In a box in the loft, packed away for safe keeping, some small, engraved glasses, marking events in the lives of the extended family, had lain undisturbed for years. They had been etched by Frank (Francis) Crossley, somewhat irreverently known as Uncle Tut, because as a young man he abandoned his Barnsley roots and made a life for himself in Tutbury in Staffordshire. Oral history suggested that as a young adult, Frank had turned his back on his family and had little contact with them beyond a few hours’ visit around Easter each year. What seems more likely was that he left in order to make a living from skills that were not in demand locally.

When a casual internet search for Frank Crossley located a museum image of some elaborate glassware which he had engraved in his employment, it was clear that he was a respected craftsman with technical and design skill which far exceeded the decoration on our glasses.

Frank was born in 1867, the only son of a coal miner. Boys from this background usually left school as soon as they were able, and joined their father at the pit, but Frank’s parents seem to have been keen for him to carve a different path. His father had witnessed the aftermath of the most costly mining disaster to date in terms of lives lost, at the Oaks colliery in 1866. His mother was a well-educated woman who had been a governess and art teacher. Frank inherited her talent.

Sometime in the mid-1880s Frank moved to Birmingham, which together with some of its hinterlands, had established itself as a leading centre for manufacturing and decorating glass. Whether he had already chosen glass art as his trade is unknown. It seems equally possible that he had been attracted to Birmingham by the reputation of its school of art and hoped to obtain some tuition there before deciding how he wanted to proceed. The local council had recently taken over the well-established and well-regarded school of design and expanded it, creating the country’s first municipal school of art. Such an establishment would have appealed to his artistic and educated mother and his social activist father, who by this time, had become a leading member of Barnsley’s co-operative movement.

By 1891, Frank was working in Birmingham as a glass painter, which suggests that engraving was a skill which he learned later, perhaps on the job or with an informal apprenticeship to an established worker. Two years later, when he married a girl from Tutbury and moved to the town, he had made the transition from glass painter to glass etcher. Their marriage produced four children in eight years before Harriet died, leaving Frank a widower for the remaining 40 years of his life.

There were two local factories which specialised in high-quality decorated tableware and across his long career, Frank worked for them both. The older was Jacksons (subsequently Webb Corbett) which was based in Tutbury. Early in the 20th century, Royal Castle Glassworks was established in the neighbouring village of Hatton.

Both factories produced two product ranges. The main output was lead glass, which was decorated by cutting lines into its surface to create patterns. The item was then polished so that it sparkled in the light. Cutting was a long-established craft and skilled practitioners knew how to maximise the sparkle, producing elaborate items which were beautiful but expensive.

Despite the skill involved, cutting had limitations. The technique lent itself to regular geometric patterns rather than pictures and the cost of the finished product could exceed domestic budgets. In the mid-19th century, population growth and an increase in the number of households with some money to spend on the refinements of life signalled that there was unmet demand in the marketplace.

Glass etching or engraving developed in the middle of the 19th century as a way to meet the growing consumer demand for affordable decorative glassware. Rather than cutting lines into the glass, etchers removed a fine layer of material from the surface of the glass, either by applying acid or a caustic substance to a selected area, or by drawing directly onto the glass with a fine, abrasive tool. The technique widened the range of decoration as it permitted images to be created, as well as patterns, and writing to be incorporated into a design. It also reflected the values of the Arts and Crafts Movement, which was popular at the time. This rejected mechanised factory production in favour of handcrafting items that were (in William Morris’s terms) beautiful or useful, or in this case, both.

Relative to cutters, there were fewer opportunities for engravers, but Frank was widely acknowledged as an exceptional craftsman, combining technical skill with abundant artistic talent. He worked with a diamond point tool, drawing or writing directly into the glass. As the fortunes of the two local producers ebbed and flowed across decades, he was able to move between them with little difficulty.

Outside their employment, Frank and, it is believed, other cutters and engravers, produced decorated presentation pieces of a personal nature to mark special events in the life of a family member, such as a birth, marriage or anniversary. We understood that Frank had used cheap glasses from Woolworths, a well-known department store that sold a range of household items. After discovering that it was widespread practice for workers to use glasses from the factory for these presentation pieces, I examined the ones we have. They contain almost imperceptible defects suggesting that they had been rejected as not of high enough quality to be decorated and sold commercially. Nevertheless, Frank’s cover story held for a century and meant that he avoided any awkward questions from his Barnsley relatives about a Staffordshire practice.

Of the glasses which Frank took to Barnsley on his annual visit to his sisters, few have survived. Engraved onto them is evidence that working-class family relationships could remain strong in an age when visits meant lengthy, perhaps difficult, journeys on public transport, and communication was by letter, rather than conversation.

Cost, availability of transport and the demands of parenthood on a widower all help to explain why there were relatively few meetings between brother and sisters after his marriage. In addition, Frank had taken on duties in his new community, particularly the role of Sunday School teacher, where he enthralled his classes with spontaneous sketches to illustrate the stories he was telling.

The earliest glass is from 1894 and was engraved for the Scottish mother-in-law of his recently married sister. Years later came a pair of glasses for this lady and her husband, to mark the golden wedding of this Carluke couple in 1910. These could not have been produced without effective communication between brother and sister, indicating that both parties were letter writers and passing on a wealth of information about their lives.

Scottish culture features in the most elaborate of our surviving pieces, one which bridges the artistry of Frank’s employed output and the simpler designs on the commemoration glasses. On a stem, and narrowing towards its base, one side of a glass contains a design of Scottish thistles, while on the other the words of Auld Lang Syne are engraved in minute but legible handwriting.

After a long career as the leading engraver in the Tutbury district, Frank died in 1941. Newspapers unsurprisingly mention Barnsley relations among his mourners. Oral history has limitations and the detail engraved in a succession of glasses is ample evidence that Frank and his Barnsley relations, rather than growing apart, had been in regular contact for over 50 years. {