Benjamin J Fletcher

Benjamin Fletcher (1868-1951) was born in 1868 near the Wrekin, in Shropshire. He went to work for the Coalbrookdale Company aged about eleven and from seventeen began teaching part-time classes at Coalbrookdale School of Art. He must have impressed the principal, Augustus Spencer, because when Spencer was appointed head of Leicester School of Art in 1888 he took the twenty-year old Fletcher with him as his deputy.

Fletcher took over as head from 1900 until 1920 and the reputation of the school flourished. He visited Austria and Germany in early 1900s looking at art, design and craft education and developed close links between the school and craft industries in the city. In the summer of 1903 he attended a summer school in jewellery making at the Guild of Handicraft, an Arts and Crafts community set up by C R Ashbee in Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire,. Fletcher persuaded one of the guild silversmiths, John Sidney Reeve, a former art teacher from Bewdley who specialised in chased work, to leave the Guild to teach at Leicester School of Art.

Collins & Co Metal Work, Leicester c1904-6

Established Leicester firms employed students from the School of Art to raise standards of design and workmanship while former students and teachers set up new businesses such as Collins and Company founded by William H Pick, an ex-student, producing silver, metalwork and jewellery.

Fletcher was a close friend and colleague of Harry Peach and designed cane chairs for the Dryad works; he also set up a department for cane work and wood furniture at the school in 1909 and in 1913 evening classes specifically for the cane and willow apprentices at Dryad. He believed that changes to the teaching methods in local schools from nursery level were the first steps to reform art, design and craft education in Leicester. He was instrumental in the introduction of a new drawing syllabus for kindergarten and upper school pupils in 1901. In 1920 he was appointed head of Birmingham School of Art.