By Ines Keane
Jet isn’t a gemstone in the usual sense. It’s fossilised driftwood, roughly 183 million years old, that spent the Jurassic soaking up bitumen from the sediment around it until the wood itself turned into a hard, carveable black material — jetonization, rather than the mineral replacement that makes most fossils. Whitby sits on one of the world’s best deposits of it, and for about a fifty-year stretch in the 19th century, that geological accident built an entire local industry.
The trade’s fortune was tied, almost embarrassingly directly, to death. After King George IV died in 1830, the Lord Chamberlain’s office specified jet as the correct material for court mourning jewellery, and demand followed the ruling. It intensified considerably after Prince Albert died in 1861 and Queen Victoria adopted mourning dress for the rest of her life, jet ornaments included. Between 1860 and 1880, Whitby’s jet industry employed roughly 1,500 people across more than 200 workshops, supplied by around 300 small mines cut into the surrounding moors, some as far off as Osmotherley and Guisborough.
It didn’t survive the 1880s. As mourning fashion itself fell out of favour and cheaper imported jet undercut confidence in the material generally, the trade began a decline it never reversed — by the time the Whitby Gazette was still complaining about foreign competition in 1889, the damage was largely done. By 1958, the last Victorian-era jet worker with first-hand knowledge of the trade’s boom years had died, taking the last direct link to that period with him.
What’s left is a handful of jewellers still working genuine Whitby jet in the town today, alongside a harbour, an abbey ruin that partly inspired Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and a working fishing fleet that predates the jet trade by centuries and outlasted it easily.
Sephari doesn’t yet have sourced, checked profiles of the jet workshops currently operating in Whitby — a trade this easy to fake with dyed glass or plastic deserves real verification before we point anyone toward a specific name.
Yorkshire makers can find out what’s involved at /sell-with-sephari/.