By Ines Keane
I want to start with the material itself, because it’s stranger than most people assume. Jet isn’t a mineral in the way a gemstone usually is. It’s fossilised driftwood, around 183 million years old, that soaked up bitumen from the sediment it was buried in until the wood itself effectively turned to hardened carbon — a process called jetonization, distinct from the mineral replacement that produces most fossils. Whitby happens to sit on one of the richest deposits of it anywhere, buried in shale along the coast and inland moors.
For most of its long history, that was a geological curiosity rather than an industry. What turned it into one, abruptly and specifically, was death. When King George IV died in 1830, the Lord Chamberlain’s office ruled that jet was the correct material for court mourning jewellery, and the fashion followed the ruling downward through society the way court fashion often did. The real turning point came in 1861, when Prince Albert died and Queen Victoria committed to mourning dress for the remainder of her life — jet brooches, jet bracelets, jet everything, worn by a monarch whose example much of the country followed without question.
The numbers from that period are genuinely striking. Between 1860 and 1880, Whitby’s jet trade employed roughly 1,500 people across more than two hundred separate workshops, fed by something like 300 small mines dug into the surrounding moorland, some of them well outside the town itself, toward Osmotherley and Guisborough. For a town this size, that’s not a cottage industry. That’s most of the working population, directly or indirectly, carving a fossil into brooches for a nation in mourning.
It fell apart faster than it rose. As mourning fashion itself lost its grip on Victorian and Edwardian taste through the 1880s, and cheaper imported jet undercut confidence in the material more broadly, the trade began a decline it never really reversed. By 1889, the Whitby Gazette was still grumbling about foreign competition’s effect on the local industry, which tells you the wound hadn’t closed even years on. By 1958, the last Victorian-era jet worker with first-hand knowledge of the industry’s boom years had died — the quiet end of the last direct link to a trade that had once employed a town.
Walking Whitby’s steep old streets now, past the handful of jewellers still carving genuine jet, it’s hard not to think about how completely a single royal death reshaped a coastal town’s economy for two generations, and how completely a shift in fashion and cheaper competition unwound it within a few decades. I didn’t come away with names of workshops I could confidently verify as working authentic Whitby jet rather than something imported or synthetic — the material is notoriously easy to fake with dyed glass, and that’s exactly the kind of claim Sephari won’t make without proper sourcing.
If you carve or work with jet here, the process for getting listed is at /sell-with-sephari/.