The Bench: A Short Love Letter to the Jeweller’s Workbench

The oldest thing in my studio isn’t the kiln, and it isn’t any of the stones. It’s the bench. I want to tell you about it, because almost everything I send you begins and ends here, and most people have never seen one.

A jeweller’s bench is built around the way the work has to be held. It stands high — higher than a desk — so that you sit upright with your hands raised close to your eyes. You don’t lean over the work; you bring the work up to you. Spend a day at the right height and you understand why: the precision lives in those last few inches between the tool and the eye, and a bad posture costs you them.

Cut into the front edge is a half-circle, the spot where you sit. It lets you get into the centre of the bench rather than reaching across it, and it puts the work directly over the most important fitting of all: the bench peg, a small wedge of wood that juts out at chest height. You brace against the peg to saw, to file, to set. It takes the force of the work so your hands can stay delicate. A jeweller’s peg wears into its own private shape over the years, notched and grooved by the particular things that maker tends to do.

Underneath, slung between the legs, is the skin — a leather apron or a metal drawer that catches everything that falls. In most trades the dust is swept away. In this one it is saved. Filings of silver and gold collect in the skin all year, and in time they are gathered up and refined back into metal. The sweepings are called lemel. Nothing precious is allowed to simply leave the room.

What strikes me most about the bench is how little it has changed. Look at a woodcut of a goldsmith’s workshop from five hundred years ago and you will see the same high bench, the same cut-out, the same peg, the same skin catching the same dust. A jeweller from that workshop, set down at my bench today, would need no instructions. The tools in my hand would be familiar in the hand. The kiln might surprise them; the bench would not.

I spend more hours here than anywhere else in my life. It has a smell — metal, a trace of wax, the ghost of the kiln nearby. The front edge is worn smooth and gone slightly dark where my forearms rest, and in a few decades that patch will be a real hollow worn into the wood. I think about that sometimes, and it doesn’t make me sad. A hollow worn by your own arms over a working life seems to me one of the better things a person can leave in a piece of wood.

The romance of this work, people imagine, is in the finished piece — and it is, a little. But the truth is that most of it happens right here, at a plain wooden bench, in the quiet, doing the same small motions that hands have done for centuries. If you’d like to see the results of all those hours, come and find me at Paddington Markets on a Saturday. The bench stays home; the work comes with me.