Bernard Cuzner

The son of a Somerset-born watchmaker, Bernard Cuzner was a silversmith and product designer who served his apprenticeship as a watchmaker under his father but after two years he joined a Birmingham Silver firm and studied to be a silversmith at night school at the Vittoria Street School of Jewellery and Silversmithing where he studied under Robert Catterson Smith and Arthur Gaskin. From 1900 he started teaching at the Birmingham Municipal School of Art and also designed works for the famous London store Liberty. By 1910 he was the head of metalwork at the Birmingham School of Art and he retained that position until 1942 when he reached retirement age but he continued to work as a silversmith up to the time of his death. In September 1902 he obtained his own mark at the Birmingham Assay Office.

Many beautiful examples of his work from his workshop at Bournville, Birmingham remain today. His works extended from ceremonial and Churchplate work to simple silver and gold jewellery. But whether requiring the greatest of skill and technique, or the simplest of skills, Cuzner carried them out to the highest standard and many if his designs centred around the beauty of nature; flowers, birds and grasses. He also designed the King’s Vase that was presented to the winner of the race of the same name at the 1935 Royal Ascot Meeting. The Culzner Trophy for House Football at King’s Norton Grammar School is named after him after he designed and presented the trophy to the school as a way of saying thank you to them for educating his son John who left the school in 1935. Bernard Cuzner wrote many books including A Silversmith’s Manual, written in the early1920’s and reprinted in 1993. A lot of his published works we reprinted long after his death.

His Olympic entry in the 1948 Painting, Applied Arts category was entitled Silver Symbolic Torch and his work received an Honorary Mention. It was later commissioned by the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths, one of the major guilds, and subsequently made by his Olympic student Stanley Morris and engraved by William Biddle. It went on display at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge in 1950 during an exhibition sponsored by the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths. At around 46 cm, the torch is significantly smaller than the one actually used for the torch relay. It appears on the cover of the 1949 edition of Cuzner’s book A Silversmith’s Manual.