The Coat Route (21 page)

For a short time, the town perked up—until, that is, the opening of the Merry Hill Shopping Centre about five miles away. There was free parking for ten thousand cars, two hundred shops,
a ten-screen cinema, England’s first drive-through McDonald’s, and a monorail—a monorail!—to whisk shoppers from their cars. (Enthusiasm for the futuristic train withered when twenty passengers had to be rescued after spending hours fifty feet above ground in a disabled train—in what newspapers called the “Merry Hill Train Terror.”) The monorail shut down in 1996, but the shopping center grew, attracting retail giants like H&M, Debenhams, the Disney Store, Gap, and Marks & Spencer. Best Buy and Staples opened nearby. Halesowen—and the other towns around the mall—didn’t have a prayer.

In the bluish light of the Cornbow Center, Peter and I walk down an open stairway to the first-floor food court. We get coffee and limp croissant sandwiches at a counter and take them to a round table. All around us are people wearing clothes that are almost certainly adorned with plastic buttons from China’s Button City.

I ask Peter if he thinks he can keep his button business going.

“Like most manufacturing businesses, we are threatened,” he says. “And … the government has done nothing at all to support manufacturing in this country. I think it goes back to schools. Children were being told, ‘You don’t want to go into industry; you might get your hands dirty.’ Young people grow up thinking that you can make loads of money just by manipulating financial systems.

“We’ve got this terrible thing called greed. People only care about making money, and they don’t care who they hurt along the way. Everything else goes out the window. I tell my children, ‘Leave the country. We’re finished.’ ”

Peter takes a sip of coffee.

“I was brought up [to believe] if you buy something it would
last forever. It’s a disposable world now,” he says. “People buy things and they just expect the stitching won’t be good and the buttons will fall off. To me, it’s all alien. I just can’t live with it.

“Sometimes I think I should have sold the factory and taken the money. I could have, but it would have put people out of work. They rely on me, and I rely on them. I couldn’t do it. My father is probably thinking, You stupid idiot—you should have gotten out while you could.”

We sit in silence for a few moments. A group of kids in black hooded sweatshirts and ripped skintight jeans walk by.

“But then one day you are walking around the factory and you see a button, and you pick it up, and you say, ‘My God, that’s a cracking button!’ ”

Peter’s eyes light up with the thought.

“And it drives you on.”

T
he coat was missing something, John felt. It needed a final flourish, something extraordinary. One day, while he was in the shower, it came to him. His good friend John Thompson was one of the best gold engravers in the world. John wondered if he could commission Thompson to create something special for inside the coat
.

The tailor stopped by Thompson’s shop in Sydney and told him what he had in mind. Thompson agreed to work up a design that would incorporate the J. H. Cutler logo on one side of a narrow eighteen-karat-gold bar and Keith Lambert’s initials on the other. The plaque would be suspended on a gold chain and serve as a hanger inside the collar. He would also carve Keith’s initials into a small gold plaque that could be anchored just above the inside breast pocket and take the place of a traditional cloth label. All in all, the two pieces would add about $4,000 to the final price of the coat. The tailor knew that Keith wouldn’t mind
.

J
ohn Thompson works with his thirty-three-year old son, Peter, out of a small, brightly lit studio and salesroom on the fourth floor of the Dymocks Building, an Art Deco landmark in downtown Sydney. The shop is divided by a lighted glass display case holding samples of their work: intricately engraved wedding bands, signet rings, and cufflinks in gold and platinum.

The two sit over microscopes at tables in the back half of their room. The elder Thompson wears a dark denim shirt with the cuffs turned back. He has a broad face, sleepy, kind eyes, white hair, and a trimmed white beard—reminiscent of Ernest Hemingway in his Cuban seafarer period. Peter wears wireframed glasses and has dark chin stubble and cropped brown hair gelled on top into soft short spikes.

Though it is only 10:30 a.m., John gives off a sense of exasperation that suggests he has already had a long day. Since I arrived and was invited to sit in a chair against the wall, he has misplaced a gold ring, then found it, then misplaced it again, lost
to a curiosity shop of desktop clutter: magazines, an old-looking pistol with an engraved handle, tools, crumpled papers, an adding machine, coffee cups, stacks of books, including a battered copy of
Fairbairn’s Book of Crests
, a bag of dried apricots, invoices, plastic bags filled with pieces of jewelry and gemstones, and several small metal soldiers, who I assume are strays from the battle-scene diorama set up on a table near me. In the corner, beyond a counter holding a microwave oven and boxes of tea bags, I notice several long-barreled muskets leaning against the wall.

“I like stuff,” John says when he sees me scanning the room. “Guns. I get them at auctions. It’s bordering on an obsession. This is a ladies’ traveling pistol from 1718.” He lifts the gun up from his desk to show me.

“Over there, those are Indian muskets, English, Confederate, and Union rifles. It looks like I’m waiting for the next uprisin’,” he says, laughing.

John grew up in London’s East End and still has the accent and sense of humor of the true Cockney that he is. As a child, he was, of all things, an engraving prodigy. When he was four years old, his father taught him copperplate writing, a style of calligraphy that is transferred by an engraver, using a pointed tool called a burin, onto a plate made of copper. The plate can then be used to make prints. At fifteen, he was accepted into London’s Central School of Arts & Crafts, one of the world’s most prestigious art institutions, even though the minimum age was eighteen. One school had turned him away because he was already a better engraver than the instructors.

“When I picked up the graver and put it into copper, I knew that this was what I wanted to do,” he says.

John happens to be a descendant, on his mother’s side, of William Hogarth, the eighteenth-century engraver and painter,
whose best-known work is
A Rake’s Progress
, a series of images depicting the boozy downfall of a rich young man who comes to the city. “Maybe that’s where the obsession comes from.”

John’s lettering had a balletic flow, and his images were complex, precise, and assured, astonishing in one so young. He was recruited out of art school for a five-year apprenticeship at William Day Limited, a famed copperplate engraver specializing in high-end stationary and naval charts. It would be the last hand-engraving apprenticeship ever offered in the U.K.

“It was quite Dickensian,” John says of the firm where he did his training. “My guv’nor had a Sherlock Holmes pipe. I remember one day hearing him completely dismissing offset litho printing, saying it was a ‘toy,’ that it would never take off. And, really, it pretty much killed off the copperplate industry.”

Copperplate engraving produces print images of exquisite sharpness, but because the plates wear down with each strike they have a short life-span. The offset press removed the direct contact between plate and paper by the addition of a rubber surface, allowing for a large number of prints, albeit of lesser quality than copperplate, to be produced rapidly and at a more affordable price. As the use of offset lithography became more widespread, copperplate engraving became increasingly niche.

“The biggest customer in them days was the royal family,” John says of his time working in London. “I did the invites for Princess Diana’s wedding.”

He was also commissioned to craft a gold signet ring with the Welsh three-ostrich-plume crest for Prince Charles’s investiture as the Prince of Wales—a ring he still wears on his pinkie.

John moved to Australia in 1983 and, after a short stint in book publishing, started his own jewelry business. He uses engraving methods and tools identical to those used in the fourteenth
century, when the craft was first developed to provide ornamentation on suits of armor. With the burin’s rounded wooden knob handle resting in the palm of his hand, John pushes the sharp steel tip into precious metal to make a groove, like a plow furrowing a field. The pressure must be exactly right.

“You can always tell an engraver,” he says, holding up his right hand and showing me his middle finger, which is permanently twisted from applying force for the past forty-eight years.

Though engraving appears to be a sedentary pursuit, John says it is a physical and mental workout.

“You really use every muscle in your body. And it’s also a bit like yoga. You have to control your breathing.”

John takes projects home every night, and works on them until 2 a.m. He is usually up by 6 a.m. to make the hour-long commute back into Sydney. Some nights he loses track of time and looks up and realizes that the sun is coming up.

“I always strive for a hundred and ten percent,” he says. “I’m never satisfied. That’s how passionate I am about it. I eat, drink, and sleep it. I think that’s the mark of a true artist. I don’t mean to sound conceited.”

John’s wife is resigned to his long hours. She does not allow him, however, to tell people he is an engraver when they are on vacation, knowing that he will start talking about his work and will be unable to stop.

“She says I have to say I’m a metal worker,” he tells me with a laugh.

When John W. Thompson & Son launched several websites, inquiries and orders began coming in. Signet rings were not, it turned out, in demand only among the tallyho set. He is often asked to engrave words in Hebrew, Arabic, and Chinese—none of which he speaks.

“I have got an idea about Latin,” he says.

On his left hand, he wears a gold ring on which he carved the words
Cave Furorem Patientis
—“Beware the Fury of a Patient Man.”

“There is so much access now. I’m doing five, six, ten jobs at once,” he says. “I’m getting overwhelmed. And emails—that’s a different kind of hell. People expect me to answer them.

“I’m my own worst enemy, though. I talk too much. I’m always talking to customers who come in. I want them to feel welcome. But I don’t like the tire-kickers, the people who want to pick your brain, and then they go home and get on their computers. Or they say, ‘Why are you charging so much when I get it done at Mr. Minit?’ They don’t know how much work is involved.”

I think about my own recent brushes with metal engraving: an iPod with my initials on it, and dozens of small personalized trophies for my daughter’s ski team. Both purchases had arrived at my front door with stupefying speed after I ordered them online.

John is so skilled with the burin that he can carve sixty letters on a ring measuring only one centimeter across. Just for fun, he once engraved a tiny copper plate with the words “Wishing you a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year,” then used it to print his holiday greeting cards. Though John may not be competitive—“I’ve got past all that. I don’t feel I have to prove myself”—hand engravers do have a long tradition of trying to top one another.

The challenge has always been to fit the most words on the smallest surface. In the late 1800s, that might have meant carving the Lord’s Prayer on the back of a dollar gold piece. In 1899, a Canadian goldsmith named Samuel Dibbs gained notoriety when he engraved that prayer, plus the Ten Commandments, his
name and address, and the words “There are 1,593 letters engraved on this coin” on a five-cent piece. Two years later, the Lord Provost of Perth managed to get the Ten Commandments, the Beatitudes, the Lord’s Prayer, Numbers 6:24–26, and the Doxology on a three-penny piece. In 1904, Clarence Young, a U.S. government engraver, fit two full alphabets, the date, and his name on the head of a pin. Then, in 1907, Paul Wentz, a Pennsylvanian, squeezed the Lord’s Prayer onto the head of a brass pin with a 2-mm diameter.

That inspired a Seattle jewelry engraver named Godfrey Lundberg to attempt to go one better. His goal was to fit the Lord’s Prayer on a pinhead one-third the size of Wentz’s. Before he could begin, however, Lundberg knew that he had to undergo serious physical and mental training.

“
The steadiness of nerve that would be required could come only as the result of a conditioning process stricter than that of the highly trained athlete,” the Spokane
Spokesman-Review
reported. “Tobacco, coffee and like indulgences were out of the question. Fresh air and exercise were necessary. Complete rest for the eyes had to be assured.”

As he prepared himself physically, Lundberg also spent six months making an engraving tool of specially tempered steel that could carve microscopic lines but still hold up to the pressure of the engraver’s strokes. The point was invisible to the naked eye. Once he had the tool—and the resting heart rate—he worked on the pin only in the evenings, when the rumbling trolley cars that passed by his shop had stopped running for the day. With his arms strapped to an iron bar and his wrists bound with leather straps to muffle the rhythm of his pulse, he completed only two or three strokes a day. After starting over hundreds of times, he
finally completed one perfect pin. It had taken him three years—and what was calculated to be 1,863 individual strokes.