My wife, Diana Porter, who has died aged 78, was a jewellery designer based in Bristol . Among her most popular items were the range of 21 “Sibyl” pendants she made – figures of stylised women, each etched with an affirming word such as “hope”, “vision” “clarity” or “calm”. Hanging from chains or special ear wires, they give the wearer something positive to focus on, and have been worn by thousands of people in Bristol and beyond.
Born in Weston-super-Mare in Somerset to Dorothy (nee Wilson), a civil servant, and George Porter, a company director in the grain milling industry, Diana lived nearly all her life in Bristol, and was devoted to the city and its culture. She went to La Retraite high school in Clifton and then Clifton high school, before starting her working life as a primary school teacher in the Bristol area.
She married her first husband, Chris Smailes, in 1962 and left teaching to bring up their two children. However, after the marriage ended in divorce in 1970 she briefly returned to the classroom, teaching at primary and secondary schools in Bristol.
Alongside her interest in teaching, Diana had a passion for the theatre, and so in the early 1970s she started a near 20-year career in arts administration that included running a mobile box office and managing the Common Stock theatre company in London and the Avon touring theatre in Bristol, before setting up the Albany Centre community arts venue in the city. She also ran the Birmingham women’s festival.
We met in 1973, backstage at the Bristol Arts Centre, where she was playing Regina in an amateur production of A Doll’s House and I was carting scenery about. After 46 years together we married in 2019.
In 1990, at the age of 47, Diana set off in another different direction, taking a degree in jewellery and silversmithing at the University of Central England in Birmingham before returning to Bristol to establish her own jewellery workshop, gallery, and retail business.
Committed to ethical sourcing, she was one of the first designers in the UK to produce a full collection in fairtrade gold, and, as a lover of travel, she visited artisanal mines in Bolivia and gold-panners in California. In 1999 she was named UK Jewellery Designer of the Year by Retail Jeweller magazine.
Despite failing health in later life, Diana was working until the end, and was always happiest when concentrating at her jeweller’s “peg”, engraving and etching the words that were the hallmark of her work. Enthusiastic, passionate and ever ready to laugh, she was committed to ensuring that her “other family” – the devoted team who worked with her in her workshop and gallery – were willing to carry her creativity and beliefs “on and on”.
She is survived by me, her daughters from her first marriage, Nicky and Lucie, two grandchildren, Billie and Lily, two great-granddaughters and her siblings, Jacqui and Donald.
