Vintage Smith & Pepper Sterling Silver Oval Bangle/Bracelet with a safety chain - made in the 1960s.

Vintage Smith & Pepper Sterling Silver Oval Bangle/Bracelet with a safety chain - made in the 1960s.
Superb condition; gift quality.
Gorgeous art deco machine turned engraving with a soft satin sheen.
Engraving lovely and crisp; still has a mirror finish.
Firm clasp; strong hinge.
Very fine quality.

Hallmarked Birmingham 1963, plus the Lion Passant mark for silver that meets the sterling standard of purity, and stamped with the maker's mark, S&P, for Smith & Pepper Ltd.
The full British hallmark gives an absolute guarantee of quality.
Impossible to get photos on my iPhone that show how nice this bangle really is.

The Smith & Pepper factory is now the Birmingham Museum of the Jewellery Quarter.

In an industry newsletter dated spring, 1981, the headline is: "Can jewellers fight the recession? The answer, in the case of family business Smith & Pepper, was "no".

Literally overnight, in August of 1981, the three surviving, unmarried, childless Smith siblings, known simply as Mr Eric, Miss Olive and Mr Tom, simply shut their factory down after nobody came forward to buy them out, plus new health and safety rules were about to make their factory obsolete without expensive investment.

And, yet, the manner in which they suddenly shut up shop, within a week of deciding they couldn't carry on, is the reason why Smith & Pepper has effectively survived the recession. Today, the former business is an astonishing time capsule, where staff were banned from wearing turn-ups or Brylcream on their hair, lest they trap gold dust. Even hand washing water used to go into a pit of sawdust which would be burned once a year to help reclaim every speck of precious metal.

Birmingham city council spent two years at the start of the 1990s painstakingly preserving the Smith & Pepper factory for generations to come. With a visitors book illustrating how people are coming to the museum from all over the world, Smith & Pepper's name looks set to live for far longer than its owners could ever have imagined.

Approx. dimensions: Please see photos. The internal circumference is approximately 7.05 inches or 17.90 cm.

Weight approx.: 28.2 g.