I am starting to get my eye in on the differences between various kinds of moss as Peter pads on through the wood, peering at a likely tree or picking up flints. “They are all acid or neutral soil species,” he advises, which squares with my own geological thoughts. On the bank, the tempting dark-green “cushion” is a neat, close mat of erect, unbranched shoots, each bearing relatively long, slender, lance-like leaves arranged in rosettes—the bank haircap (Polytrichastrum formosum) is a variety that people instinctively stroke as they pass a mossy bank. A somewhat similar, but much paler moss on the same bank has wider leaves, with beautifully crimped edges (common smoothcap, Atrichum undulatum); its capsules have long beaks shaped like golf tees, and they rise like miniature charmed cobras from the green carpet below. A fork moss (Dicranum) grows with it, bearing leaves thin as hairs all curving in one direction. Different mosses evidently grow in separate places in the wood, some preferring well-drained ground, others happily colonising wood or stones. I remember the sawpit, surely the dampest spot in the wood, and when Peter climbs down into it, sure enough he discovers three kinds of moss we have not found before, including juicy silk moss (Plagiothecium succulentum) and thyme moss (Plagiomnium rostratum), the latter with large (well, for a moss) rounded leaves so thin as to be transparent. Near the dyke, on mossy stones (ones that have never been rolling, which as we know, gather no moss), another silk moss (Pseudotaxiphyllum elegans) sports curious feathery branchlets extending off its dangling shoots.
Mosses are easy to store for the collection; they are just dried for an hour or two and then popped into small packets. The number of species in the wood climbs to fifteen, but there is nothing rare enough to have escaped inclusion in Peter’s guide to local species1 until we find a small moss forming neat, almost spherical cushions on fallen branches of cherry and beech. We had earlier found a greener, straggly version of this moss growing on beech trunks, which Peter had identified as the wood bristle moss (Orthotrichium affine), another common species. This one is different, with compact little red-tipped capsules projecting from its surface like diminutive gooseberries. Our strongest hand lens reveals a few long hairs at the base of the little beak (seta) that tops the capsule. “Orthotrichium stramineum,” Peter announces with confidence. “Straw bristle moss. Not in my book. Nice find.” This small moss has only been found in this part of the world a couple of times before. It is common in Wales. Peter thinks it has found the air quality more to its liking recently, although it is only thirty miles or so from the middle of London to Lambridge Wood. The abolition of coal fires in the city in the last century may have begun to pay dividends at last in ways only a “moss man” would instantly appreciate. Grim’s Dyke Wood can smell the change in the air.
Beeches: The Last Stand
The wood is inured to change; it has been accommodating changes for a millennium. At the end of the nineteenth century it was still working for a living. The most striking change was in the sounds that reached it from the road to Bix. Since turnpikes were abolished in 1888, steam-driven traction engines had taken over much of the work of dragging logs and performing heavy duties on the farm. The puffing, wheezing and gasping of the engines and the crunch of their huge, metal-shod wheels on the newly surfaced road must have made the whole area feel more industrial than rural at busy times of the year.2 Granite road surfaces were added in 1909 to help cope with the wear. The hills were short of water, and traction engines needed a ready supply. Close to the old tollhouse at Bix at the top of the hill, a large, rectangular tanked pond still remains to show exactly where the engines slaked their thirst. For a decade or so in the twentieth century, horses, traction engines and early internal combustion engines co-existed in the Chiltern Hills, before modern petrol-driven tractors became universal. Every summer, steam-lovers still charge up their restored traction engines to congregate at Stoke Row near the Maharajah’s Well. They seem appropriately elephantine. All their bits and bobs of brass are polished to golden perfection, and all their paintwork glows. One engine is deployed to power a steam organ, to jolly effect. The work that goes on is for display purposes only. As for horses, they might still provide the least damaging way of dragging out a large, felled log from the wood, if only I could find the right kind of powerful beast to oblige.
Edwardian Henley was a town of elegant indulgence and leisured luxury, and if it was built on the back of an Empire that stretched its capitalistic tendrils over half the world, I do not suppose the average spectator at the Henley Regatta gave that a second thought. The house I live in was built on the junction between the reigns of Queen Victoria and Edward VII, and is a comfortable villa made for the middle classes. There are bell-pushes in most of the rooms to summon the maid. They no longer work. A gentleman who was “something in the City” might have commuted to and fro, leaving his family to enjoy a healthy country life, with weekends together punting and picnicking on the Thames. Mine is an appropriate house for a geologist, as it has limestone surrounds to the windows and panels of local flint for decoration.
View of the centre of Henley in the early 1900s, along the side of the new town hall towards Hart Street.
The original inhabitants would have been able to enjoy their privileged lifestyle for a dozen years before everything changed. The First World War awakened Britain from its Imperial complacency—and also transformed the use of the common beech tree. Huge numbers of wooden items were required as part of the war effort. The beech woods provided raw material for rifle butts. Field camps used tents, and tents demanded pegs—many millions of them. What else should provide this necessary, but unacknowledged, essential for life under canvas but the reliable beech tree? Tent pegs were supplied in several sizes. Making a good tent peg requires twenty-four different movements, which were carried out on a primitive wooden sawhorse. In its way, peg-making was as complicated as turning out a chair leg, although the cause was more urgent. Like many skilled artisans, “peggers” had their own special tools, with names that I find strangely poetic. Beech logs fresh from the woods were split into appropriate lengths using a huge, odd-shaped wooden mallet called a “molly” that engaged with an iron splitter known as a “flammer.”3 The workers sheltered under corrugated-iron sheets held up by four poles, with draped sacking to keep out the draughts. Wives and children helped with the stacking of the finished articles.
Many of those who might have been servants in more leisurely times were called to the trenches, or became workers for the war effort, women included (this may have been when my bell-pushes fell out of use). The “peggers” were not above exercising their industrial strength, even in wartime. The Reading Mercury of 22 April 1916 reported: “About 20 tent-peg makers employed by Mr. Douglas Vaderstegen…struck work at Stoke Row on Monday morning. It appears that the men, who were recently granted an increase in the price of large size pegs, asked for a rise of 3d per 100 on small pegs.” Whatever the success of their action, their pay was still niggardly. The demand for pegs continued during the Second World War—in 1942 the Stallwood family at Stoke Row received an order for no fewer than two million pegs. I recall the same kind of tent pegs being used on camping trips during my childhood, whacked in with a wooden mallet, but their production on an industrial scale has now ceased for several decades. It has pegged out.
The nearest sawmill to the wood was at Middle Assendon, along the valley to Stonor. To reach Froud’s, an Edwardian traveller from Henley would have turned right on to the smaller byway at the end of the Fair Mile, where a pub called the Traveller’s Rest Inn occupied the fork in the road. This hostelry had to be demolished in the mid-1930s when a second carriageway was added up the hill on the main road to Nettlebed and Oxford—which became one of the first “dual carriageway” highways in England. Froud’s sawmill in Assendon operated for a century from 1866. It was “green.” Waste wood products were burned to power its large stationary steam engine, with a forty-foot chimney in the yard surrounded by stacks of sawn timber seasoning slowly, and unsawn trunks piled up awa
iting attention. Martin Drew would have felt at home there. Froud’s was by no means a small operation. At its height between the wars it employed nearly a hundred men, who walked to work from all the surrounding villages along ancient rights of way—today’s public footpaths. The mill was known for making the wooden backs of brushes. It had a national reputation among brewers for its turned shives and spiles (two more wonderful words!). Shives were the bungs in wooden beer barrels, and made from hazel—a reason to maintain some woods with the ancient “coppice with standards” system. Spiles were the vent pegs in the barrels, usually made of beech. Froud’s was bustling when Cecil Roberts moved into Pilgrim Cottage in Lower Assendon. In one of his thinly fictionalised novels based on the area, he described the passage on a “chariot” past his cottage of the beautiful young son—nicknamed Apollo—of “Farmer Lowfoot,” “with fine hair fluttering above his brown head and throat. In the early sunshine he passed like the young god driving up the dawn. There followed the blower down at the wood yard calling the men to resume work.” The manufacture of spiles and shives seems a mite ordinary after raising the sun.
Beech from our wood was destined to go a little further afield than Froud’s mill. After nearly nine hundred years, the manor of Greys Court was separated from Lambridge Wood when the last Stapleton owner sold our ancient woodland to Mr. Shorland in July 1922. An era of quicker profit was upon us. By 1938 Shorland had sold on his interest to the Star Brush Company. Their works at Stoke Row were a major local employer, and vast quantities of beechwood were fed into the factory from woods all around to make the backs of brushes. I have the price catalogue for the company for 1925 (“Patent machine-made solid back brushes”), which lists a great variety of scrubbing brushes, laundry brushes, nail brushes, hat brushes, clothes brushes, shoe brushes, stove brushes, horse brushes, and more. Prizes were awarded to the company at international trade fairs in Paris (1878), Sydney (1879) and Melbourne (1880), for “merit and novelty.” Rather wonderfully, a handwritten note to a customer that fell out of my catalogue added (in pencil): “We do not make brooms.” One of their products might linger in the back of a cupboard in your house: a sensible board carrying a heavy set of bristles and a longer scrubbing set at the front. Indestructible. The bristles listed in the catalogue are of “Mexican fibre,” the product of the tough agave shrub. For paintbrushes, the best bristles came from pigs raised at Chungking in China.
I feel certain that fine beech trees from Lambridge Wood found their way into the backs of countless humble scrubbing brushes, which were items of even less common regard than wooden spoons—the traditional bottom prize in any competition. How are the mighty fallen! The trees used for brush manufacture were usually more than seventy years old, and at the height of the business 100,000 cubic feet of beechwood were used up every week. Contemporary photographs record huge machines relentlessly gobbling up the timber. Nevertheless, the Star Brush Company was proud enough of its reliable products to put its six-rayed brown star trademark on the back of every item. Only obliging beech could tolerate the rigours of the milling process. Star had factory premises in Holloway in north London, where the finished products were assembled. The company made profits, too. Although the depressed interwar years were tough (net profits 1938–39: £1,860), the shortage of imports during the Second World War boosted the sales of the home-made products enormously, such that company profits for 1944–45 were £25,842.4 In 1955 the Star Brush Company merged with Hamilton Acorn, a long-established Norfolk brush-manufacturer. Increased mechanisation and “economies of scale” led inevitably to such mergers as the British economy struggled to recover from the war years.
Brush-back making in the Chiltern Hills continued until the Stoke Row premises finally closed in 1982. Cheap imports and the invention of even cheaper plastic products finally ended the beech tree’s last stand. By that time our wood had already been in the ownership of Charles Darwin’s descendant Sir Thomas Barlow for thirteen years, and it was no longer expected to yield any kind of regular “crop.” Many trees were free to grow to maturity to help develop the woodland dog-walkers and joggers enjoy today; and, of course, to provide shelter for the occasional scavenging naturalist.
Very few old-timers who worked in the Chiltern beech woods survive to describe the daily lives of the woodsmen. David Rose is one of them. Now in his eighties, he lives with his wife, Mary, in an old cottage in the valley on the edge of the Stonor estate at Pishill. Mary worked as Lady Camoys’s personal secretary, while David worked in the woods, so they connect viscerally to the Chiltern landscape and its embedded human history. They are both full of life, and welcome a chance to talk about the old days. David tells me that his grandfather was a gypsy who married on Salisbury Plain, then settled in Barn Cottage at Maidensgrove, uphill from the Assendon Valley. His father was one of twelve. David’s aunts wore long black skirts, remained spinsters and spoiled their young nephew. His rubicund, gently folded face loses its ingrained good humour momentarily as he recalls, “My father was hard as iron.” David went to school with Maurice MacRory, who later ran the sawmill near Nettlebed, which is still operated by the same family in 2015. David started work at fifteen. Some years later, in 1955, he cut a hundred acres with his father “with axes and crosscuts,” which went to Froud’s for processing. The family lived in the Market Place in Henley, travelling to where their skills were needed, “even as far as Windsor Great Park.” David was employed as a piece-worker all his life: “No dole for me; sometimes I only earned ten quid a week. Sometimes there were big jobs that paid well. In 1968 I cut 100,000 cubic feet for the Andover Timber Company. I worked alongside horses until specially designed tractors replaced them.”
The harvesting of timber was sustainable; small trees were protected from damage to replace the felled generation. It was not always so. In 1934 Cecil Roberts lamented mass wreckage: “a terrible and heartless devastation, and slopes once glorious with ash and beech stand riven and naked to the sky.” David Rose supervised the felling in Lambridge Wood when Sir Thomas Barlow harvested some sections (not ours) on the advice of Mr. Mooney. With permission, wood could still be cut there even though it had been declared a Site of Special Scientific Interest. He recalls felling a huge ash—“a beauty”—in Lambridge in 1968, but he had to be careful: “It tends to split and kill the feller.” “Some of the lads who helped in the woods were no better than they should be: ‘hobos’ we called ’em. In the summer they lived out in a pig shelter.”
David’s was a tough life. He recalls hearing the drone of Lancaster bombers over the woods during the last World War, sometimes “with smoke coming out.” On 29 May 1942 a Spitfire came down near the Fair Mile, killing a Polish airman. The crash would have been heard in Grim’s Dyke Wood. Even the Chiltern Hills could not escape the turbulence dominating Europe. Missions took off from a local A-shaped airfield at Kingwood Common, no more than four miles west of our wood: “All completely overgrown now, though the concrete runways are still there, under the trees.” I have explored this former airbase; it somehow seems to belong to a deeper archaeology than the twentieth century. Fawley Court was requisitioned by the British Army for training special forces, and many commandos passed from its peaceful riverside meadows into the thick of the fray in France. After the war, the former seat of the Whitelockes, Freemans and Mackenzies was purchased by the Congregation of Marian Fathers, for use as a school to educate Polish boys displaced by the tragic events in their home country. “Mind you,” said David Rose, “I never felt in as much danger during the war as I did in the great drought of ’73 to ’74. There were lots of ‘stags’ heads’ [dead branches] through the woods, and ‘widow-makers’ were falling all the time.” He smiles gently at the thought, an old man at ease with his memories after a long life well spent in the company of beech trees: the last of his kind.
Last Orders
I find evidence of the woodsmen who worked in Grim’s Dyke Wood. Half-buried in the beech litter a couple of bottles attract my attention. My firs
t thought is: Litter louts! Just jettisoning their bottles when they’d finished with them! One of the bottles is brown, with a design etched upon it and a heavy screw-in stopper still in place; the other is green, with a black screw stopper with a milled edge. Traces of a rubber seal linger on its underside. My first impression was wrong: these are old bottles. They were probably meant to be re-used; their glass is thick, and they are altogether heavier than their modern counterparts. Matching the threads of the stopper with the inside of the glass neck took careful manufacture. The etched design on the brown bottle is rather elaborate: around the perimeter of an elliptical cartouche the words “Brakspear & Sons Ltd. Henley-on-Thames,” and in the centre a nicely rendered honeybee underlain by a scroll labelled “The Brewery.” The screw stopper of the green bottle also carries the Brakspear identification as a relief. So there is no doubt that these were bottles of beer produced by Henley’s own brewery, which still uses the bee as its logo. They will have to go on their side to fit into the collection. But when were they left behind? This design is extinct. Metal crown caps are almost universal on beer bottles today, although more elaborate contraptions are used to seal some up-market German brands. I have early memories of screw-stoppered bottles of luridly coloured “pop,” but I am fairly certain that by the time I was allowed to drink beer those bottles had already disappeared.
The Wood for the Trees Page 27
