Remembering David Thomas: The Crown Jeweller at the Heart of Royal Pomp

He took pleasure in recalling meeting Queen Elizabeth on the evening before his first state opening, and nervously discussing the correct placing of the crown in Queen Alexandra’s State Coach. She calmed his apprehension and advised him to always point the Cullinan diamond at the horses. He was appointed by the Queen as crown jeweller in August 1991, after five years with Garrard, the crown jewellers since 1843, and held her personal warrant. He was the sixth crown jeweller since Queen Victoria created the appointment, and was responsible for the care of the Crown Jewels held in the Tower of London and the private collections of the Queen and the royal family. Every year, in January, he would supervise and actively take part in a cleaning and conservation process in the Jewel House of the Tower of London, after an inspection of the condition of the jewels in December. The cleaning took place in the evenings, when the Tower was closed to the public, and the job usually took ten days. At one time rouge and whitening powders were used, but once their abrasive qualities were recognised, they were rejected in favour of good old fashioned soap and water, and what Thomas and his team described as “tender, loving care”. Another annual duty was the removal from the Tower of the plate dishes, used to hold the purses of Maundy money distributed by the Queen to deserving pensioners — one for every year of her age — at the Maundy Thursday service. Thomas had the sad task, after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997, of cataloguing her jewellery for probate purposes. This included the items she was wearing when she was killed — a blood-flecked watch, a smashed pearl bracelet and one earring. It was a particularly poignant undertaking, as Thomas, in 1981, made from Welsh gold the then Lady Diana Spencer’s wedding ring, and was a guest at her wedding to the Prince of Wales at St Paul’s Cathedral. At the funeral of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, in 2002, he oversaw the placing of her crown on her coffin and pinned on to cushions her insignia: the Order of the Garter, England’s oldest order of chivalry, and the Order of the Thistle, the Scottish equivalent. Subsequently the Queen asked him to catalogue the Queen Mother’s jewellery. The Queen Mother once remarked of her collection: “There isn’t much you know,” but Thomas took seven weeks completing the job. There were, he said, “hundreds of pieces”, most of which had not before been properly listed. He was also frequently called upon to advise foreign royal families, and travelled worldwide lecturing on jewellery and the Crown Jewels, and staging exhibitions. He first met King Charles, then the Prince of Wales, at Buckingham Palace after the prince sustained an injury playing polo. His task that day was to cut off the signet ring from the small finger of his left hand, a delicate piece of surgery which to Thomas’s relief was successfully completed. Soon after he was awarded the prince’s warrant. At the time he was a director of Collingwood, the Conduit Street jewellers, and the princely warrant was a first for the firm, despite its association with the royal family, dating back to the reign of Edward VII. Thomas also made, in 1999, the wedding rings of Prince Edward and Sophie Rhys-Jones. His own wedding took place in 1969, to Vivienne Simms, a former nurse who survives him along with their three children: Katharine, a piano teacher, Libby, a nurse, and Rob, an art and design technician. A genial Welshman with a gift for making friends, David Vyvyan Thomas was born in 1942, the son of Muriel Fear (née Arthurs) and David Glyn Thomas, a pharmaceutical chemist and the grandson of a clockmaker and jeweller. He was educated at the Emmanuel Grammar School, Swansea, and Hertford Grammar School. His formal education ended when he was 17, due to the premature death of his father. He joined Collingwood in 1959, and spent two years “below stairs” as an errand boy and a silver and jewellery cleaner. For the next two years he worked in the jewellery workshop, and jewellery became his great passion. His evenings were taken up with learning about his craft. His dedication was noticed and eventually he was assigned to the showroom director as his junior assistant, until, in the late 1970s, he became a director of the firm. He had his own set of royal and aristocratic clients, among them the family of Princess Diana, and the royal families of Norway, Jordan and Malaysia. In 1986 he was recruited by Garrard to train alongside the then crown jeweller William Summers, with a view to succeeding him on his retirement. Summers, who was crown jeweller for almost 30 years, was Thomas’s friend and neighbour in Kent, and was an invaluable source of knowledge and advice, which he enjoyed dispensing at home over a gin and tonic. Thomas worked from a cramped office at Garrard, above the imposing ground-floor showrooms in Regent Street, surrounded by the tools of his trade: instruments, books, drawings and replicas of crowns, coronets, tiaras and other insignia. Among the artefacts was a model of his favourite crown: that made for Queen Victoria in later life, and weighing just five ounces. He would demonstrate to visitors that it could fit into the palm of his hand. His tenure lasted until his retirement, aged 65, when he was appointed as a member of the Royal Victorian Order, an honour only in the Queen’s personal gift. By then Garrard, with its 160-year history as jewellers to the truly great, had been acquired by an American private equity concern, and there had been a gradual shift in its image in a bid to appeal to the more racy transatlantic market. Jade Jagger became its creative director in 1996, and the pop singer Christina Aguilera was given a contract as the firm’s face. Thomas, who had a keen sense of the value of the unique history of Garrard, had grave reservations about the new style, and did not hesitate to express his concerns. In the event he was the last Garrard crown jeweller, although he remained a director. In 2007 the Queen appointed the traditional Harry Collins, of Tunbridge Wells, to succeed him. It was said that she was not inclined to drop Garrard before Thomas retired as crown jeweller.