The following is excerpted from “Honest Labour: The Charles H. Hayward Years” – a collection of essays from The Woodworker magazine while the legendary Charles H. Hayward was editor (1936-1966). These columns are like nothing we’ve ever read in a woodworking magazine. They are filled with poetry, historical characters and observations on nature. And yet they all speak to our work at the bench, providing us a place and a reason to exist in modern society.
It always gives one a little sense of shock, I think, to come up against fresh evidence of what a very ancient craft woodwork is, and how very slow to change. During the re-building of the Bank of England, which took place a short time ago, workmen excavating the foundations came down to the peat bed of the old Walbrook, a stream which once ran right through the heart of the City, and in it they found an old Roman barrel in a remarkable state of preservation. This barrel is now on exhibition in the British Museum, in the gallery devoted to Roman remains in Britain, and is a magnificent example of how traditional craftsmanship has a continuity of its own. The metal bands have perished, leaving only a faint discoloration behind showing their position, but the wood itself is in a remarkable state of preservation, thanks to the action of the peat. And it shows in a startling degree how very little cooperage has changed in the last fifteen hundred years. There is the same treatment of the wood, with diagonal scraping over the inner side, the same bevelling of the timber edges. I nearly said the same bung-hole, but in this instance there are two bung-holes, the theory being that one bung may have got too tightly wedged in, and it was easier to make another hole than to force it.
To me there is always a thrill in discoveries such as these. They leap over the barriers of time, language and race—though even our word “cooper” comes from the Latin cuparius—and show us the men themselves, facing the same difficulties and overcoming them in much the same way as we do to this day. Man’s conquest of material was extraordinarily effective even in the ancient civilisations, and at the highest point of development in the civilisations of Greece and Rome was in no whit behind our own. If we want to see, for example, what the Greeks could do with stone, we have only to look at the Elgin marbles in the British Museum and see (broken fragments though they are) how they are penetrated with life and feeling; or to look at the marvellous Winged Victory of Samothrace in the Louvre to see how life and movement at their loveliest were wrought into stone, so that we are no longer conscious of it as a stubborn, inert material. Nowadays, by the development of machinery, we have discovered quicker methods for the handling of material, making large scale production possible, but we have carried creative art no further, because that is something which has its genesis in the spirit of man and not in his tools.
I wonder if we are not rather too content nowadays to leave creation alone. Even to let our woodwork confine itself to a few repair jobs about the house, a few useful labour saving articles, and not to set ourselves to conquer our material in real earnest and become expert craftsmen. We are not even dealing with a dead thing. Wood is a living, sympathetic material, having none of the stubbornness of stone; it is man’s oldest friend, and capable of giving beauty as well as service. A good many of us, I think, have the urge for achievement: what is really lacking is the faith to persevere, a faith which becomes increasingly difficult in a world where so little is done by hand. The older type of craftsman saw men all around him working in the same way: he knew what could be done and took it all for granted. But nowadays nothing is easier for the man who works with hand tools to develop a kind of inferiority complex and doubt his own powers, especially if he is doing the thing as a hobby and is out of touch with fellow workers. We need to remind ourselves not only of what is possible but of what other men have done; that a real flame of enthusiasm, combined with determination to become skilled, will liberate powers of doing and creating of which we can only be dimly conscious while we are content to potter.
For there is a dynamic quality about enthusiasm which nothing can resist. You can see it in the street orator, whose whole heart is in his argument, swaying a crowd. You can feel it in the work of any artist—painter, writer, musician, or whatever he be—if he has put himself into the thing he has wrought in, felt it enough, suffered it enough. And the beginning of the year is a good time, it seems to me, to set about enkindling our enthusiasm afresh. For life is a dead thing without it. Make it woodwork, if our tastes lie in that direction; make it stamp collecting; make it anything in the wide world so long as it is alive and vital.
Living as we have all been living, first in a war-weary world and then in a world distracted by slumps and war rumours, it has not been altogether easy to keep any enthusiasm alive. All the more reason then for renewal when the year begins afresh. And we can remind ourselves that some of the best work of the world has been executed in turbulent times. We can see it in the pages of old Vasari, the painter of the Italian Renaissance who has come down to fame, not by reason of his own pictures, but from the fascinating record he has left us of the Florentine craftsmen—mostly painters and sculptors—of the period. It has long been a habit of mine, whenever I want real refreshment of the spirit or feel that I want to recapture the spirit of enthusiasm, to turn back into the pages of old Vasari and read just how those men worked, with a fire, a zeal, a soaring ambition which has never since been equalled. It is a mine of good stories and sage maxims, and the men with all their oddities and idiosyncracies are made to live again. In Florence enthusiasm was communicated from one man to another to a marvellous degree. It is quaintly summed up in the words of an old painter to the young Perugino, who asked him why it was that in Florence men became so perfect in all the arts. It was because, he said, in Florence there was such a spirit of criticism abroad that men judged work upon its own good qualities rather than from the name of its authors. Then prices were so high that they spurred a man on to make money; and thirdly, the very air generated a thirst for honour and glory, since no man of ability would suffer himself to be outdistanced by other men “fashioned like himself, even though acknowledged to be masters.” Which gets to the root of the matter pretty thoroughly!
— Excerpted from “Honest Labour: The Charles H. Hayward Years“
