The Village Carpenter

Walter Rose

Description

First published in 1937, this woodworking classic reveals a fascinating look into the social structure of a 19th-century English town and a carpenter's place in it. Encapsulating a time prior to power tools and mass production, when woodworkers made virtually everything, Walter Rose writes eloquently on a number of topics, including running a country business; the carpenter's shop; working on a farm, new home, and windmill; undertaking; and furniture repairs. Manifesting the importance of skill and the attitudes of the craftsman to his tools and work, this book will be of great interest to any carpenter or woodworker with an appreciation for the history of their craft.

Informations

• Publié par: Linden Publishing
• Date de parution: 17 juillet 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781610351881
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

The Village Carpenter
by
Walter Rose
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by an information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.
Originally published in 1937 by Cambridge University Press
Cover art: The Village Carpenter by Edward Potthast
Used with permission
In memory of S. Linden Bookseller
33 Craven St, Strand, London
ISBN: 978-1-61035-051-8
Printed in USA
135798642
Linden Publishing titles may be purchased in quantity at special discounts for educational, business, or promotional use. To inquire about discount pricing, please refer to the contact information below.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file.
Linden Publishing, Inc.
2006 S. Mary
Fresno, CA 93721
www.lindenpub.com
To
ALL LOVERS OF WOODCRAFT THIS LITTLE WORK IS DEDICATED
CONTENTS
Introduction
Author’s Preface
Chapter I Early Associations
II The Old Country Business
III Timber
IV The Carpenter’s Shop
V Tools
VI Work on the Farm
VII Wooden Pumps
VIII Roofs
IX Work on the New House
X Work at Water-mills
XI Windmill Repairs
XII Undertaking
XIII Furniture Repairs
XIV The Outlook
Glossary and Index
ILLUSTRATIONS
PHOTOGRAPHS
Sawn logs drying under hazel bushes
The ring-dog in use
"Seated on the shaving-horse, fitting the rounds for the taper holes of a ladder pole"
"I see grandfather’s venerable form"
"Large butts waiting their turn to go on the saw-pit"
An old saw-pit
The four-wheeled timber wagon
The shaving-horse
Hand morticing
The sticking board in use
Old moulding planes
"With each separate act the article is evolving"
An old English mole trap
Centre-bit, shell-bits, spiral-bit
Ancient and modern brace and bit
The ornamental jowl of a hand-made field gate
"The carpentry of the open countryside ought not to savour too much of the joiner’s bench"
"The making of a gate was considered a day’s work for a qualified carpenter"
Oak bridle-way gate
Bottom gate hook and thimble, showing wings and spike
"I would fain doff my hat before such a gate"
Timber carriage. "A huge two-wheeled construction with a pole and roller arrangement that lifted the logs and carried them"
The crown wheel of a water-mill
Two views of a spur wheel and its wooden cogs
"White clinging dust was everywhere"
Inside the tower-mill at Lacey Green, showing the wooden spur wheel in position
The post and beams of the post-mill at Brill
The old post-mill at Brill
In the top storey of a wind-mill, showing the large horizontal axle to which the sails outside are fixed
"The stocks were sawn at our pit to fit the large iron cross-eyes"
The tower-mill at Lacey Green
All photographs except that facing page 22 were taken with a Leica camera by M. WIEDLING.
FIGURES IN THE TEXT
Uncle John’s "forcycle"
The barking iron
Wooden cow-stalls
Old English rat trap
The hand-made field gate
Boring the wooden pump
Wooden pump bucket
Wooden pump in position
Framed principal or roof truss
Wooden mill cogs
The four degrees of reefing the mill sails
INTRODUCTION
There is for half the world a deep-rooted association of domestic modesty, frugality, and wholesomeness about a carpenter’s shop. We may smile to ourselves to observe the innocence which made a medieval painter portray the holy land as very like his own; but do not we also construct a private image of the home of Joseph and Mary out of free memories of our own homes and what we remember of some village carpenter’s shop? And so, by an inverse association, the carpenter’s shop has come by its familiar gentle repute: carpentry seems quite at home in the best known domestic story in the world, and it cannot help gathering a little saintliness by it: we are more christian than we admit.
Not that carpentry itself has nothing to contribute. It would have been harder to domesticate bellows and forge and anvil, had Christ been born a blacksmith. But he was not, and so, whether by chance or a natural orientation of spirit, what was fact was also fitting, a natural-born allegory.
For who has not some pleasant memory of a carpenter: his clean-smelling work, the musical sounds of his tools, his slow, kind, but masterly hands? As Mr Walter Rose points out in this intimate book, carpentry has a very near connection with home life; cupboard and shelf, wainscot and window, table and footstool, are all either creation or patients (or both) of the village carpenter.
When the sweep came, or the plumber, or painter we kept out of the way they made the house unhomely and we took our things out of the reach of their grime. But a child can watch a carpenter at work without risk of soiling; sawdust is cleaner than snow and not unlike it, and the long curling crinkled shavings, that come off sweetly (as clean as a whistle) are lovelier than any manufactured fabric. Wood is tender stuff, too; you must not bang it about as you must bang iron about, and, handling it gently, carpenters as a race are gentle. They seldom shout; they never leave their tools about.
Mr Rose’s book, as it goes on, shows a great deal of the carpenter’s social character. When he says that a man would look at the ends of the chisel handles (the part you hit) to see what sort of a workman owned them, he is giving not a custom of the trade so much as an insight into a carpenter’s character. "‘The difference between you and me is that I happen to be the one who will have to use this tool’, was my remark" (he writes) "to a salesman who extolled the merits of the saws on the counter to avoid taking the one that I wanted from the window. The saw, eventually purchased, was of marvellous quality, a delight to use. But I took it to work on a new house, it was borrowed by the labourers for cutting firewood, and on my return I found it in my basket broken in two." This simple story is quoted from Mr Rose’s chapter on tools ( p. 59 ). If it was the only speech at the only entrance of an actor in a play, it would (it seems to me) convey the whole character of a carpenter. The tragedy, oddly enough, seems to happen not to Mr Rose, but to the saw. That the saw is broken is the accepted source of emotion; a regretful grief, and not a righteous anger, is the theme. It may be objected that to make much of so slight and casual a quotation is ridiculous. But only think of the difference had this story been told, of one of his tools, by a morose plumber or an irascible blacksmith. The world would have heard something, then, of the character and antecedents of the labourers! In words, too, not so mild as old Enoch’s notable "Blam-me".
Carpenters are not the only craftsmen it may be true of a motor mechanic that the last wipe-over with a greasy rag is half a caress for a job done to an inward satisfaction but if anyone wants a type of what is best in all craftsmen, ten to one he will choose a carpenter. Have you seen him run his plane first along the edge of the plank, then tilt the plank to test its straightness with the eye, and then (for no purpose but unexpressive affection, that I can see) run the soft pad of his hand down its length, approving its smooth warmth? This is not done to verify that it will function, it is an excess of mild pleasure, it is done because the senses are delighted with wood well worked.
No gaslight ever lit his shop;
He had no wheels to start and stop;
No hot, metallic engines there
Disturbed the shaving-scented air;
His hands were engines, and his eye
His gauge to measure beauty by …
How gently time went by for him
Up in that workshop! which grew dim
At sunset time: and then he’d lay
His chisels down, and sweep away
The chips and shavings of the day;
But left upon the bench no less
Than that day’s gain in comeliness;
Then shut the door, and slowly went
Under the rose to bed, content.
A tool working well rings a song to a carpenter, and one ill-sharped or badly set, jibbing at its work and forcing the delicate fibres, gives him pain as discord hurts a musician.
Psychologists say that of all occupations carpentry is the most perfectly balanced between the aesthetic, mental, and physical faculties. How this applies to-day when much of the work that was once done laboriously by hand is done to standard by machines, I do not know; but even the machine-minders in a woodworking shop show susceptibilities about the products of their work that metal-workers seem to lack, and one believes there may be some truth in the virtue of material. Ruskin gave general advice to employ as little fire as possible, and to give preference to methods which do not need to employ it. Wood is alive (Mr Rose is keenly aware of this), and iron is dead; a carpenter who takes no notice of the run of the grain or of the individual qualities of a piece of wood is only a botcher, and I suspect that something of the prejudice against plywood which many older carpenters express, is due to the way that plywood can be treated wholesale, so much stuff to fill openings with. It baulks carpenters of half their acc