Ted Smith

Tower of London armourer

Edward Herbert Smith, armourer: born London 10 March 1927; staff, Wilkinson Sword 1941-49; staff, Tower of London Armouries 1949-91; MBE 1990; married 1949 Iris West (10 children); died Cambridge 24 March 2006.

Ted Smith was head of conservation at the Royal Armouries at the Tower of London for several years before his retirement in 1991. He was a craftsman conservator of the old school, who learnt how to restore weapons and armour by working with more experienced colleagues at a time when there was no formal conservation education.

In fact, as far as armour is concerned, there are still no specialised courses and the most relevant training is to study metals' conservation and then apply this to armour "on the job" and preferably under supervision. This is where Smith made one of his major contributions to the field, by accepting young conservators into the Armouries workshop for periods of hands-on experience. His students are (or were) working in several of the leading armour collections around the world; for example at the Royal Collection, the Australian War Memorial in Canberra and the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.

Edward Herbert Smith was born in Chelsea, London in 1927, the third son of Arthur Smith, who died only three years later, and his wife Violet (née Sugars). Ted attended local schools in west London but his education was interrupted by evacuation following the outbreak of the Second World War and on reaching the age of 14 he left and soon afterwards went to work for Wilkinson Sword.

He was called up in 1945 when the war was nearly over and found himself guarding prisoners in Germany and Italy, a job not to his liking and he rarely talked about it. He returned to Wilkinson Sword on demobilisation from the Gordon Highlanders in 1948. A year later he was recruited by the conservation department (then known as the Workshop) at the Royal Armouries in the Tower of London to work alongside two former Wilkinson colleagues, Theodore Egli and Arthur Davies.

Egli was older and had made a name for himself in the antiques trade as a restorer of weapons and armour in the 1930s, but had joined Wilkinson's at the outbreak of war. He thus had relevant experience for the move to the Tower and encouraged the appointment of his two younger former colleagues in whom he had detected the necessary flair.

At this time the curators at the Royal Armouries were concerned for the security of a number of important helmets still hanging in parish churches that were being increasingly targeted by thieves. The growth of armour- collecting in the 19th and early 20th centuries, especially by the nouveau riche wanting to fill their baronial mansions with the trappings of ancestry, had created a demand for fine pieces that outstripped legitimate supply and the curators wanted to encourage the deposition of many pieces at the Tower for safe keeping, but the tit-for-tat had to be the provision of a replica to hang in the church.

Egli taught Ted Smith and Arthur Davies how to work metal by the traditional methods and together they experimented with materials as different as Swedish wrought iron and sheet automobile steel. One of their first important tasks after the war was the replication of the Black Prince's achievements to replace the originals in Canterbury Cathedral. Only the helm and gauntlets were actually made at the Tower, but the workshop there also supervised the making of the shield and jupon by others.

The success of this project led to requests for replicas for other churches, such as Castle Acre in Norfolk, and altogether about a dozen were made, although towards the end of Smith's career, the time investment in making a real metal helmet was so costly that a change was made to the use of glass fibre/resin. The earlier metal replicas were so good that at least one was stolen and offered for sale in the antiques trade.

Perhaps the most high-profile replica is that of the Sutton Hoo helmet, made for the British Museum in the early 1970s. Scientific examination had shown that this was a very complex piece, consisting of an iron skullcap lined with leather and covered with tinned bronze decorative panels, and with a face-guard inlaid with garnets, silver and niello and with a gilt bronze nose. The British Museum provided detailed drawings, but Smith and Davies barely looked at them and produced a metal cap "by eye" that was correct to within a couple of millimetres. Smith worked with Nigel Williams of the British Museum, who had conserved and restored the remains of the original helmet, to decorate this cap with electroformed panels and thus create a replica that demonstrated the wealth and rank of King Raedwald of East Anglia, to whom the original had belonged in the early 7th century.

If the making of exact replicas was the cream of the job, the bread and butter was the care and conservation of the national collection of arms and armour. Museum visitors are mostly unaware of the behind-the-scenes activities of conservators, but major gallery refurbishments like those carried out at the Tower in the 1960s and 1970s are heavily reliant on the conservation team.

Egli, Smith and Davies lifted this side of the work from a scrub with brick dust and mineral oil to a more careful use of much milder abrasives and rotating soft mops. They also used other manual cleaning techniques, eschewing the use of chemicals and electrolytic stripping that were being applied elsewhere. Ironically the use of these "modern" methods that were supposed to be more economic and efficient have mostly been abandoned in favour of the techniques used by Ted Smith and his colleagues. The result is that the national collection of arms and armour is now in remarkably good condition for the enjoyment of future generations.

Ted Smith married Iris West in 1949. Outside his profession, he was kept busy keeping old cars on the road and cooking for his large family. In 1985, Smith became a freeman of the Worshipful Company of Armourers and Brasiers, the first working armourer to be elected since the 17th century, and of the City of London, thereby gaining the right to drive a flock of sheep across London Bridge and to go about the City with a drawn sword.

Andrew Oddy

May I correct one statement in Andrew Oddy's otherwise excellent obituary of Ted Smith? writes Claude Blair. The concern over the security of valuable helmets hung over tombs in churches had nothing to do with the "growth of armour-collecting in the 19th and 20th centuries" which " created a demand for fine pieces that outstripped legitimate supply".

Much armour was lost from such funeral achievements over the years as a result of the depredations of iconoclasts, restoration and rebuilding work, and, above all, ecclesiastical indifference, but before the Second World War criminals, on the whole, drew the line at stealing from churches. Until the 1950s the great majority of the several hundred churches recorded as containing armour in a list published in 1922 with a supplement of 1939 still had it. The thefts began in earnest in the 1960s, and it was then that the late Sir James Mann, as Master of the Armouries, initiated the policy of offering replicas in exchange for the loan of valuable helmets.