‘Oh, we work on trust – have to. And all my lads are good’uns, aren’t you, you lucky lot?’ He addressed his workers jovially. ‘You get wise to all the tricks. No turn-ups on trousers in here – and no hair lacquer. You’d be surprised how much gold dust you can stick in yer hair if you keep running yer hands through it all day long! And all these sinks –’ He pointed. ‘That water don’t go out into the drains – oh, no. It goes down into sawdust in the basement and we get the gold out of that an’ all. Aprons, overalls – all washed here and the dust strained out.’

‘Gracious,’ Margaret said. ‘I’d never have thought of all that.’

‘Oh – it soon comes, with time,’ Eb laughed. He hurried them through the rest of the workshop – the shelves of dies for stamping out shapes for decoration, the drop stampers at the end, working the machines, each using one leg to work the long rope, raising a heavy metal weight and letting it release with force to stamp out the metal.

‘The deeper the cut, the more difficult the work,’ Uncle Eb said. The men kept working steadily. The boss was there and they had work to do. The weight of the stamp came hurtling down and crashed on to the dies below.

‘Right – there’s a few girls up in this end room.’ In a narrow side room, four women sat working at various machines, the straps whirring round large cogs close to the ceiling. ‘They do finishing and polishing in here – women’s work, that.’

‘Why?’ Annie asked, in her challenging tone. Margaret gave her a look – not that she took any notice.

‘Just is,’ Eb said, ignoring her tone.

As their uncle steered them back along the workshop, they saw a man pouring liquid into a shallow bath in a kind of cupboard, with an outlet pipe above it leading out through the roof. The constant, overpowering stench seemed to be coming out of there. It was not something Uncle Eb had mentioned. Margaret didn’t like to ask as her uncle seemed in a hurry now, but Annie said, ‘What’s that then?’

‘Oh – that’s the pickle,’ he said. ‘Vitriol – an acid, that is. It gets all the muck off the gold – solder and such. Right – last thing, I’ve got to get on.’ He indicated the work tables on the other side from the presses. ‘These on this side are the pegs.’

Each table had semicircles cut out all round it, each with a leather pouch fastened to it which Margaret guessed must be to catch any gold waste. Beside each semicircle a man sat on a stool, bent over his work, a leather apron tied across his lap. Most of them had a tube of some kind in their mouths and were working with a gas flame which burnt at the end of a cable fixed to the bench.