How I live. Lawrence Jenkin Spectacle Maker.

By Virginia Ironside for the Idler magazine Nov-Dec 2019.

Lawrence Jenkin made his first pair of spectacle frames at ten years old. Now, at 76, he is still making frames at Britain’s last hand-made spectacle factory, Algha Works, in Hackney Wick’s Fish Island Conservation Area. 

My father became the breadwinner of the family – his mother, brother and sister - at the age of 13 and he made a living selling soap for Lever Brothers door to door. 

Later, when he married and had us three boys, he got into binoculars and became a businessman, servicing and replacing binoculars for servicemen in World War 11 and formed the Anglo American Optical Company. 

I think it was his background that gave me a taste for trading. I’ve always wanted to make and sell my own stuff. 

When the company was bombed, my father relocated to a big building on Hampstead Heath next to the Magdala Tavern, where Ruth Ellis shot her lover. 

I always wanted to design frames and I was taught when I was ten years old because in the school holidays dad used to take me to work with him. He had a caretaker, George Lowe, who had been an apprentice in 1905 but had now retired. He took a fancy to me – he was very fond of my dad – and when I was in the factory he showed me how to make frames. 

My father was amazed when he saw the first pair of frames I made because George had refused to teach frame-making to anybody else. He’d learned his trade as an apprentice so his knowledge was hard-won.  Of course my first frames had been mainly made by George, but even so, it gave me a taste for the business. 

I told my father I wanted to be an optician. That doesn’t mean someone who tests your eyes, but someone who sells and fits the frames. He saw a job advertised in New York and they came over and I was offered what seemed like a huge amount of money in those days so I went over and joined a very fashionable traditional opticians on 57th Street between Park and Madison called Lugenes. In those days Donald Trump was building Trump Tower down the road and he came in quite often as a young man. He was clean-cut and quite pleasant. I remember selling him a pair of Raybans. 

After a couple of years at Lugenes I left to work at Vision Unlimited, near Bloomingdales, where they wanted to design their own frames. When the owner, Burt Geisinger, asked me about my plans I told him I wanted to design, make and sell my own frames. So he said: “How much do you need?” I told him and on the spot he gave me £10,000. 

I came back and with my two brothers – one was an engineer and one was a salesman – we started manufacturing using the name of my father’s company, Anglo American Optical.

I was influenced by National Health frames. The thing is they had good basic shape and frames but were poorly made 

The problem then was that all opticians were shielded by the Health Service. The NHS provided free tests, free prescriptions, free lenses and free frames but it stopped any creativity in frame design. The fact the spectacles were free stopped people from wanting fashionable or original frames. British opticians were lazy and didn’t have to try hard to be smart retailers. So it went too far and the NHS became too powerful. Eventually in the late seventies people wanted something more and when the NHS stopped providing free frames in 1984 that’s when we took off. 

Before that we were influenced by some frames produced by Oliver Goldsmith – he designed in London - which were reaching New York. They were based on health service shapes but in beautiful material and stronger – and expensive -  and they were selling really well there but they didn’t sell well in London partly because of the Health Service. But things changed. 

With my brothers we sold to all kinds of different companies – some opticians in New York and Cutler and Gross here. You want a frame that looks good on your face or something that contradictors everything and makes a big statement – like Iris Apfel for example. .

I used to love going to New York seeing everyone with our frames at the airport. It was very exciting. We made Clark Kent’s frames in the first Batman film, and frames for Andy Warhol. Frank Sinatra had a pair. 

I left the company in 1996 and now I work on my own. I get up in the morning – not very early, feed the cat and travel from New Cross to Pudding Mill Lane where I get off  just because I like the name of the station.

Even though I’ve got my own worship at home, I like coming here because I’m alone in the basement of this lovely Victorian building occupied by Algha Group, the only factory left in the world that continues to make frames in gold filled, or rolled gold, materials. I’m here surrounded by my machines – they’re all very old and you can’t get them any more - and I work till lunchtime, then maybe go off and have lunch in a greasy spoon round the corner and then come back till here and work till about 5.30. Then I go home and feed the cat again. 

There are 38 processes involved in frame-making, including cutting the acetate slabs to size, cutting the inner eye and then the outer eye, cutting the bevel for the lens, cutting the lens groove, making the bump bridge, putting them in a rough barrel to polish them, then shooting the wire into the sides, fixing the hinge caps, making the recesses for the front joints, riveting the pins, sanding all the pinheads flat, bending the side at the temples, adjust the head width… it’s a long process. I only manage to make four or five frames a week at most. 

I have copies of nearly all the frames I’ve made and a collection of 2000 frames at home. I also collect old opticians’ shop signs – I’ve got about 150 of those going back to 1820. 

Now I make bespoke frames for various clients, and also for the opticians with the Royal Warrant, Roger Pope and Partners. We used to make frames for Dame Edna and now I’m making five pairs for her new show. I love the one called Flames. Everything is hugely exaggerated. I don’t know if I like them but I like making them very much. 

And I do a bit of teaching as well – it takes a long time to learn. 

I trained Tom Broughton who set up Cubitts in Covent Garden. Now he designs his own, and they give frame-making lessons in their shop in King’s Cross. They’re oversubscribed because these days so many people are interested in making things with their hands.