Perspex Jewellery
Beverley Bennett

PHS member Beverley Bennett is a keen collector of acrylic jewellery, and hopes this article will prompt some correspondence.

I was interested to read the feature on Perspex in Plastiquarian 14, and in particular about the large scale production of the material for the aircraft industry during the Second World War. As a collector of Perspex jewellery, especially brooches, the use to which scraps and off- cuts of Perspex were put is fascinating.

Numerous traders from whom I have bought jewellery have related to me their beliefs about its manufacture during wartime and the post-war years, and this has been supplemented by information gleaned from various published sources. Davidov & Dawes,,, in their- book on Bakelite jewellery (1) describe and illustrate what they call under-carved or reverse-carved transparent cast phenolic resin jewellery. This was made in the 1930s in the USA by home craftsmen or skilled machinists, the colours being either painted or injected into the carved designs.
By 1940, however, Plexiglas and Lucite were being carved in the, same manner. There are illustrations of this jewellery in Kelley & Schiffer's book on plastic jewellery (2)(see Plastiquarian 8 p10). They also describe faceted, engraved, moulded and carved acrylic jewellery made in Germany in the 1930s.

Perspex brooches can be found in a vast range of geometric shapes and designs, and colours vary from pastel shades to deep, rich tones. Flowers predominate along with sailing ships , swans and ladies in crinoline dresses, all popular motifs at the time.

The makers of these brooches have been variously described. RAF pilots may have made such jewellery in their spare time from scraps of Perspex and certainly there is a whole variety of carved Perspex brooches, pendants and bracelets with RAF wings embedded, including heart-shaped ‘sweetheart’ brooches in red and transparent Perspex. The different thicknesses of Perspex which were used apparently depended on where in the aircraft it originated - the thickest from windscreens, and the thinner Perspex from gun turrets.

Other suggestions of sources include German or Italian prisoners of war. A collection of brooches I bought a few years ago had apparently belonged to a woman who had begun collecting in 1944 when she was working for the NAAFI on the Isle of Wight. The first brooches she bought were made by prisoners of war in the camps on the island.

As well as reverse-carved jewellery, Perspex was cut and shaped into butterflies, birds and aeroplanes. One trader told me that he thought such Perspex jewellery was made by women who worked in the factories where aeroplane parts were made and in one wartime autobiography (3) reference is made to jewellery shaped from scraps of aluminium, Perspex and wood when there was a lull in work. This was at the Wolverton railway engineering works where damaged aircraft were repaired. Some of the butterfly and bird brooches in my collection combine aluminium backgrounds upon which painted Perspex is riveted. Sometimes silver and coloured metal paper was used in the designs. One of my favourite brooches is a carved Hurricane aircraft with paste stones embedded in the wings.

Another trader described to me how, when lie was a child in Essex, he would finish bracelets from Perspex scavenged from wrecked aeroplanes , burning out the designs with hot wire and bending the Perspex in hot water.

After the war, Perspex jewellery appears to have remained popular into the 1940s and 50s, and the range now included more earrings, pendants, bracelets and insets for face-powder compacts. One trader told me of a lady who made jewellery as an out-worker at this time. She would burn out the designs with hot wire and immediately pour in dyes, sometimes using food colourings.

Also in the post-war years other reverse-carved Perspex objects appeared in the form of door furniture, paperweights, clocks, napkin rings and trinket boxes. Even in the 1980s a range of under-carved acrylic jewellery was available from 'Next' stores, and colourful paperweights and key-rings originating from Taiwan were on sale in gift shops. Chunky 1960s laminated Perspex rings resurfaced for a while and numerous craftsmen and women are making jewellery in acrylics today.

From the way that prices appear to be escalating and the relative scarcity of the jewellery itself at antiques fairs and flea markets, there must be many other collectors out there. My knowledge about the origins and manufacture of Perspex jewellery remains fragmentary and I should be delighted to hear from anyone who has more information on the subject.

1 Corinne Davidov & Ginny Redington Dawes. The Bakelite Jewelery Book. Abbeville Press, 1988.
2 Lyngerda Kelley & Nancy Schiffer. Plastic jewelery. Schiffer Publishing, 1987.
3 Doris White. D for Doris, V for Victory. Oakleaf Books, 1981.