Newsflash:

notretro.com are pleased to announce we are exhibiting at the Vintage Furniture Flea on March 27th 2011 at York Hall 5-15 Old Ford Rd., Bethnal Green London E2 9PJ. An essential antidote to the pretentious rigours of Dulwich.

A boxed canteen of Monte Carlo cutlery by Geoffrey Guy Bellamy: born 1922 died 1997. Freeman of the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths. He often stamped his pieces with a facsimile signature.

In 1940 when he was 18 he joined the RAF and served until the end of the war flying Lancasters in 405 squadron before moving on to the Pathfinder force where he won the DFC and bar. He lost 2 crews, one while on sick-leave recovering from a flak wound, the other while he was seconded elsewhere, and flew 112 missions.

After the war he studied at the Birmingham College of Art from 1946-1950 and then at the Royal College of Art from 1950-1953 graduating the same year as younger colleagues Gerald Benney and David Mellor. He and Mellor were the first two students to win first class honours in the silver degree course and all of the younger students admired him. Eric Clements was there at the same time and Robert Welch graduated in 1955, all of them being taught by Robert Goodden.

Bellamy started his own one-man workshop in London in a small basement beneath a dry-cleaner's in Cadogan Street making small items, some for the retailer George Tarratt in Leicester. With Ivan Tarratt they formed Bellamy & Tarratt, a production silver company which lasted until 1959. He then did some designs for A E Jones. Bellamy won a Design Centre Award in 1961 for his "Monte Carlo" cutlery, made by George Wolstenholme in Sheffield. Before 1964 he joined the Council of Industrial Design as Industrial Liason Officer for silver and the allied industries, his job being to encourage good designs. (Committees under him at this time rejected industrial designs that Gerald Benney had done for 8 separate companies. Many of these were commercially successful and helped Benney finance his silversmithing).

Bellamy enjoyed teaching and became Head of the Sheffield College of Art and then Principal at Canterbury and Maidstone.

44 pieces including 6 steak knives and two servers. V & A Permanent Collection.