New Month Old Post: first posted 1st April 2018.
The practically skilled will mock the mess I made. If I could do it again now, I think I would have the patience to make a decent job of it. At school, I didn’t care enough.
The room smelt of sandpaper, sawdust and lacquer. It housed eight workbenches: the solid wooden kind with shoulders at the sides, tool cupboards underneath and a vice at each corner. And in our tough new carpenters’ aprons: loops around necks, strings tied at the back, deep pockets at the front, we really looked the business.
With that pencil-behind-ear can-do competence that only real woodworkers possess, Tacky Illingworth showed us how to shape a piece of wood into a ship’s hull by pointing the bow and rounding the stern, how to chisel out a couple of recesses in the top to leave a bridge, fo’c’s’le and fore and aft decks, and how to attach dowel masts and a funnel, simpler than but not dissimilar to the model in the picture. Mine was awful: irregular, lob-sided, gouge marks and splinters where it should have been flush-flat smooth. At the end of the year I didn’t bother to take it home. I think we made them only because it involved a variety of tools and techniques, rather than for any functional purpose.
I did learn to love the beautiful, age-old tools though: the tenon saw with its stiffened back, the smoothing plane, the spokeshave, the carpentry square, the brace and bit, the mallet and woodworkers’ chisels, and best of all, the marking gauge.
How could you guess what a marking gauge is for unless you know? Why does it have a sliding block with a locking screw? What are the spikes for? Why two on one side and one on the other, and why are they moveable? A mystery! I’ve got my own now. I last used it to mark how much to plane off the bottom of a door when we got a new carpet.
After spending the following year in Metalwork, we were allowed to choose which to continue. I returned to the relative peace and safety of woodwork, the lesser of the two evils. We had to decide upon a project, so I went for the ubiquitous book rack in its simplest form: a flat base with two vertical ends and a couple of pieces of dowel for feet. I selected a beautiful plank of mahogany which my parents had to buy, and began to cut out what were supposed to be stopped (half-blind) dovetail joints – visible underneath but not at the ends. It was far too ambitious. At the end of the year the book rack laid unfinished on a shelf in Tacky Illingworth’s stock room, wrapped in a soft cloth. His school report flattered me: “Progress is slow but does work of good quality”. Perhaps I had not yet made the mess it eventually became.
That could have been the end of the story because there were no crafts in subsequent years when ‘O’ levels took priority, but an unexpected change of policy allowed games-averse weaklings to escape to art or crafts instead. Metalwork was no longer on offer. It had been replaced by pottery, which was tempting, but for some bizarre masochistic reason I went for woodwork again. Maybe I refused to be defeated. Tacky Illingworth proudly retrieved my unfinished book rack from his stock room, still in its protective cloth from eighteen months earlier.
I even finished the thing. I wrote the date on the bottom: April 1966. It’s a real mess of course. At one end I broke through the wall of the ‘pin’ part of the dovetail and had to stick it back in, and the joints were so loose that even glue could not hold them together. Tacky reluctantly allowed me to fix it with screws. It has been on my desk for over fifty years.
I wondered could I find it hiding in old photographs, and yes, here it is in various Leeds and Hull corners of the nineteen-seventies. It still holds one of the same books.
As I said, if I were to make it again today, in the same way with hand tools not machines, it might not be perfect but I like to think it would be better. That would match my other subjects. At the very least I would hope not to break the ends. It probably comes down to patience, and perhaps a bit of care and confidence as well. As someone once said, education is wasted on the young.
Did you move on to constructing MFI? More wobbles than a Tory Cabinet.
ReplyDeleteMy MFI disaster was to erect a wardrobe around a ceiling light fitting. Had to take the thing to bits and start again.
DeleteThis blogpost reminded me of my own experiences in The Woodwork Room. The teacher, Mr Taylor, was a nasty individual but even so I got a "B" grade at O level a year early. I was just fifteen. My parents had known him vaguely in Delhi during the latter part of WWII. He had been up to stuff he should not have done but they never told me what. It involved an arrest by the military police - possibly for producing an inferior dovetail joint.
ReplyDeleteYou keep going into spam. Did you do domestic science as well?
DeletePerhaps Mr Taylor got into trouble for dovetailing his joint in the wrong place. You must have been very handy with a tenon. 'O' level woodwork at my school was only for those not doing sciences.
I have always liked Spam. Sliced and fried and served with new potatoes and garden peas. Perhaps this is why I am sent to Spam. No I did not do Domestic Science. Throughout The East Riding, apart from Goole, that was only for girls.Did you do Needlework too?
DeleteWRCC under the great Sir Alec Clegg.
DeleteWasn't he in "Last of the Summer Wine"?
DeleteTasker, could you pop over here and build me a garden summerhouse ?
ReplyDeleteP doesn't fancy the job for some reason. Says I am too picky.
I have a tried and tested design if you are happy with a scaled-up guinea pig hutch. I could miss off the wire netting.
DeleteYour story is a typical example of how we come to appreciate something we didn't care at school much later in life. For me, it was Natural Sciences, mainly physics. If I didn't like a teacher (and the feeling often was mutual), sort of went into inner boycot of the subject he or she taught. Only when I was in my mid-to-late 20s, I developed an interest in all things space with astronomy as a starting point, and along with it came a much better grasp and appreciation of maths, physics and chemistry.
ReplyDeleteI don't mean to say it is always a teacher's fault when a student doesn't do well (it very often was my own disinterest and laziness, and I knew it very well back then), but a good teacher can do much to make a student care.
Sorry, the grammar in my comment is a bit off. Blame my tiredness after a long and busy working week.
DeleteI think it was the same with me, as it showed when I did my 'A' Levels again in my 20s. It does not really say much for the education system that it failed to inspire us to enjoy things at school.
DeleteLooks good to me!
ReplyDeleteWell, it has worked for 56 years.
DeleteThat's a real heirloom, vintage and one day, antique. Grade A for perseverance.
ReplyDeleteAn heirloom that will end its life in a skip, or reclaimed for another project.
DeleteGirls had to cook and sew at our school. Only boys got to enjoy woodwork. Cooking and sewing classes were wasted time from my point of view my mother and two grandmothers had been running lessons in both since before I started school. Woodwork would have been much more interesting. Strange old division of crafts - assumptions that boys would never be tailors and girls never build cabinets.
ReplyDeleteHalf the boys at my school would have jumped at the chance to escape the horrors of woodwork and metalwork for the peace of cooking and sewing. And, of course, half the girls would have jumped to do the opposite.
DeleteBrings back memories of the woodwork master at my school - a Mr Lawrence - who had been a professional carpenter before becoming a teacher. He was a real pro, able to turn his hand to any of the sets needed for school play productions, and in his spare time rebuilding a boat. He was also one of the officers in our school cadet corps, and had been known to be driving around with a couple of dozen .303 rifles in his old Dormer van at times on the way to various events.
ReplyDeleteThese teachers were usually highly skilled, and could make just about anything. The metawork guy once said he could make a motorbike.
DeleteI took to making miniatures when I was an adult. I loved my tools the little lathe, drills and chisels. Making furniture in 1/12 size. All gone now and I still miss them.
ReplyDeleteIt's very satisfying to have skills of that kind, but it takes practice and work to acquire them, which makes them all the more absorbing and worthwhile. I would miss it too. So many people never have such things in their lives.
DeleteThen when you had the carpet replaced by a floating timber floor, was it a bit draughty with the large gaps under the doors?
ReplyDeleteI remember a little about woodwork at school. I made an interesting fruit 'bowl' and one of things with a vee cut into it to remove your gum boots without touching them. I thought we pronounced the word for the tool gauge as gouge. I am not sure.
We say gayje.
DeleteThe carpet was not all that many years ago and we've still got it. I don't understand the fashion for hard floors. They are cold and dangerous.
We had home e.g. I had to sew a dress. It did not come naturally to me, but I got the thing done. By the time it was finished, I had outgrown it!
ReplyDeleteYet you seem to be extremely good at practical things now. I suppose there is practical and practical.
DeleteStill can't sew for beans. I probably would have fared better in woodshop. At the time I went to school, girls took home ec. Boys took woodshop. Ne'er the twain shall meet.
DeleteHello there.
ReplyDeleteThanks for commenting on my blog. I enjoyed reading this.
I actually forget - and then remembered - that I built a bookcase when I was 14/15 years old in woodwork. I really enjoyed it. It took a month of after-school class and sessions. I bought some wood and then learnt how to use tools including saws and stuff like that. There's nothing like the pleasure of making something yourself =] .
A bookcase sounds impressive.
DeleteThanks for looking. It's good to have a younger commenter than the usual load of old wrinklies we are in this blog circle (although we don't feel any different than we did when we were younger).