A DAVENHAM silversmith has amazed an Antiques Roadshow expert with her bargain find of two rare pieces of machinery.

Yvonne Chadderton, jewellery designer and former gemmologist, spotted two diamond cutting and cleaving machines in an antique shop window while on a weekend break in Scarborough 20 years ago.

She managed to snap them both up for just £150, and visited Arley Hall when the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow came to town in June.

The cleaving box and hand-crafted cutting machine, with its original copper cutting wheel, were made in the ‘diamond capital’ of Antwerp in the early 1900s.

Yvonne said: “I have had them all these years as museum pieces and talking points in my studio and workshop, but when I heard that the Antiques Roadshow was coming to Arley Hall in Knutsford I decided to take them along to see what more I could find out about them.

“The programme’s jewellery expert John Benjamin told me that in all his years on the Roadshow he had never seen an actual diamond cutting machine before.

“In his expert opinion he told that they were now probably worth about £450 but since I have no intention of selling them, the value is not of any real significance. It was just great to know that they were so unusual.

“Just how they managed to find their way from a diamond workshop in Belgium to an antique shop in Scarborough, I suppose we will never know.”

The cleaving box would have been used to split diamonds along clearly-defined cleaving planes, and the diamond dust produced by that process would then have been mixed with oil to lubricate the copper wheel on the cutting machine as it sliced through the stone.

Yvonne runs one-to-one jewellery workshops at dates and times to suit individual clients. She can be contacted via her two websites, yc-jewellery.co.uk and yc-jewellery-courses.co.uk.

The Roadshow filmed at Arley Hall will be screened in two parts on September 25 and again on October 2.