FOR more than three decades Leslie Durbin was the silversmith of choice for many an institution in need of chains of office, maces, processional crosses, commemorative plate or any of a whole range of other items from desktop inkstands to 3ft oars. Always a team player, he believed in working closely with clients, self-effacingly attributing success to their inspiration rather than to his own skill. He was generous to his professional colleagues, too, and would, in his later years particularly, attempt to deflect commissions towards younger artists.

All Durbin’s reserves of modesty, however, could not prevent the best-known piece he worked on from appearing on the world stage in the most dramatic of circumstances. This was the Sword of Honour, a ceremonial sword commissioned by King George VI in 1943 to honour the valiant conduct of the people of Stalingrad during the seven-month battle of 1942-43. Designed by Professor R. M. Y. Gleadowe, forged at the Wilkinson Sword factory in Acton by Sid Rouse and Tom Beasley, and glitteringly decorated by the 30-year-old Durbin in elaborately worked gold and silver, this became the highest- profile British sword since Excalibur.

It was presented at the 1943 Tehran conference between Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt. Churchill gave a laconic account of the occasion: “When, after a few sentences of explanation, I handed the splendid weapon to Marshal Stalin he raised it in a most impressive gesture to his lips and kissed the scabbard. He then passed it to Voroshilov (later Soviet President), who dropped it.”

Leslie Durbin was born in Fulham five years before his railway-clerk father died in the flu epidemic of 1918. At 13 he won a London County Council scholarship to study silversmithing at the Central School of Arts and Crafts after normal school lessons in the mornings. Three years later, his head of department at the Central recommended him as an apprentice to the leading silversmith of the day, Omar Ramsden, under whom the promising young smith studied chasing, engraving and decorating while continuing with classes at the Central in his spare time. In 1939 he won the second of his two awards from the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths — a travelling scholarship — just in time for him to explore Europe’s artistic heritage before war broke out.

Between then and his call-up in 1941 Durbin worked on his own account in the workshop of his former Central School tutor Francis Adam, on commissions including a dish to commemorate the June 1939 visit to North America by King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. In 1943 he was seconded from the RAF’s Allied Central Interpretation Unit to assist with Professor Gleadowe’s commission to produce Stalingrad’s Sword of Honour. Time was short for such an elaborate piece: the battle, did not end until the final German surrender on February 2, 1943, and the presentation would be made in November of the same year.

Just over 4ft long, the sword — inscribed, in English and Russian, “To the steel-hearted citizens of Stalingrad, the gift of King George VI in token of the homage of the British people” — featured Durbin’s silver crossguard with cast and gilded leopards’ heads, a handle bound with 18-carat gold wire, and ferrules of red enamel on silver. It was also Durbin who decorated the ornate scabbard and who chose the rock crystal from which was carved the pommel that landed on Voroshilov’s toe when the sword slipped out of the scabbard at the presentation ceremony.

This was painstaking craftsmanship of an order not much seen in wartime Britain, and before the sword’s dispatch to Tehran long queues formed to view it when it was exhibited in London — at Goldsmiths’ Hall, the Victoria and Albert Museum and Westminster Abbey — and in other major cities. Evelyn Waugh described the scene in Westminster Abbey in the third volume of his Sword Of Honour trilogy: “The sword they had come to see stood upright between two candles, on a table counterfeiting an altar. Policemen guarded it on either side.” Today it is displayed in the Battle of Stalingrad Museum in Volgograd.

After the war Durbin entered into partnership with Leonard Moss, sharing with him the workshop in Camden Town where he worked on another sword of honour, this time for Marshal of the Royal Air Force Lord Tedder. He also collaborated with the glass engraver Laurence Whistler on King George VI’s Christmas 1949 present from his wife: a silver-gilt and glass casket in the shape of an Ionic temple. In 1972 he and Whistler were to join forces again over a silver-framed, engraved-glass plaque showing flightpaths above Windsor, presented to the Queen by the British Airports Authority.

At a time of university expansion, Durbin was in demand for ceremonial pieces such as Southampton University’s silver Foundation Mace. He produced work for the older seats of learning, too, receiving an honorary doctorate and the accolade of “craftsman inspired by Minerva” from Cambridge.

In 1951 he was chosen to work with Professor Robert Goodden of the Royal College of Art on a tea service for the Festival of Britain. More work with royal associations came his way in the 1970s. In 1977 the Assay Offices of Great Britain commissioned him to design a special hallmark for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. And in 1979 he worked on a silver oar, nearly 3ft long, the symbol of the authority of the Admiral of the Cinque Ports.

Connections with his early sponsors, the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths, recurred over the decades. It was through the company’s recommendation that he won a commission from the Bank of England for an inkstand to commemorate its 250th anniversary in 1944. And in 1982 it was the company that staged the exhibition Leslie Durbin: Fifty Years of Silversmithing, many of the potential exhibits for which –— such as his mace for Nigeria’s House of Representatives and Coventry Cathedral’s processional cross — were unavailable for the best of reasons, their continued heavy use.

Quitting his Camden Town workshop in his sixties, Durbin worked from home, making something of a second career of coin designs for the Royal Mint. For the reverse side of the pound coin in the mid 1980s, he created four designs representing the constituent parts of the United Kingdom, each showing a floral emblem encircled by the royal diadem. In 1997, at the age of 84, he produced the reverse-side design for a gold £5 proof coin commemorating the golden wedding of the Queen and Prince Philip.

In 1940 Durbin married the watercolourist Phyllis Ginger, who survives him, with a son and a daughter.

Leslie Durbin, CBE, MVO, silversmith, was born on February 21, 1913. He died on February 24, 2005, aged 92.