I think it’s fair to say that Aston University has never encountered anyone quite like the fine jewellers Theo Fennell and Stephen Webster before. The pair, both larger than life in their own ways, are visiting the Aston University Engineering Academy (AUEA) for the day. This university technical college focuses on teaching technical skills to students aged 13-19 and, in so doing, offering the possibility of a better future to children from one of the most deprived areas in the country just across the road.
The rock’n’roll Webster, fine jewellery’s answer to Ronnie Wood, is wearing a crucifix-shaped amethyst as big as the Ritz on his pinkie. The Old Etonian Theo Fennell checks in his spotty silk cravat at the front desk. Just his cravat. Cue utter bafflement.
Their wingwoman is the soignée jewellery expert Carol Woolton. The trio are co-founders of an initiative called the Leopards which, since 2016, has had as its aim passing on to a new generation the skills and craftsmanship upon which the future of the British fine jewellery industry depends, and encouraging inclusivity while they are at it.
The Leopards took their name from the hallmark for London, a leopard’s head. But they have chosen Birmingham as the recipient for ten De Beers-sponsored specialist tool boxes because it too has a jewellery industry in desperate need of a new generation of trained craftspeople. “If you go to our jewellery quarter,” says Daniel Locke-Wheaton, the impressive head of AUEA, “it is full of people in their fifties and sixties. We have to strike now.” The biggest challenge the local jewellery companies face is “recruitment”, says Greg Fattorini, head of his family firm, Thomas Fattorini.
Those boxes are “a portable jewellery course”, according to Judith Cobham-Lowe of the Goldsmiths’ Company, the livery company also offering its support to the Leopards’ initiative. Each one is worth £500 and contains 36 tools. Collette Waudby, a jewellery designer who is heading the programme in Aston, is even going out into primary schools, attempting to catch future Fennells and Websters young with, for example, a spot of metal stamping or wax carving.
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Both men are evangelical about what a career in jewellery has done for them, and what it can do for others. Both are irritated by a society — and an education system — that holds head work in more regard than hand work. (Fennell talks at length about the postwar idea of “parity of esteem”.) Both are more than irritated, downright cross actually, about the fact that when it comes to our art schools, as Webster puts it, “talented British kids lose out to lucrative foreign ones who may not be as talented”.
“This is an industry that can offer jobs that fulfil kids and give them a great life,” says Fennell, who tells me that, when he left Eton in the Seventies, he was the first alumnus to go to art school in a decade. “You can make a terrific living at something you love rather than sweating away in a terrible office.”
Webster, the son of an Essex draughtsman, talks of how transformative art school was for him. “I loved it immediately. I couldn’t believe that jewellery design was a career. If you offer the kid who isn’t good at maths the chance to make something early on, that can change their future.”
Fennell, who now has a sideline as a bestselling memoirist, and whose daughter is the film-maker Emerald (Saltburn, Promising Young Woman), describes what it’s like in his studio when a big piece is completed. “Everyone gathers around and we have a reveal. Everyone has been involved. And everyone claps. It’s like a baby leaving the nest.” Pause. “Or at least it would be if we didn’t then have to wait three years to sell it,” he deadpans.
It’s important to both jewellery designers that they introduce a wider cross-section of society to the charms of their chosen métier. “I hear from a huge number of Lavinias,” Fennell says. “They tell me they have been making things out of feathers in Ibiza. Or their parents ask me if I can help them set up a brand. The Leopards want to find the right people. If we get them hooked now …” He laughs. “Besides, Stephen and I are the end consumers. We need people.”
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Not that there haven’t already been a few bumps in the road with the Leopards’ longstanding mentorship programme, run in collaboration with the Goldsmiths’ Company and the Prince’s Trust. “One of our mentees started melting gold and silver in her bedroom,” Woolton says. “She ended up setting her pillow alight.”
Waudby remains undeterred. “We’ll get them jewellers in,” she says.
