Robert Welch (designer)

1979 Awarded MBE (Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire)

1979 Kitchen Devils' Professional knife range. The Kitchen Devils Professional knife range won a Design Centre Award in 1984.

1965 Elected RDI (Royal Designer for Industry) – a faculty within the Royal Society of Arts

1962 Elected FSIA (Fellow of the Society of Industrial Artists)

1961 CD25 cast iron candlestick (medium), the first of a decorative range of cast iron pieces. This was re-launched in the mid-1990s as Hobart.

1961 Alveston cutlery, named after his home village, near Stratford-upon-Avon. Alveston cutlery won a Design Council Award in 1965.

1961-4 Alveston tea set. Including what is often referred to as the Aladdin tea pot.

In 1960, Prince Philip commissioned Robert Welch to design and produce a silver trophy, known as the Prince Philip Silver Wink, which has been awarded since 1961 to the top British university tiddlywinks team competing in inter-university matches.

1957–1960 Oriana tableware and cutlery range. Commissioned by the Orient Line for the ocean liner Oriana, launched in 1960.

1956 Campden tableware and cutlery range, named after Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire, where his studio was based. The cutlery was jointly designed with David Mellor (designer). The Campden toast rack won a Design Centre Award in 1957.

Welch successfully sold one of his prototype designs to J. & J. Wiggin before he left college. A small family firm in Bloxwich, north of Birmingham, J. & J. Wiggin was the only British manufacturer of stainless steel tableware, marketing pieces under the brand Old Hall. Welch did some work for the firm whilst still a student and in 1955, he was appointed as their consultant designer, an association which lasted until the firm closed in 1984. His geometrical ideal suited the material, and his passion for precision suited the factory.

In 1955 Welch established a workshop and studio in Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire in a silk mill that had formerly been the home of Charles Robert Ashbee's Guild and School of Handicraft. He had chosen this area because it was easy for him to visit the Wiggins' factory in Bloxwich, and his parents' home in West Malvern, as well as London – to where he would eventually travel for teaching posts – but it would remain a base for the rest of his working life.

He went on to study at the Royal College of Art in 1952, the year after the Festival of Britain, joining David Mellor and Gerald Benney who were both a year above him. Welch was the only silversmith in his year.

Welch made his first work in a precious metal, a powder bowl, in 1950 but examples of his work in metals survive from as early as 1946.

All three were to become renowned in their field, creating "remarkable one-off commissions in silver, as well as tackling production designs in newly fashionable and affordable stainless steel. During the 1950s they had all been influenced to a large degree by the Scandinavian Modern style, especially the anthropomorphic vessels and jewellery of the Danish sculptor-designer Henning Koppel for Georg Jensen." Lesley Jackson

In the late 1950s, the silversmith and artist John Limbrey (1933–2013), who had also previously studied silversmithing at Birmingham, came on a visit to the Cotswolds. He knocked on the door of the studio-workshop and said "What a nice place to work, do you want any help?" He began working with Welch in 1958, from which point he was largely responsible for making most of the commissioned ecclesiastical and domestic silverware. He remained as silversmith, model maker and draughtsman until well into the 21st century.

His time at Malvern was broken up by two years of National Service, during which time he served as a wireless operator in the Royal Air Force. While in the RAF he attended classes at Cambridge School of Art before returning to complete his studies at Malvern, 1949–50.

When Robert was young, the family moved to the village of Colwall, which sits on the side of the Malvern Hills and, in 1939, to West Malvern, Worcestershire where he grew up. He had a lifelong love of the Malvern Hills and often walked there.

Robert Radford Welch MBE, RDI (21 May 1929 – 15 March 2000), was an English designer and silversmith.

Born in Hereford, he was the only son of Leonard Radford Welch (1894–1969) and his wife, Dorothy Perkins (1897–1982), who trained as an artist before their marriage in 1923.