand. Smoking, it read Dickens. Drinking, it liked to look at saloon bar decorations inspired by Merrie England. It was dainty, but fond of the army and navy. It polished a lot. If you seek a monument, here it lies, jumbled in a Birmingham factory.