Robert Austin Lamb was born at Leicester in 1941, the son of a railway signalman.  His father once worked in the signal box at Woodhead Tunnel.  The family moved to Tankersley and Bob Lamb was schooled at Hoyland, Barnsley.  Aged eleven, he was introduced to the school’s metalwork shop, where the teacher was from Sheffield and was a former silversmith.  His recommendation paved the way at the end of 1956 for Bob to join Mappin & Webb at its Queen’s Road factory.  After a six-year apprenticeship, he became part of that firm’s team of twenty silversmiths.  They made silverware and electro-plate silver items (such as tea pots and coffee pots) for shipping lines and railway companies.  However, that trade was declining and the big silver firms began merging.  Bob worked for a time in the silver department at Walker & Hall in Howard Street, before returning to Mappin & Webb.   Silver cigarette boxes and sterling silver trays were still in demand.  ‘Anything you could make in silver, we did’, he told one journalist (Rob Hollingworth, Sheffield Star, 16 January 2022).

In 1965, Bob married Jane Lee and, as the silver trade continued to declined, he joined Jack Cheetham at Devonshire Lane.  He stayed for nearly a decade and then worked for a year at James Dixon & Sons.  In 1971, he started working for himself, alongside a colleague, Roger Draper.  Their first workshop was on Arundel Street, but in 1986 they  moved into premises on Newton Lane, which had been recently vacated by a woodwork firm.

In 2022, when he was 80, he was still working with Roger (aged 79), as the go-to silversmith in Sheffield (especially for repairs).  He has links to the Assay Office, with his work on display there, and has also been a judge for starter programmes for new designers, silversmiths, and jewellers.  He is keen to encourage more people into the trade.  A tennis lover, in 2019 he was awarded a British Empire Medal for services to the preservation of traditional skills and to sport in Mexborough.