A 1958 article in "British Buttons", said that Lionel Nichols was one of the last British outposts of the glass button craft. It compared his colour sense and the richness and depth of his work to the windows at Chartres. Daddy would have regarded such comparisons as "Tommy rot!" He never thought of himself as a craftsman but as a button manufacturer.
In fact he was neither, he was a gentleman amateur.
Before the war he had been a commercial traveller for a firm of button importers, after the war he thought he would make his own.
At first, like Mr Toad, he enthusiastically ran through a mad range of materials. What he produced was vigorous and unusual, and it sold, but he begun to experiment with glass and in glass he found a worthy mistress.
His approach was entirely experimental, nobody taught him how to do it. He had no industrial experience, what he fixed on was much more akin to cookery. He cut the raw sheets of glass into squares, melted it in the furnace, brought it out, worked on it, returning each piece to the furnace three times.
Everything was done by one man and his methods were staggeringly uncommercial, but like all craftsmen he had no regard for his own time. He would work away with his unlit pipe in his mouth, his overall tied with string in his precarious workroom with no running water and gaps between the floor boards where nothing was used for its original purpose.
