At work in the Old Mill, Chipping Campden

He would I think have chosen the designation 'silversmith', though I don't suppose it would have much mattered if I called him a cutlery designer or metal worker. Or just craftsman. Whatever he created, whether in two dimensions or three, in metal, wood, or glass, even a simple a typographical mark up for a personal letterheading, it was always just right, never flamboyant or overstated; always capable of surviving the ravages of time.

My earliest recollection of Robert Welch - I seem to remember it was the mid 60s when he would have been in his early 'thirties - was of a well built young man with a shock of wavy hair, quietly confident, his self belief relieved by delightful modesty, quite sure that he knew what he wanted to do and in which direction he was going. In fact, by that time he had occupied the Old Mill at Chipping Campden in the Cotswolds for some ten years and was already well established. He was among the outstanding products of the Royal College of Art in its post-war heyday. Fame and rewards were already accruing. He could just as easily have been a first-class cricketer, having played for the Worcester second eleven while still in his teens.

Design skills and craftsmanship were inborn. His mother, Dorothy, went to Hereford Art School and kept an album containing some of her immaculate sketches. Robert treasured the beautifully tooled leather bound record of her school work, much of it in the Art Nouveau style of her day, to the end of his own life. Maternal example surely had something to do with the fact that his own working life was sign posted by the same kind of confident, purposeful sketch record, though he confessed to being overawed by the standard of his mother's work. Later on he attested:

'...the fact that the house was full of canvas, watercolours and drawings, as well as an enticing pile of old STUDIO magazines, added a strange excitement to art for me.'

His own future was easily determined. The family moved to Malvern in Worcestershire and he studied at the local School of Art before going on to the Birmingham School of Art and the RCA, like his mother picking up a good many awards and prizes along the way.

In 1950, before leaving for the Birmingham Art School, he received a letter from Worcestershire's Director of Education telling him that he had been awarded the Charlotte Jacob prize for Silversmithing. A cheque for one pound and ten shillings was enclosed. It was the modest beginning of an illustrious career in the course of which Robert Welch silver would find a place in British embassies and royal palaces across the world, on passenger liners and aircraft, in cathedrals and churches, livery halls, town halls, universities and museums.

After Birmingham came the RCA and the influence of Professor Robert Goodden, before the inevitable pressures of commerce and the need to make a living took hold. He found an astute short cut to the hearts of British business men - A vintage car. A 1923 open tourer Lancia Lambda took up most of his savings but it served its purpose. He was welcomed with outstretched arms at the entrance to the Old Hall factory at Bloxwich. Its chief directors, Leslie and Wilfrid Wiggin, were devotees of the Lancia marque. The car may have eased the way, Robert was appointed Design Consultant to the Company on the strength of his clear grasp of the aesthetic and commercial problems facing not only Old Hall but the entire British stainless steel industry. Scandinavian dominance in an area of manufacture which Britain had once ruled with supreme confidence had become a thorn in the flesh of Sheffield and other centres of cutlery manufacture. Robert had taken time out to work in Norway while at the RCA, and he later stated his personal case:

'the philosophy of the Scandinavians, so popular at that time, designing simple everyday objects that were functional and beautiful and which most people could afford, greatly appealed to me.'