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- Depriving youngsters of a practical education
February 2019 I passed out of Shoreditch College, the leading UK Handicraft Teacher training college in 1966 - with a Distinction in Advanced Woodwork. I went on to teach in numerous schools and leading colleges including Bristol Polytechnic where I trained CDT teachers and more recently (2009) I was invited to become an inspector for The British Accreditation Council (for Independent Higher Education) based on my vast and varied experience in Education. I didn't apply for the job but was invited and to this day don't know who put my name forward. Added to that I have run YTS courses where the Government of the day sponsored young people to work alongside practitioners serving as a valuable stepping stone in their career path. I have also run successful private courses and taken on young people for informal but intensive work experience programmes and in particular from Finland. Jeremy Broun was the fitrst visiting lecturer at the Connemara West Centre in Ireland (1987) that has since become (Letterfrack Furniture School) a centre of excellence for furniture making talent It disturbs me that whereas I was priviliged to have by chance an exceptional and inspiring school woodwork teacher who set me on a path I would walk again today if I was 17, the opportunity for most young people to engage in practical education today is diminishing . This is little short of scandalous because the skills go way beyond that of training someone to become a carpenter or plumber. These are enabling, transferrable problem-solving life skills and I have documented them fully elsewhere (eg RSA Comment: Practical Arts in Education and Society. A 6 minute video showing work experience opportunities offered by me in woodworking, CNC, vehicle restoration and video production. The opportunity is not just diminishing because the focus on secondary education is away from engineering, manufacturing, making - in fact for jobs we don't know will exist in this rapidly changing technological age, but there is almost a deliberate and systemmatic block under the name of 'political correctness' that is shooting us in the foot. Not long ago schools claimed it was too expensive to maintain workshops and lacked the imagination that quality materials can be found in skips for young people to create things with. That kills two birds with one stone as it addresses the serious issue of the throw away society. Health and Safety became another block and devoid of flexibility and common sense risk assessment in a case-by-case scenario and whereas the term 'apprenticeship' has been banded about by politicians when it suits them, in reality offering an apprenticeship today is full of expensive deterrents and now we have a situation where only the well-off can afford a craft training post secondary school. A fellow furniture maker friend of mine and prominent in the field, today told me his experience of once considering offering an apprenticeship. Despite his large efficient workshop he was told his machines were not far enough apart and when he said the youngster wouldn't be using his machines but would start off loading timbers from outside he was told that the youngster would have to be issued with sun cream. Silly me I forgot that today we have a generation of over-protective parents and some of them in Education who insist (if it isn't already law) that to play conkers you must wear safety glasses and a helmet. Not that long ago local schools were keen to send their sixth formers to me for short periods of work experience. One young lady assisted me making a documentary film about the late Alan Peters, the foremost British furniture craftsman of the late 20th Century and she later gained a job as a researcher with the BBC. Recently I tried engaging with schools but they never answer emails or are in tea break when you try to phone a key person. My own generation, many of whom enjoying their leisure time must surely be aware these valuable skills will be lost. Maybe they don't care but I have always been committed to education and passing on the skills I was advantaged to learn. Who knows what jobs or skill demands there will be post-Brexit in a decade from now? When I taught my highly successful Intensive Design and Make in Wood courses in my small studio to adults a few years ago, several of my students commented that actually what I was teaching were life skills. As it stands many of the state furniture making courses have been closed down and the vacuum filled by elite and very expensive schools. Is this a society of equal opportunity? Please read my short essay for The Royal Society of Arts in 2009: The Value of Practical Arts in Education and Society: https://www.thersa.org/comment/2011/01/practical-arts-in-education-and-society
- Bright spark magazine editor
February 2019 Life takes many twists and turns when circumstances suddenly force change. I have worked with many editors of Woodworking magazines but none comes to mind so much as Nick Gibbs who eventually got to publish his own woodworking magazines. Sadly Nick suffered a brain injury in 2014 having been knocked off his bike and this changed his life dramatically. I knew Nick as far back as the 1980's when he was the youngest editor of Th e Woodworker , Britain's top woodworking magazine. Unusually bright, Eton educated but very much a man of the people, he was very good at thinking outside the box and I joined him in the early 90's when he set up Good Woodworking magazine at Future Publishing in Bath. I was an associate contributing editor and wrote many articles for him and tested tools and there was a sense of fun in the editorial office. In fact I once recall thinking they were a bunch of sixth formers! Nick Gibbs was a good match for the radical Good Woodworking magazine with its easy to digest highly visual content broken up into boxes moving away from the text heavy tradition Nick was promoted to senior management at Future and then took the bold move to set up his own publishing company (Freshwood) and he launched British Woodworking and another magazine called Living Woods. Again he asked me to write for him and I know he enjoyed pushing the boundaries and involving me in mildly controversial articles such as questioning the Holy Grail of the Dovetail used by cabinetmakers. After Nick's brain injury and long period in a coma he lost his job, his career which I believe was his passion. Many of us who have gone through brain traumas to a degree understand that even the smallest brain malfunction and that sudden loss of faculties taken for granted can cause major life changes. The brain is so finely wired, we still know little about it although we can fly rockets to Mars. Nick was an exceptionally bright spark in the world of magazine editorial. Good Woodworking was Future Publishing's flagship magazine in the 1990's, groundbreaking in its highly visual format and jargon busting text boxes, de-mystifying woodworking to mortal men and women. The last time I heard of Nick was that he was sitting outside Bath Abbey carving wooden spoons with a penknife, curiously as outside that same Abbey I would busk on my guitar but not on that day. I understand Nick has an active blog and quite philosophical in some of his postings about his life after being an editor for so long. I wish him well
- Memories of a furniture maker friend
August 2012 Andrew Varah died in July 2012, delivering something of a shock to the British bespoke furniture making community where he had become a distinguished figure; the bloke I recall from my student days, who always sat at the top table, could charm the girls and where after a late start in the furniture making world, he arrived. John Makepeace OBE (speaker), David Pearce, Jeremy Broun (speaker) and Andrew Varah (speaker) at the Irish CREATE event in 2005 It was little surprise he was ambitious as he was the son of Chad Varah, the founder of the Samaritans suicide telephone line, member of MENSA and his mother, head of the Mothers Union Europe. Andy was a triplet and identical twin. I first met Andrew in 1963 as a fellow student at the legendary Shoreditch Teacher Training College in Surrey. In our second year Andrew got me a room in the sought after old college building alongside his close mates Geoff Buckland, John Eustace and Max Carter. I suppose the obvious thing we all had in common was that we spoke without an accent and so it was probably a class thing. I guess in retrospect we were an elite group although I saw ourselves as different rather than better than the main core of trainee handicraft teachers. We tended to be more independent minded. Shoreditch College was a fantastic training ground not just in woodworking skills but in other craft disciplines such as metalworking, basketmaking, pottery and bookbinding and we had the very best practitioners in the country as tutors. My God those were the days and I shed a tear on the very last day of my training looking over Runnymede from the college campus, thinking it will never be as good as this again. Shoreditch was renowned for supplying not only the best teachers but the pranks that went on at the college were legendary. From one of the towers in our residential building I recall being persuaded by an errant third year student to spray one of the college tutors on duty with a fire water hose and later hiding in Andrew's wardrobe while the search party sifted through the study bedrooms. Andrew was sitting in bed wearing a nightcap, reading a book, innocently pointing to the open window which happened to be four storeys up and telling the tutor 'maybe they went that way'. I was nearly kicked out as an example to other students but I went on to gain a Distinction on the Advanced Woodwork course while Andrew became social secretary and was out with the girls rather than pushing his cabinetmaking skills. Andy helped me buy my first Morgan three-wheeler and we drove out to secluded pubs in Virginia Water in it and even attended a party in Surrey held by John Gregson the actor. The three-wheeler had no reverse gear and on one occasion we plunged through somebody's garden fence in Bagshot. We shared many fun experiences lasting into our thirties. The first 1937 Morgan three-wheeler arrives on the Shoreditch College campus in 1962, causing a sensation amongst students and staff. I took Andy salmon poaching on wild Scottish rivers (my home was in Scotland) and on our last day of the trip I said 'I can't send you back to London empty handed'. While my older sister stood lookout for the bailiff, I hooked the salmon and Andrew landed it. I hooked the salmon and Andy landed it - an apt description of our furniture making careers. (1968) On a furniture travel scholarship abroad my car was stolen and he offered to drive over to Holland to pick me up. I managed to get an old banger and arrived back from a 24-hour drive straight from Italy to his barn workshops near Rugby and he was the first to see all the exciting items of innovative furniture I had been given. The old banger loaded with gifts from Artek, Cassina Artemide etc - first port of call Andrew Varah's pad 1979 At the beginning of our careers Andrew and I taught in tough London schools and met up in our respective school workshops after school hours to brainstorm designs for school projects. We were pioneers of design in schools a decade before 'Design Craft Technology' became officially part of the curriculum. We both left teaching after two years and Andy went to work in Zambia running a furniture factory. He invited me over to be his designer but my phobia for injections stopped that. He returned around 1974 but in preceding years had written to me many times asking what it was like to be a 'designer maker' and saying he wanted to do what I was doing back in England. Andy set up as a solo maker and so our contact was much closer. I visited him many times at Little Walton, mucking into the renovations of his barn workshop. He had a fantastic pad while I was working in a tiny underground city workshop without natural light. A strange contrast as at the time he was an unknown and I was well acknowledged in the field by galleries and magazines. Around 1979 I introduced him to the Prestcote Gallery and remember his very first exhibit there, an inlaid table in ash. It was a electric time as the new boys exhibited alongside the old boys; A Fred Baier chair sitting next to an Edward Barnsley table. A table by Andrew Varah circa 1976 Perhaps ashamed of my own somewhat tiny workshop I turned down an opportunity in 1989 to be filmed for a regional television craft documentary and introduced the film director Trevor Hill to Andrew Varah who at that time had just taken on the genius woodworker Andrew Whateley from John Makepeace's workshop. I think it was Andrew's first television exposure and at that time a rare insight into the work of furniture designer makers. Jan Leeming, ex News reader was the presenter. A chair by Andrew Varah around the time of the first television feature Andrew delighted in pleasing his clients and working to their needs, often adding whims drawn from different architectural periods making his actual designs somewhat derivative and overplayed in clever craftsmanship in my opinion. I felt he became a bit of an 'untouchable' in terms of design critique but then there are no critics of bespoke modern furniture! If it were a West End play the performances would be torn apart by ruthless critics (Kiera Knightly playing Anna Karenina)! But design apart, Andrew Varah became a formidable maker and guiding light to a new blossoming generation of furniture designer makers. It was the late Alan Peters (who also trained at Shoreditch College) who said in 1974 this is surely the most difficult craft to sustain. I still have some prime quality flitch cut English oak Andrew sold me at cost price in the year of the drought in 1976 and some Rio rosewood veneer he gave me on the same occasion. In our halcyon days Andy would often get to meet the girls I dated and would say 'I can't believe how you can pull the most beautiful birds' yet he could pull the most prestigious clients and was really in a different league running a furniture business and employing talented young craftsmen, many of whom stayed for decades. Above all Andy Varah had an astute business sense in what is a very difficult business to sustain There was obviously rivalry between Andrew nyself. Even as students he once told me he could run as fast without training as his identical twin brother Mike who was running 800 yards for Britain. I told him he was arrogant and challenged him to run around the college track. He beat me after 26 laps and I was in the college athletics team and he wasn't! Curiously as my furniture 'career' suffered because of depression in my life I once admitted to Andy I had often phoned up his old man's outfit the Samaritans. I got the impression Andy did not get to see much of his father in his youth. Despite our more recent fall outs, we exchanged an amicable conversation at our last chance meeting at an exhibition in Cheltenham where we were both judges for different awards. I made a film including him called 'Five Ways to Fashion Wood' in 1989 In 2006 Irish furniture maker organized an event call CREATE and invited John Makepeace, Andrew Varah and,and a light-hearted clip called 'Three wise men' in 2005: A light-hearted view of two different versions of history at the at the Irish CREATE event Q & A session in 2005 Inevitably Andy and I followed different paths, but nothing can take away our early formative and fun years. Varah RIP.
- Dovetail - the holy grail
September 2011 In the world of woodworking there is nothing more striking than a dovetail joint and what it represents historically. Many still argue it is the strongest joint and when it come to cutting dovetails they have to be cut almost according to the gospel. A joint devised by Jeremy Broun combining a lap dovetail with a through dovetail The novel dovetail joint echoes the carcass pinning on the trinket box side But I find it a little irksome when I see immaculate cabinetry at exhibitions and when I open the drawer I see the shoulder line left on. No, no, no. If you are going to stick to tradition stick to tradition! I also observe inconsistency as the shoulder line should never be left on the carcase dovetail! So, who is the gospel according to? Well if we take the 50's and 60's as the zenith of handmade cabinetry, before machine woodworking got into gear, a certain Mr Charles Hayward was famous for a series of definitive books on practical woodworking and he was pretty well acknowledged as the authority. In fact nobody since (including myself) has gone into the craft in anywhere near the depth of his books. He states clearly that the shoulder line should be removed and this teaching at the same time was coming out of the leading colleges - Shoreditch and Loughborough. A light shoulder is first scribed and then deepened where the tail and pin portions are removed. the line there serves as a location for a chisel and saw. Although many antiques display crude shoulder lines left on which on close inspection by the torn grain imply a marking gauge was used (rather than a try square and marking knife), it is no guide to proper practice or the best tradition. Many antiques were made by semi skilled craftsman and are so badly designed and made would be thrown out of an exhibition of contemporary furniture today. Here endeth the lesson! If you are going to be a stickler for tradition, do it properly!
- Death of a magazine
November 2024 The loss of The Woodworker magazine brand after 123 years is a sad day for many of us. I wrote my first article for the Woodworker magazine in 1972 . Throughout my early teaching career in the mid 60s the schools would usually have copies of The Woodworker annuals in hardback edition. Fast forward to today I wonder how many schools even teach woodwork in the UK. It is particularly devastating for the editor Tegan Foley who has put her heart and soul into trying to rescue the magazine and its merger with Good Woodworking in 2018. Before I look at the history of the leading woodwork magazine brand since 190, its demise and where woodworking finds itself today, I wish to pay tribute to the editor: A personal tribute to the editor I met Tegan for the first time at the Axminster Tool Centre in Nuneaton to discuss an exhibition there for The Alan Peters Award in 2021 (which she has enthusiastically supported). She talked about a planned trip to Sweden to visit Tormek and learn all about surface grinders to later write an article. I imagine Tegan learned much about woodworking on the job but her professionalism as an editor has been outstanding and I would go as far as to say she has been the best editor I have worked with over the years and I have worked with most of them since the 1980s. Long gone were the days when editors would take the time to allow the writer to check proofs for articles, but Tegan always sent me one to check and approve. The presentation has always been really good transforming my text and images by the talented designer Nik Harber into something that made the magazine ‘look pretty’. I would say it has looked pretty good on Tegan’s watch and interestingly the recently merged magazine was a game changer. She says ‘this was to take the best elements of both and produce a new and improved “super” magazine’. While Good Working tended to appeal to a younger audience, The Woodworker was generally the older demographic, so the two complemented each other well. Working to a very tight budget and needing to find new companies for vital advertising revenue at a time when magazines were in the doldrums and being increasingly replaced by online content , I believe Tegan did her very best to appeal to the interests of a wide range of woodworkers retaining the basic elements of a good read. I looked at how The Woodworker had evolved from my own collection of magazines and annuals. Interestingly in a 1940 edition there is an advert titled “ Woodwork in War Time” and advice on what books you need to make things ‘in the present difficult circumstances’. We must not forget that the Covid pandemic made things much harder as budgets were cut and Tegan had to rely on more archive content from Good Woodworking magazine. ‘No one wanted the magazine to cease and thankfully we were able to navigate this difficult time’. The making of a brand Browsing through my own collection of Woodworker magazines and annuals I picked a few at random to see how the magazine has changed. February 1932 - Firstly, the magazine survived two world wars. The price is sixpence. It smells of old paper and ink but still holds together well, it is thin at about 60 pages and has 12 pages of adverts, a sale & exchange page and the rest of the content include a series called ‘Chips from the chisel’, and instructions, plans for useful projects, has an interesting page called ‘How I do it’ by readers and several pages devoted to ‘The Question Box (replies to readers queries). For many decades the magazine was black and white with a sepia cover Dipping then into the February 1940 issue, it is more or less the same but with more projects and strikingly improved illustrations; all in black & white and the emergence of photographs (in the April issue) and here enters the legendary Charles Hayward ( editor and illustrator from 1939 to 1967) and the visual transformation of the magazine . There is an exploded view line drawing of a plywood lantern that would look modern today and in this issue also a crossword puzzle! Charles Hayward ‘Charles H. Hayward (1898-1998) was the most important workshop writer and editor of the 20th century. Unlike any person before (and perhaps after) him, Hayward was a trained cabinetmaker and extraordinary illustrator, not to mention an excellent designer, writer, editor and photographer’. He also wrote a series of definitive woodworking books that still stand today including the famous Woodworkers’ Pocket Book. At the helm of the Woodworker he ‘tailored the magazine to match the specific tastes and interests of their readers; exclusive interviews, behind-the-scenes looks, and content that aligned with readers’ lifestyles and aspirations. This curated approach makes the magazine feel like it was made just for them, something that’s hard to achieve with broad digital communications’. Fast forward to 1956 and the January edition is fractionally thicker at 66 pages, strangely just one page of advertising, lots of project pages, mostly quite advanced woodworking , I would say and more of a feeling of design with the splayed legged style on the 1950s (now in vogue amongst today’s makers. Some woodcarving, history of 18th century furniture, and more or less the same elements (Question Box etc) of the early magazines. S H Glennister was a familiar mid-century writer/author having trained at Shoreditch College and holding the FCollH qualification. (After I trained at Shoreditch I gained the updated MCCED qualification). Moving swiftly to the present era (I am fast exceeding the allocated space for this article) the magazines of the 1960s were generally more customised content with profiles of makers, features such as ‘Offcuts’, ‘Reviews and events’ and plenty of adverts, all in black and white and the health check of any magazine ‘ the ‘Letters’ page. The 1980s probably was the golden era with interest in British furniture design at a zenith and features on the design maker revolution. Colour pages began to appear around 1987. Editors included Peter Collinette, Aidan Walker and in the 1990s Nick Gibbs. May 1984 magazine featuring my Caterpillar rocking chair Taking us to the present day the magazine looks great (pic 11), if a little lacking in fresh enticing projects to make! So what happened? Let’s first summarise the value (importance) of a magazine: For the cost of a pint The monthly outlay for magazine subscription is considerably less than a person’s average consumption of beer. It is something to look forward to in the post, to feel and dip into at leisure. As Andy Lawton (co-judge of the Alan Peters Award says ‘Wood is a tangible and tactile material and so is a printed magazine. Viewing information electronically is all very well but a physical magazine is hard to beat and for me somehow more 'real' than something online. I have an archive of The Woodworker going back to the late nineteen eighties: an easily accessible invaluable resource’. In my mind the greatest strength or raisin d’etre of a technical magazine apart from it being a one stop shop package is its curated content, previously mentioned: Curated content Magazine editors may not be woodworking experts but they rely on respected technical and creative input and are in overall control of the magazine content and messages it conveys. In old money this means censorship, especially about what is actually truth, something that online content does not provide. Already sophisticated You Tubers will convince thousands that end grain does not require re-inforcement for a strong bond but can rely just on glue (not endorsed by the likes of Titebond) . Misinformation and mistruth will increasingly make woodworking discrimination more difficult for the beginner. The new online influencers YouTube has taken over as the major teacher of woodwork. The new gurus command massive audiences (sometimes 150,000 views on a new video in a day) increasingly using clickbait titles to maximise their online income. Pushing his ‘personal limits and providing entertainment’ is what a current young guru claims as his YouTube channel shows imagery of a chisel flying through the air. Another oldie major UK influencer wrote on his website in 2016 ‘ I can’t recommend any of the magazines to learn from because generally they are advertisement companies…. we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that all they do is about making money…mostly they are always to promote machine woodworking and use real woodworking as a bolt on’. Well apart from the hypocrisy about profit motive and falsehood that magazine content creators have the same motivation as publishers , the inaccuracy of these opinions are echo chambered on digital forums today . But as I hope I have demonstrated the magazines have relied on advertising from the start and it is no greater today. When the lights go outage Putting all your eggs in one basket we should know is risky. A recent global internet outage not to mention AI and CGI is a warning of the future. Brilliant though much of the online content is, especially on Instagram, woodworking is not generally a scroll or delete activity but requires patience and and focus. Farewell I thought I would be the last person to defend tradition as for most of my furniture making career as a designer I challenged it, although history and heritage is important ‘tradition needs to move on’ as Alan Peters once said to me. Let’s hope the Woodworker makes a comeback! About the writer Jeremy Broun originally trained as a Handicraft teacher at Shoreditch College gaining a distinction. He also trained as an illustrator and gained the MCCEd (the successor to the FCollH which was an entry into craft journalism) and he won the national prize for highest marks in the written examinations in 1971. He has been a pioneer designer maker and amongst many awards he was voted professional Woodworker of the Year 2005 by The Woodworker magazine. Although officially retired now, he was invited to become a freelance inspector for The British Accreditation Council in 2009 and currently organizes The Alan Peters Furniture Award. He is a guitarist and street performer in his home city of Bath.
- Come back when you're famous
October 2011 I think it was the year of 1973 and I was working in a converted cattleshed workshop on the outskirts of Bath. The rent was £5 per week. I called myself 'The Bath Carpenter' and took on a variety of work ranging from trimming the bottom of doors (fitted carpets had made their debut then), to building fitted wardrobes and kitchens which paid the way for me to speculate on my individualistic contemporary furniture designs. I used an anonymous title as I felt good design should sell on its own merits rather than rely on a name, a rather naive view. The converted cattleshed workshop in Milton Avenue, Bath (1973) There were no outlets for my furniture. It was too modern. I did manage to persuade the owner of a local Persian Carpet shop to put one of my rocking chairs in front of one of his expensive carpets in the window and he took just ten percent. There were two craft galleries in Bath at the time; Coexistence and Centaur Designs. I remember the tall female owner of Coexistence looking down on me and asking whether I had been to the Royal College of Art. I had more breeding in my little toe! I politely withdrew from her exclusive gallery and walked across the road to Centaur Designs with my portfolio. I showed a picture of my rocking chair and said it had been selected for a major London exhibition called "Wood". In his put down I recall the proprietor saying 'Let's wait and see what happens from the London exhibition' which in effect was code for 'come back when you are famous'. An early rocking chair in pine which sold in 1974 for £40 for sale in 2023 for £4,950 A few years later a gallery owner in the north of England telephoned me invited me to show my work at an exhibition. I asked her didn't she want to see my portfolio. 'No she said' reassuringly 'That's not necessary, we know your work'. Did they?!
- School masterclass
December 2012 One of my missions throughout my woodworking career has been to encourage as much as I can young people to use their hands and minds at school. I originally trained and taught as a Handicrafts teacher in London. Over my career I have seen the demise of the practical arts in schools yet the creative practical arts generally are a huge national asset. Early in 2010 I received an invitation to teach a Saturday masterclass at Eggars comprehensive school in Hampshire. It was a very successful day involving a team effort of staff at the school with yours truly heading the project I had devised. The mostly 15 year old boys and girls took home to mum a useful artefect which embodied equally useful woodworking and life skills. Jeremy Broun teaches a woodworking masterclass at a Hampshire comprehensive school It is vital young people develop their potential fully through using the incredible gift of hands irrespective of whether they get a job as a carpenter or brain surgeon. That is not the point. 'Education through the use of materials' is what a few of us called it in the 1960's and served as a vehicle for fostering self determination, acountability, stamina, visualisation, interpreting abstract ideas into three dimensional objects, numeracy skills, not to mention motor skills involving the senses of touch, sight, and sound, muscle memory. Despite throwing 'craft' out of the curriculum the most enlightened teachers in the 1960's were doing all of this in an integrated way, (teaching design as part of making) but the now established Design Technology curriculum, passes over many of the essential 'making' skills, not least through a basic misunderstanding that the prime purpose of teaching eg. woodwork at school is to train carpenters. That is the role of post school specialist education. With the increasing uncertainty of what jobs we are training young people for (and questioning whether university should be the default route) there is ever more need to teach them resourcefulness through making things and designing what they make. Anybody daring to claim it is too expensive to provide practical education, go raid a skip and use some valuable secondhand wood that is thrown out daily! I am course honoured (in 2010) that my skills have not been dumped on a skip and that a school like this invites someone like me to pass on my skills and experience. There are plenty of exclusive and very expensive masterclasses for older people, many switching careers from 'The City' and encouraged to use equally expensive tools but our obligation is to future generations and give all young people an equal opportunity to develop through their hands. The last time I worked with young people (before the Eggars masterclass) was at my local technical college teaching acoustic guitar making to a group of errant 16 - 19 year olds, some in trouble with the Police and all lacking in any numeracy or literacy paper qualifications from their secondary schooling. It wasn't easy and only three survived out of a group of six but they made their guitars and will probably always look back on this achievement with pride. A simple leaning bookstand exploiting a dovetail designed by Jeremy Broun and presented to 13 year olds in 1963 made by 15 year olds at a Hampshire comprehensive School in 2010. Teaching acoustic guitar making on an 'Education to Employment' course in 2005
- Short grain
October 2024 Its been a while since I posted and probably no bad thing as there is so much opinion out there bombarding our senses daily. But I hope when I do write a blog I have something worthwhile to say, even if only a few people read it in this new wold of online woodworking gurus! Do people still read blogs? An issue that cropped up during my judging of The Alan Peters Furniture Award this year (2024) and again in a video on Instagram is short grain and its inherent structural weakness. This diagagram demonstrates the X Y rule I taught back in my esarly days of school teaching. It is a very simple rule; X should be longer than Y in a construction. Of course this was back in the last century when woodwork was taught in school. Fast forward to today and YouTube and Instagram is where most people learn woodwork. Certainly there are major iunfluencers in the USA and UK and a new mindset of cancelling history and re-inventing the wheel as books and magazines are no longer the stalwart of curated information. But Nature does not lie and wood has no interest in history or fashion but has its own truth. The first instance that came to my notice (and the other judges of the Alan Peters Furniture Award) was a striking looking immaculately veneered table. It had cantilevered legs as in the schematic cross-section diagam below: The leg acts as a lever and where it joins the top you can immediately see the short grain and where the main stress point is. Strong woodworking joints rely on long overlapping fibres. So these fibres are further weakened by the large wooden dowels that are presumably used to re-inforce the joint! It reminds me of the antique chairs I used to repair in my early days as a furniture maker helping pay the workshop rent. The mortice and tenons had long since loosened by the detereorated fish glue and subsequent attempts to repair the chairs would be to insert steel screws or wooden dowels. This involved drilling through the joint weakening the fibres and further weakening the chair. Below is a schematic sectional diagram of a beautifully crafted small table leg joint, video filmed on Instagram with mouth watering closeups of the joint being squeezed together and the dowel plug shaved flush with a chisel. So one presumes a steel screw has been inserted to strengthen the joint. Now this diagram is a cross section through the middle of the joint, whereas the table top female joint receives much of the short-grained cantilevered leg but the effect is the same. The strength of the joint is always at the weakest part. I was not going to mention names but I did in fact engage in a friendly but critical conversation with the maker a rising star - Tom Addison. And of course he defended what he described to me as a 'controversial' joint by saying it had been thoroughly tested by him and his wife sitting on it. Reminds me of my radical cantilevered rocking chair design! Anyone following my own furniture making career would know I was the first to challenge tradition and was quite a rebel, paying the price sometimes when I broke the rules and did not respect that timber moves. I am passionate about innovation but in the back of my mind I always ask - how will this piece of furniture be abused as well as used and will such a joint withstand a really sudden jolt or somebody standing on the table to change a lightbulb. What came out of this risky taboo breaking convention of oine furniture maker not challenging another was a friendly off-topic exchange as I looked at Tom's website and discovered he was 2014 Fell running British champion so I spilled the beans on his Instagram feed that in my youth I won my school record for 440 yards at 51.3 seconds, clipping .6 of a second off the then Women's world record. But it was a meaningless story as I was nowhere near British male champion standard! I gained insight into the struggles of today's young makers, many ofg whom have young families to support,a stark choice I had to make as a young man that I could not earn enough as a designer maker to support a wife and kids. Wood is a curious animal, sometimes we can get away with pushing the boundaries and sometimes with modern adhesives but the fundamental fibrous character of wood hasn't changed. If my half century of experience is worth a dime to anyone perhaps my suggestion would be don't re-inforce the joint, you are cutting into/severing essential fibres that give the joint strength. Using steel re-inforcing rods with epoxy glue should be controversial in that some very famous and very expensive chairs have featured this but what happens over time? Wood and metal have a different co-efficient of expansion. I am not going to mention this particular name but I will pass on what Alan Peters once said to me 'You would do well to visit a museum and see how wood behaves over time'. Advice from those who came before.
- My beautiful hands
September 2011 A few days ago I did a stupid thing and whilst using a portable metal grinder the molegrips slackened, the metal moved and the rotating cutter went quick walkabouts over my hand ripping through a layer of flesh around the base of my thumb. Fortunately no nerves or tendons were severed as this is my right hand used for guitar playing and my thumb is very important. The last time I damaged a hand was also whilst working on a car project in 1989 and I drilled through the bodywork with a half inch drillbit, forgetting I was supporting the material with my fingers the other side. In fact it was the same thumb! Complete stupidity and a reminder how valuable my hands are. I often lie awake at night silhouetting my hands against the moon shining through a skylight above my bed. I still have beautiful hands, strong working man's hands but also well proportioned hands with guitar player's fingers. I don't think its vanity but a sheer appreciation of the wonder of how the hands interpret what the brain commands. I exercise my hands whilst doing my full moon ritual, making the fingers move in every possible way. Learning guitar chords (or any instrument probably) is an excellent workout for hand and brain. Some guitar chord shapes take tens of hours to master from the initial careful placing of each finger on each string, often awkward to hold the position, then months later the chord shape is executed at speed. I'm lucky, although I used to be able to site read, I play totally by ear and once the muscle memory kicks in the chord sequences are automatic and I can then concentrate on expression. I am amazed at how many jazz players read off the manuscript. I thought jazz was supposed to be free and improvised. I am an improvisor and my wonderful hands are the greatest gift I could ever ask for, linked to a brain that fires on four cylinders most of the time. I am very fortunate, at this moment in time I have no aches and pains in my limbs and in particular my hands and it is surprising I have not worn my hands out. I have made a living from my hands, renovated three houses and made countless pieces of furniture. On my rocking chairs alone I have drilled nearly forty thousand holes through which eight miles of sailing cord has passed to create the upholstery (although many of the chairs were woven by others) but I drilled every hole. Over five decades of using my hands since building my first guitar at school, I reckon this represents between 30,000 and 50,000 hours of creative hand work and still they are almost as agile as when I was 17 years old. This takes into account a fair percentage of my life immobilised by depression. Perhaps the price I pay for such wonderful hands.