'I started work helping my dad in a West Midlands factory now I make jewellery for footballers and TV stars - Christmas is one of my busiest times'
Christmas is a popular time for engagements and weddings. And a Great Barr born jewellery, who has a host of celebrity clients, is getting ready for the season at his West Midlands business
Helping couples celebrate these milestone moments is master jeweller Steven Charles Quance, who crafts luxury engagement and wedding rings by hand from Birmingham’s historic Jewellery Quarter.
Born in Great Barr, he first started working in the trade when he was a teenager. “I used to go to work with my father. I was the factory lad. I used to get the sandwiches and sweep the metal swarf up, etc.
“Dad worked as a toolmaker; he was the factory floor manager, not one of the bosses. I worked every Saturday morning and in the school holidays. He would moan about working for someone.
“When I asked, as I got to the age of looking at careers, why he did not work for himself, he said it was all the overheads: the big factory machinery, 30-40 staff, etc., and he would rather be a well-paid manager and not have all that responsibility.
“I was having a ring made for a girlfriend of mine at the time, and after listening to all of that, I walked into a gentleman’s office I had commissioned to make this ring, one of my dad’s friends, and I saw his little pliers, workbench, a room not much bigger than a spare room at home, and I realised the overheads were not that great. I did not see the expensive items he was working with,” he recalls.
“I said to my dad I wanted to be a jeweller, and that was when I was 14 or 15. Now I am 55 and still going strong.”
