A change in the way timber was sold accompanied the furniture boom. It was marketed while still in the woods as standing trees. A plentiful record of these sales survives as advertisements in newspapers, and as printed sale notices. They announce the sale of such items as “eight thousand scragging faggots”4 and “capital butts,” which could sound indecent in any other context. Auctions were held at inns close to the woods up for sale, and the lots were “shown” in situ by estate employees to prospective buyers.
The greater part of Lambridge Wood was now owned by the Misses Stapleton of Greys Court, who lived quietly together in the big house for decades. The tithe assessment of 1842 records them as possessing 159 acres of beech woods. Their woodland managers included several generations of the West family, who held the tenancy of Brickfield Farm near the house, and later lived in the old cottage closest to our wood. An auction in 1848, addressed to “timber merchants, wheelwrights, and others,” was shared by the “Ladies of Greys Court” and Lord Camoys of the Stonor estate.5 It was held by James Champion & Son at the Bull Inn, Nettlebed, on Tuesday, 15 February, at “Two o’clock, at which time precisely a Hot Dinner will be provided, at 1s 6d each to be returned to purchasers.” This deceptive largesse was presumably a device to deter time-wasters in search of a free lunch. The Greys Court part of the sale comprised “380 loads of BEECH and ASH averaging about 15 feet in a stick [trunk].” As a final inducement there were “good roads and no turnpike to the Wharfs at Henley” for those who wished to export their purchases up- or downriver.
Champions had sold two hundred loads from Lambridge Wood nine years earlier at the Catherine Wheel in Henley, so our woods were being regularly worked. Dozens of similar sales throughout the Chiltern Hills and adjacent parts of Oxfordshire ensured regular management of the estates for a steady return in profits. A poster of another auctioneer, Jonas Paxton, shows the Earl of Macclesfield in 1864 selling 480 loads of “capital beech” from his ancient property at Shirburn a few miles along the Chiltern scarp from Nettlebed. Once again, the endurance of an ancient landscape that dated from Saxon times proved its worth to its stewards a thousand years later.
Poster for timber sale, 1864.
Bodgers and Turners
In Grim’s Dyke Wood I nearly fall into a bramble-filled pit on the edge of one of the smaller clearings. Armed with strong gardening gloves, I pull out the pesky, thorny interlopers by the roots to discover what they were concealing. Brambles find ways of swiping your exposed bits when you least expect it, and a bloody brow is the result of uncovering this piece of archaeology. It is a price worth paying. The pit had clearly been excavated, as it is encircled by a bank of clay-with-flints—the material dug from the hole. It is about the size of a grave that might have accommodated a particularly large cow; it is a well-preserved sawpit, a legacy of the way trees were formerly processed right here on the ground.6 After the beeches had been purchased they were felled, and planked by hand. A pit had to be dug to allow a gigantic two-man saw free rein. In 1745 the botanist Peter Kalm described this method of processing “green” wood by creating a pit “a fathom deep,” “on each side lined with boards so that earth does not fall down into it.” The same practices continued throughout the nineteenth century, and into the twentieth. I believe mine must be one of the very last examples, because it is still in fine condition and clearly defined. I have seen old sawpits elsewhere in Lambridge Wood which are partly filled in and smudged out after a hundred years of erosion.
The two-man crosscut saw was a fearsome instrument, longer than the average human and with teeth that would not disgrace a great white shark. Examples are preserved in the Museum of Rural Life at the University of Reading, where the “Do Not Touch” sign must be one of the most superfluous notices in museology. To process a log into boards, the trunk was placed lengthwise along the pit, and one sawyer was straddled above while the other one was downstairs. He was the one who got all the sawdust in his eyes as the saw went back and forth, as well as being imprisoned in a small space. He was known as the “underdog”—the man aloft in the open air being, naturally, the “top dog.” So now you know.
The first stages of chair manufacture were carried out in the woods, but have not left such obvious pitfalls. Legs and stretchers were turned on lathes set up under the trees by artisans who came to be known as “bodgers.” “Green” beech was again employed for the purpose, and workers made temporary camps in the glades of trees in which they had an interest. The simple shelters they constructed for themselves were known as “hovels,” and they often camped out in them. There were a few skilled craftsmen who could make a whole chair, but most bodgers were piece-workers who turned out thousands of legs to order. Beech was first roughly cut into lengths appropriate for chair legs (“billets”) before being turned.
In the early 1930s Cecil Roberts visited “the last of the chair makers,” a little old man over eighty with a “bright eye and an impish face,” and described the “crazy old apparatus he called a lathe”: “A sapling…was bent down, and a cord from this passed around the future chair leg, and was connected to a strip of wood that acted as a treadle. On pressing the treadle down the springy sapling made the cord taut and revolved the chair leg. The turning was done on the down stroke, which revolved the leg towards the worker. Despite the jim-crack nature of these pole lathes, as they were called, a skilled worker could turn out four dozen legs an hour.”7 The bodgers used the young saplings in the wood to power the processing of the more mature neighbouring trees; no doubt they even used the shavings to boil their billycans. Could a more ecologically sensible industry be devised? The legs were not just tapered spindles, either, but could be considered shapely, often having a raised ring around them purely for ornament.
The “top dog” above a sawpit at a Herefordshire sawmill in the 1930s.
“Bodgers,” c. 1930: one holds a beetle and wedge, one is using a draw shave, and the third holds a roughly shaped leg. The hut contains a pole lathe.
When they had finished their work the bodgers would take off to an ale-house to spend too much money on beer. The Crooked Billet at Stoke Row was still such an establishment when I first ventured into the Chiltern Hills more than thirty years ago. Tucked away down a side road off a side road, only ale could be purchased, and the barrels sat in full view on cradles in the back room. The bungs were turned beech wood. Oak beams, low ceilings and wide fireplaces attested to the age of the place, which had once been run by a bodger called Bill Saunders. A low murmur of voices provided the only musical accompaniment. Nowadays it is a gastropub.
I am puzzled why the word “bodge” has come to describe slipshod work. The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that it transmuted from “botch,” but this still does not explain why skilled woodworkers acquired such a label. I once had a beechwood chair that fell uncompromisingly into its component parts, but that was a new one, and I have several old chairs that are as reliable now as when they were made. Maybe the bottoms of some of those 19,200 Methodists were let down. The temptation is to romanticise this rural craft, but there is plenty of evidence that it was poorly paid and provided a hard life. Even at the end of the bodging era between the two World Wars the rates were exploitative: a gross of forefeet (144 front legs) and nine dozen stretchers, six shillings (thirty pence today).8 Bodgers like Bill Saunders did two jobs: running the pub by night, and working on billets delivered to his shed by day. Some of his colleagues were on the wrong side of the law, and the woods, as always, provided cover. Others fell into a poverty trap by taking out advances (with interest) against their wages from unscrupulous shopkeepers that they were never able to pay off completely. Medieval Greys Court was probably no harsher.9 In Buckinghamshire, lacemaking by the women of the household supplemented the family income—a cottage industry so exacting that their eyesight was often compromised. In 1817 Mary Shelley lived with her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, not far away along the Chiltern Hills: “Marlow was inhabited (I hope it is altered now) by a very poo
r population. The women are lacemakers, and lose their health by sedentary labour, for which they were very ill paid.” It is indeed altered now: the cottages once occupied by lacemakers are owned by retired army officers and City traders.
Chair legs and stretchers, produced by bodgers c. 1930, stacked to dry in the woods.
Alistair Phillips is a wood turner with a modern lathe. He grew up on the Warburg Reserve at the end of Bix Bottom where his father Nigel was warden, so the Chiltern woods have always been his home. He now lives in the house once occupied by Vera Paul, who devoted her life to ghost orchids and to setting up nature reserves where animals and plants might enjoy a measure of protection. In his workshop Alistair is going to turn a few rounds of cherry wood left from our felling into bowls. The wood is still wet, so cracks could present a problem as it dries.
First, a central strip of the heartwood has to be cut out, as that is where the desiccation cracks generate: it is flanked by a pair of curved planks, in each of which hides a bowl. The two potential bowls in the log nestle side by side like twins in a womb. The bottom of the bowl faces outwards—on a curved surface this maximises the size of the finished article. Like Martin Drew, Alistair is a man of few words and steady concentration. For each plank, a pair of dividers marks out the diameter of the bowl that might be expected. Then, using a bandsaw, a “blank” with a circular outline is cut out, together with a hole in the centre that allows the bowl to be attached to the chuck of the lathe. At this stage, all the character seems to have disappeared from the wood; it is just an attached block. When the lathe begins to spin fast, water is thrown out in some quantity—we are sprayed with it. The centrifugal force expels it from the vessels of the wood, something that would have happened more gently if it had been allowed to season slowly. Alistair first cuts off the irregularities from the block with his chisel so that it will spin effortlessly. Then he gouges with great assurance, and curls and chips of wood are thrown out like bubbly lava from a spitting Catherine wheel. The turnings are crisps of thin wood, and smell vaguely sweet, the fruitwood smell. He works steadily from edge to centre, employing a concave-bladed wood chisel sharpened to great keenness. Each cut makes a sharp circle moving inwards, until a special twirl finishes off the middle. The base of the bowl is shaped to be very slightly concave, so it won’t wobble on any irregularity of the surface it rests upon. An elegant side profile has emerged at this stage. The block is then reversed and the inside of the bowl is brought to life in a similar way. Alistair measures his progress with calipers, because he cannot risk going through the base of the bowl. He wants the edge to be thin, as this ensures that there is less chance of a crack developing later. Already the grain of the wood has reasserted itself as lovely, arched lines give the new bowl character; the warm pink-brown colour so typical of cherry wood emerges. The work is quickly finished off. Alistair tells us that we have to leave the bowl in a cool, dry place to let it season.
I am looking at the bowl now, more than a year after Alistair’s turning. It did indeed warp as it dried out, in a pleasant way, so that its rim gently undulates; it has become something of a sculpture. The bowl was partly cut into the sapwood, which is now a deep golden colour, the heartwood darker, but still a pale warm brown on which the growth rings of the tree are painted like contours on a map. They are the contours of a life, an archive of the passing seasons, good and bad. Our cherry bowl is an encapsulation of the recent history of Grim’s Dyke Wood, written in the language of the living wood.
Saved by the Train
As the writer of The Strange Adventures of a Phaeton appreciated, great improvements in the roads made travelling across country a pleasure rather than a test of endurance, particularly when the chances of having fob watches stolen by Isaac Darkin and his colleagues had been reduced. At the end of the eighteenth and early in the nineteenth centuries Henley-on-Thames lay on a main route across the Chiltern Hills, and provided an ideal stopping-off point for travellers to Oxford, and beyond to Cheltenham and Birmingham. The smart and elegant town, now all dressed up in its Georgian finery, was generously endowed with coaching inns, which can easily be recognised today by their wide, low-arched entrances alongside the main premises. Stabling was provided at the rear. Some of these inns had been hostelries since medieval times, like the Red Lion at the end of the bridge over the Thames; rebuilding to accommodate the new travelling classes apparently ensured a profitable future.
These were great times for the Catherine Wheel and the Bull. Services along trunk routes ran through Henley several times a day. Jackson’s Oxford Journal for 14 February 1824 lists three morning services to London leaving from the Angel Inn, Oxford, including “The White Horse post coach every morning at 9 o’clock through Henley to the White Horse Fetter Lane, and Angel, St. Clements.” In 1838 coaches from Henley in a variety of livery sped in all directions: Defiance went to Abingdon and Oxford, a white coach pulled by grey horses; Tantivy to Birmingham, decked in red; Magnet to Cheltenham, in blue. The cobbles in the Market Place must have rattled to the stamping hooves of dozens of horses. This speeding traffic would have clattered past the wood down the chalky hill towards the Fair Mile carrying passengers from the Midlands. Business and pleasure accelerated to the hoofbeats of the coach and four, and letters, at least for the well-heeled, were delivered with astonishing rapidity.
For a while, business at the wharves continued much as always, but now facilitated by easier passage along the River Thames for the export of the wood and malted barley that had first made the town prosper. It was not to last. By 1840 the Great Western Railway had already reached Reading, and four years later Oxford station opened. Passengers and goods could be whisked by steam engine in an hour or two to destinations that would have taken much of the day to reach by coach. The coaching trade collapsed very quickly. Tantivy and Defiance were no longer required. The many coaching inns were soon short of custom. Even the Red Lion closed temporarily in 1849. Henley was no longer on the main road.
The wharves were equally in decline. Paintings of Webb’s Wharf in 1889 by Janet Cooper in the River and Rowing Museum show the trade in its last days, a slightly decrepit vessel unloading a log or two. Pigot and Company’s Royal National and Commercial Directory and Topography of 1844 lists the employment in the town. There are only two wharfingers itemised, Isaac Charles and Robert Webb, the same number as there are hatters. Compare this with six leather-workers, nine “corn and hop dealers and mealmen,” ten butchers, sixteen bakers and twenty “retailers of beer,” and it is clear that the town was transformed. The banker Grote left Badgemore House, no longer willing to endure the five-hour journey to London by coach. Only the woods were unaffected by these changes, because the furniture trade operated through a different network, in which the merchants of Henley were irrelevant. The town itself may well have seemed destined to become a backwater on a road to nowhere, a place of former glory, dreaming of past times by its splendid bridge under the beneficent gaze of the Chiltern beech woods.
Something had to be done. Townsfolk, tradesmen and gentry alike surmised that Henley’s attractive riverside setting was an asset that could still bring trade, but of a different kind. The Great Western Railway passed through the small town of Twyford on its way to Reading. A spur off the main line running along a pretty part of the Thames Valley for five miles from Twyford to Henley would bring back the visitors. Memories of the formerly fashionable Henley endured; a day trip might be just the excursion for newly affluent middle-class families. In 1857 the branch line that still runs today was opened to the sound of bells ringing in St. Mary’s church. Lord Camoys from Stonor House, as always representing the oldest family in the area, announced publicly the dawn of “a new era of prosperity” now that there was “a means of making numbers acquainted with the delightful scenery of the neighbourhood.” Here was an important change in perception: for centuries the woods and dry valleys were working landscapes (not least at Stonor), a source of billets and bavins, wheat and wool. The River Thames was
as much a waterway as it was a source of power and of fish for the table. Now a concept of landscape that had developed on estates like Fawley Court could be applied more generally. The whole countryside—that remarkable “living fossil”—was to be appreciated for its beauty and pleasing proportions, by a general public.
View of Henley Bridge, with the Angel Inn and St. Mary’s church, and a laden barge, 1834.
That is still how it appears today. For thirty years I was a commuter on the train that runs from Henley to Paddington station. This journey takes longer today than it did at the end of the nineteenth century. The return journey in the evening entails changing at Twyford to the branch line, and on to a small train with three carriages and a chatty clientele. Those who sternly stuck to The Times on the main line suddenly smile and remark on the weather, or grimace and talk about the state of the world. As the little train clatters along the Thames Valley through Wargrave and Shiplake, a huge sense of relief sweeps over me: I am leaving London for the “real” countryside. Meadows by the river still look lush. A few pleasure boats tootle downstream as we cross the Thames beyond Wargrave, where willows lean down over the water’s edge and a stately grey heron might be spotted standing motionless in the shallows. The wood-clad hills beyond rise sharply in the distance where the river broaches the Chilterns and a few white Georgian houses grace the prospect, as if placed specially to please a landscape artist. Willow and alder carrs, stables and post-and-rail fences protecting fine-looking horses, the occasional mock-Tudor residence—all together induce a species of apparently rustic contentment that make the difficulties of the working day recede into unimportance. Nothing jars; even the trading estate on the outskirts of Henley is discreetly screened. I have fully subscribed to the recreational view of landscape of the fleeing townie.
The Wood for the Trees Page 25
