Obituary: Norman Bucknell

Norman Bucknell, who has died aged 95, was the last of the second generation of Cotswold arts and crafts movement designer/makers. He came from a family of craftsmen: both his grandfather, William, and father, Alfred, were Gloucestershire blacksmiths and woodworkers. As a young man, his father had worked for the Arts and Crafts architect/designer Ernest Gimson.

As a boy, Norman had showed an aptitude for technical work, but at his father’s insistence he left school at 14 to join Gimson’s former foreman, Peter Waals, as an apprentice cabinet maker. He had to sweep up, boil the glue and make a towel rail as a test piece. After six years, he rejoined his father at his smithy in Waterlane, a village near Sapperton, where the two men made brass and iron handles for Waals furniture, worked for other architects and produced one-off commissions and exhibition pieces.

After his father’s death in 1957, Norman continued to work until the 1990s. He reckoned that about half his work was architectural - hinges, light fittings, gates and the like - and half was decorative work, such as sconces.

He took me round his workshop in the 1990s. He walked with difficulty, his fingers swollen with arthritis, but he took pleasure in showing me his tools and the punches he had made to hammer the simple dots, lines and curves of stamped decoration on brass, iron and steel pieces. His eyes lit up when we came to a Gimson design for a four-branched candlestick in polished iron. "My father told Gimson that the design was too complex," he recalled "but I made a pair for a client in Shropshire in the 1950s. It was the most difficult work I’ve ever done."

Norman’s metalwork is to be found in churches throughout Britain, and in the Victoria and Albert and Leicester museums and in Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museum. A fine pair of squirrel fire dogs by the Bucknells has been touring the US as part of an exhibition on the arts and crafts movement organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Norman is survived by his wife Gwyneth and two daughters.