Lawrence Cribb, whom all his friends called Laurie, had continued turning out fine inscriptions at the late Eric Gill’s workshop at Pigotts near High Wycombe. Jonah Jones, keen to learn from him the skills of stone carving and letter cutting, secured a modest scholarship to train at Pigotts in early 1950. Jonah said of his time there, in an essay about Eric Gill he wrote in 1989: “The fun of the Gill times persisted. Laurie was a lively gossip and told tales, unrepeatable in print, of the master’s life and times.” It was the start of a long and fruitful friendship between the two men.
After the community at Pigotts broke up, Laurie moved to North Wales in 1957, and three years later he joined Jonah’s workshop, dealing with the increasing volume of lettering commissions coming in. But Laurie was more than an assistant – he was a collaborator. In a 1973 essay in Artists in Wales 2, Jonah wrote: “It was enough to mark out a block [of stone] and Laurie would start his wonderful pitching, claw and chisel work and we’d work out the idea together – he is wonderful at translating ideas into work.” In later years, Jonah said: “I owe everything to Laurie, really … he not only taught me how to cut letters, but how to establish a workshop and all that.”
https://stoneletters.com/blog/eric-gill-and-pigotts
Laurie Cribb in Eric Gill’s workshop at Pigotts where, some years later, he taught Jonah Jones how to carve stone and cut letters. Photograph from the BBC Hulton Picture Library.