Frances was born in Newcastle on Tyne during the war, but the family moved to Bristol when she was six. The daughter of scientific parents, her earliest youth was spent in the ration queues reciting tables and doing simple mental arithmetic. Weekends were mostly spent helping her father maintain a variety of old, even in those days, cars. She jokes that she was brought up by a pair of leg saying ¨pass me a 5/8 Whitworth spanner¨
There was an assumption that all the children (three daughters) would follow a scientific career. Although her elder sister avoided this, she did not. After a summer teaching sailing and a brief spell at the National Physical Laboratory she enrolled at Bristol College of Science and Technology, Bath University by the time she graduated, and read Mechanical Engineering. The course was a ¨thin sandwich¨ course involving 6 months in college and 6 in industry. She acquired practical machine and metal working skills and made some tools she uses to this day. as well working on projects on air flow around centrifugal pumps and time and motion studies. The latter has had little influence on her lifestyle.
Frances spent brief periods abroad for work, the Sudan and later in New York and Alaska. She trained as a jeweller in her late 40’s after a frustrating period of motherhood and housekeeping. She is fascinated by the properties of materials, structure and balance and loves working with and shaping metal. Her work mostly has three dimensional qualities, She has recently taken to enamelling and enjoys adding colour and pattern to her jewellery. She is influenced by her recreational activities of rowing and swimming and formerly sailing, both racing offshore and cruising under sail.
A sense of structure, balance and spatial relationships are part of her design personality and are reflected in her jewellery designs. Much of the shaping of her pieces is done by hand. Frances’ work is literally hand made.