Catherine Jones, The Cambridge Jeweller celebrates 60 years
26 Jul 2023
Family-owned jeweller, Catherine Jones of Cambridge, has been designing and selling original pieces of jewellery since 1963. This year, they return to Trinity College on 7th September to celebrate their 60th anniversary and to raise funds for The Royal Anglian Regiment Benevolent Charity.
The independent Cambridge Jeweller has been supporting local events for the Royal Anglian Regiment’s charity since 2015 and has raised in the region of £30k.
Thursday 7th, September will mark the 60th anniversary of the business with a splendid dinner in the Tudor Hall of Trinity College and another opportunity to raise funds for the company’s chosen charity.
The beginnings
As their 60th year is beginning, they have unearthed the first-ever take-book for Catherine Jones. A little black book that started it all.
Catherine opened her business in 1963 with a £500 legacy from an uncle who had owned a coffee farm in East Africa. Small fashion boutiques were springing up everywhere, in dingy, mouldy-smelling places in derelict alleyways. She toyed with opening a retail business but said there were too many already selling clothes. When invited to a Cambridge College May ball, she couldn’t find an interesting pair of earrings to compliment her dress. ‘If I can’t,’ she thought, ‘then nobody else can’. This gem of an idea led her to open her jewellery gallery in 1963 on a corner next to an antique shop. Ancient next to modern.
It was a time of vibrant challenge to social norms, of exuberant, colourful, youthful invention after the gloom of the post-war 1950s. Vidal Sassoon changed the way women did their hair; Mary Quant and Barbara Hulaniki’s Biba changed the way women dressed; Terence Conran’s Habitat changed the way we furnished our homes, and Elizabeth David scolded us for boiling our veg and taught us to make a French dressing using olive oil that you could only buy at Boots the Chemist.
Catherine was bold and fearless, enthusiastic and energetic, stocking the most exciting jewellery she could find; many made from experimental new materials. 'I did it all by feel,' she said, 'my feel for design and a sense of the beauty of things.'
Teenagers and students could afford the inspiring jewellery to wear with the expressive fashions of the day. Parents and grandparents bought for themselves. Over the last sixty years, they have served four generations in the same families watching the children grow to see them marry.
Image: Old packaging from Catherine Jones
Jewellery through the Ages
One day, a young woman came in to see Catherine.
‘Do you sell silver rings?’ she asked.
‘No, sorry, I don’t.’ The young woman asked again, ‘I mean, I make silver rings. Would you buy them?’
She showed her work which Catherine found beautiful. She bought the lot and asked the silver designer to make more. Young designers flocked to her door, shyly showing their work. Encouraging them to ‘use more metal’, she subsidised them by giving them money to buy more silver to make more substantial designs. When the designer returned with pieces made with more confidence and freedom, Catherine bought it all. Catherine broke the mould. Classically, galleries would take work on a ‘sale or return’ basis. That wasn’t her style. ‘If I can’t back my choice, then I shouldn’t buy the pieces,’ she’d say, ‘Anyway, I don’t think it’s right for these young people to be my banker’.
Her support of young designers and her business ethics made her very famous in the world of modern, contemporary retail jewellery. She was never short of new, innovative designers to support.
Catherine Jones of Cambridge has gathered an impressive collection of Danish silver jewellery from the 1980s and 1990s, with some heritage pieces by Georg Jensen and Lapponia – all brand new.
Lapponia, who’s Bjorn Weckstrom, designed the Star Wars necklace work by Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia that we stocked and sold many times from our own premises and also online. They launched online back in 2007 and have sold around the world – to Saudi Arabia, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong and cities in the US, including the Princess Leia necklace to a client in Los Angeles.
On 22 August 1987, a customer bought his future fiance her engagement ring. Thirty-five years later, she brought it back because the stone had fallen out. She brought the original receipt with her, and they found the very ring diligently stored amongst their records, which stated who made it. They found such precise information about the ring that they were able to make an identical new one and reset her original stone in the new mount.
Vanessa Burkitt, daughter of the late Catherine Jones and now co-owner of Catherine Jones of Cambridge, comments,
“Catherine quickly became a much-admired innovator in the jewellery industry! Jewellery in the 60s was experimental and inventive, so Catherine first chose fashion-led, costume-jewellery that you’d see on the front cover of the leading fashion magazines of the day. She supported new makers of silver jewellery, graduating to gold with semi-precious stones and now the remarkable pieces we stock today.
"To mark our 60th, we have accumulated and commissioned a wonderful collection from the last six decades – vintage time-capsule pieces and unique commissions made by designers with whom we have worked over the decades. We will also exhibit pieces loaned by some of our customers' collections to mark our 60th.”
Mathew Burkitt, also co-owner of Catherine Jones and CTO for the online business, talks about the fundraiser and future plans,
“I am sure nobody had any idea back then that we would still be doing this 60 years later! It’s been a privilege to work for my family business, and our fundraiser for the Royal Anglian Regiment is the perfect, quintessential Cambridge event to raise a toast to the admirable work they do to support serving and former members of our local regiment and their loved ones.”
The charity fundraiser takes place on Thursday 7th, September, and everyone is welcome. Auction prizes include an illustrated talk by their specialist colour-stone dealer on the Gems in the Coronation Regalia, dinner for 8 at Barrington Hall with Henry Blofeld, the doyen of Cricket Commentators, a private tour for 4-6 people of the London Assay Office with a history of hallmarking (the oldest consumer protection law in the world dating from 1300) plus many more!
Tickets to the charity ball can be purchased from www.catherinejones.com/60, along with donations to the Royal Anglian Regiment Benevolent Charity.
Or get in touch at online@catherinejones.com or by phone 01223 361596
View Catherine Jones of Cambridge
Source: Catherine Jones