A.Edward Jones was an important Arts and Crafts metalworking firm, founded by Albert Edward Jones (1879-1954) in 1902, and based in Birmingham until its closure in the 1980s. Until the 1920s the firm’s major commissions were for ecclesiastical and domestic objects, but from the early 1930s onwards they increasingly specialised in civic plate, including cups and trophies.
Jones himself had been a pupil of Edward Taylor at the Birmingham Art School, itself closely aligned with the Arts and Crafts principles of the Birmingham School of Handcraft. During the first years of the business the firm's output was chiefly in the Arts and Crafts style, with Jones writing in 1904: "For many years past the Silversmith's Art has become the Art of the Die-Sinker; the Silversmith only putting stamped parts together, thus making hundreds of articles of exactly the same pattern, which at once becomes monotonous. For a piece of silver-work to be really interesting it must be conceived as a work of Art, and to obtain that result it must be made by a workman who has had an Art training...combining the skill of the artist and of the craftsman." As the firm developed it further blurred the distinction between artist- and trade-craftsman, and A. Edward Jones can be understood both as an 'Arts and Crafts' and as a 'trade' firm.