Whitby - Jet Workshops on the Yorkshire Coast

Whitby is the iconic site of Victorian mourning material history. A small harbour town on the north-east English Yorkshire coast, some two hundred kilometres north-east of Manchester, with around 12,000 inhabitants in the late nineteenth century - and with an economy that, at the Victorian peak, rested almost entirely on working a single fossil material: jet. The Whitby jet of the local cliffs became the gold standard of English mourning jewellery in the nineteenth century, and with that the material basis of Europe's most important mourning style system.

Geological conditions

The cliffs between Whitby and Robin Hood's Bay lie at the transition from the Jurassic to the Lias. Preserved in these sediment layers, roughly 180 million years old, are the fossil remains of monkey puzzle trees (Araucariaceae) - driftwood that survived in its organic substance in the shallow-sea sediment of the time, thanks to high sedimentation rates and the absence of oxygen, and was compressed under pressure into a very fine, hard, glossy black substance.

This substance - jet - is not a stone in the mineralogical sense but a fossilised hardwood with a hardness of 2.5 to 4 on the Mohs scale. It can be carved with steel tools and polished to a high gloss with cloth. Above all, it shows a characteristic warm black which, in direct light, carries a faint brown shimmer - a colouring that other black materials (onyx, black enamel, vulcanite) do not achieve.

The Whitby cliff stratum is a geological exception. Outside Whitby itself, jet of comparable quality is found only in Asturias (Spain), in the Swabian Jura (Germany) and in Siberia - and in all three comparison regions the material is softer, more brittle or rarer than the Whitby deposit.

Early history

Jet from the Whitby region was already being worked in Roman times. Jet beads, small pendants and amulets have been found in Roman graves in York and along Hadrian's Wall - probably won from the Whitby cliffs and distributed across the Roman province of Britannia. In the Middle Ages the material was occasionally used for religious carvings (rosaries, small figures of saints), but remained a craft speciality without economic significance.

The Whitby jet industry proper emerges in the early nineteenth century. A local retired man, John Carter, begins commercial working around 1800 - carving small pieces of jewellery from cliff fragments washed up on the shore and selling them to visitors to Whitby. By 1810 some two workshops are registered. By 1820, around ten. The industry is small, but growing steadily.

The first major growth spurt comes with the opening of the Whitby and Pickering Railway in 1836 (one of the earliest railways in England), which connected Whitby to the national market. By 1850 around fifty workshops are in operation.

Peak, 1850–1890

The decisive impetus comes with the death of Prince Albert in December 1861. Queen Victoria's lifelong widow's mourning makes mourning jewellery the court standard, and English mourning jewellery becomes identified with Whitby jet. Three factors work together:

• Royal patronage - Queen Victoria herself wears Whitby jet jewellery; so do her daughters and ladies-in-waiting
• Crystal Palace Exhibition - Whitby workshops present their pieces at the great industrial exhibitions (London 1851, 1862; Paris 1855, 1867)
• Mourning warehouses - specialised mourning-jewellery emporia in London (Jay's, Pugh's, Peter Robinson's Court & General Mourning Warehouse) list Whitby jet as a premium line

Between 1860 and 1875 the Whitby workforce grows from around 200 to more than 1,500. The workshops organise themselves in a mixture of small craft businesses (often 2 to 5 people) and larger manufactories (up to 30 people). The main production steps are divided up as labour:

1. Sourcing raw material - by cliff gathering (small fragments on the beaches), by organised cliff working (with specialised tools) and, from the 1860s onwards, by deep mining
2. Rough cutting - the raw pieces are sawn to size and roughly shaped
3. Carving - the main work; often done as outwork in the homes of the employees
4. Polishing - by cloth or wax polish, in specialised workshops
5. Mounting - the finished jet elements are assembled with gold settings, pins, clasps and chains

The Whitby workshops employ men (carvers), women (polishers, mounting) and children (ancillary work). Wages are above average by the standards of English industry; an experienced Whitby carver earns more than a miner in the same region.

Product range

The Whitby workshops produce the full spectrum of Victorian mourning jewellery:

• Mourning brooches in all sizes, from 2 to 7 cm (see Mourning Brooch)
• Mourning necklaces as multi-link jet chains with a central pendant
• Mourning pendants as single pieces on a gold chain
• Mourning bracelets with jet plaques and a gold clasp
• Mourning earrings as smaller counterparts to the brooch
• Carved figures - small sculptural pieces with mourning iconography (anchor, weeping willow, forget-me-not bouquet)
• Heavy mourning lockets with a hair compartment on the inside (see Mourning Locket)
• Rosaries for Catholic customers (above all for the Irish and French markets)

Most pieces carry simple, geometrically abstract ornament; iconographic pictorial pieces (weeping willow, urn) are rarer than in the French or German mourning manufactories. The Whitby aesthetic is material-led - the polished black jet surface itself carries the meaning.

Important workshops and families

A number of Whitby workshops and families are singled out in antiques scholarship:

• Greenbury & Son - one of the oldest and largest workshops, sited on Whitby's main market; supplied Queen Victoria's court regularly
• Isaac Greenbury - son of the Greenbury family, works manager in the late nineteenth century
• Thomas Andrews - a well-known Whitby carver whose pieces are signed and today fetch high prices at auction
• Matthew Snowdon - workshop proprietor and town politician; founded a guild of Whitby jet manufacturers (1873)

Many workshops did not sign their pieces; accordingly only some ten to twenty Whitby workshops are well documented by name today. Anonymous mass production ran through small workshops and outwork contracts.

Whitby Museum and collecting

The Whitby Museum (founded 1823, on its present Pannett Park site since 1931) holds the world's most comprehensive collection of Whitby jet. More than 1,500 pieces from all phases of the industry are catalogued, among them special items such as:

• A three-part mourning parure (brooch, pendant, bracelet) given by Queen Victoria to her daughter Beatrice
• Carved centrepiece figures (oversized Whitby jet sculptures shown as workshop demonstration pieces at industrial exhibitions)
• A collection of tools from several Whitby workshops

The most important further collections of Whitby jet are held at the Victoria and Albert Museum (London), in the Royal Collection (Windsor) and in private American collections (above all in Boston and Philadelphia).

Decline and the present

From the 1880s onwards the Whitby jet industry begins to decline. Four factors work together:

1. Material scarcity. The easily accessible cliff strata have largely been worked out. Deep mining is expensive and yields smaller pieces of lower quality.
2. Competition from French jet and vulcanite. Black pressed glass from Paris and vulcanised rubber from Birmingham serve the low-price market segments. Whitby jet remains premium but loses the mass market.
3. Changing taste. The Edwardian era (1901–1910) loosens the Victorian court-mourning codes; matt black materials give way to light platinum filigree settings with diamond mosaic.
4. The First World War. With the collapse of the formal mourning-jewellery system, the most important basis of demand disappears.

By 1920 fewer than twenty workshops remain; by 1950 only a handful. In the twentieth century the Whitby jet tradition lives on in a few specialised workshops (above all Hamond & Co., founded 1860 and active into the 2010s) selling historicising pieces to collectors and tourists.

Today five to eight active workshops remain in Whitby. They make smaller pieces (pendants, earrings, cufflinks) and supply the collector, tourist and occasionally also the goth subculture market. Whitby is moreover an important reference point of the Gothic tradition - Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) is set partly in Whitby, and the annual Whitby Goth Weekend draws thousands of visitors from the goth subculture, many of whom also wear Whitby jet as a historicising jewellery gesture.

Whitby jet on today's auction market

Whitby jet pieces from the Victorian peak achieve stable to rising prices today:

• Simple mourning brooches without notable provenance: 200 to 800 €
• Elaborate mourning brooches with a hair compartment or carved work: 500 to 2,500 €
• Signed pieces (above all by Andrews, Greenbury): 1,500 to 6,000 €
• Pieces with documented court provenance: 5,000 to 30,000 €
• Three-stage mourning sets (brooch, necklace, bracelet in the same design): 3,000 to 15,000 €

The most important auction houses for Whitby jet are Tennants (Leyburn), Bonhams (London), Christie's (London) and the auction house Quittenbaum (Munich) for the German collector market.

Whitby and modern memorial jewellery

Whitby jet today is almost exclusively a collector's field and a workshop-tourism gesture. In the modern memorial jewellery market the material plays a very small role - historical Whitby pieces are occasionally set or reworked, but contemporary workshop practice works with gold, silver, platinum and stainless steel, not with fossilised hardwood.

Whitby's cultural-historical significance lies in its conceptual legacy: in the idea that a particular material - cut, polished, worn - can carry the entire meaning of mourning jewellery, without further pictorial elements, inscriptions or personalisation. This radical material logic is a Victorian Whitby achievement, and it has no direct equivalent left in modern memorial jewellery; but it persists as a historical deep layer whenever a modern mourning piece deliberately falls back on matt black materials.