Category: Honest Labour

The following is Excerpted from “Honest Labour,” a collection of essays from The Woodworker magazine while the legendary Charles H. Hayward was editor (1936-1966). This book is be the fifth and final volume in our series from The Woodworker.

And here’s hoping that, if you want to, you get to enjoy a few hours alone in the workshop today.

— The finest of all tools, the human hand, is determined by the will, mind, character of the man who wields it.

It often surprises me to find how few people can bear to be alone. It is almost as though they regarded time as a vacuum to be filled rather than as something to be used or enjoyed for its own sake. A man will drift along to the local, the club, or the pictures “to pass away the time” rather than spend a few hours in his own company, and yet it is just those hours when one might be alone that can be turned to the most valuable account. But to bear to be alone one needs an interest—any deep, abiding interest will do. With Paolo Uccello, the Italian painter, it was the interest of perspective which he pursued in all its most intricate forms and which so held him enthralled that we are told: “When engaged upon those matters Paolo would remain alone, like a hermit, with hardly any intercourse for weeks or months, not allowing himself to be seen,” taking pleasure “in nothing except the investigation of difficult and impossible questions of perspective.” A passion for the solving of a problem, an impulse to achieve something is already halfway to creation, and it is in the doing of a creative job that we really lose ourselves to find ourselves, and are no longer the bored, indifferent passers of time, but are unconscious of time.

It would be too much to claim that the man who follows a craft like woodwork is never lonely, but it is certain that he will never know the worst kind of loneliness, the apathy of mind and body which is the negation of life. The very acquisition of skill enriches the personality, adding to a man’s resources, making him more independent, developing his judgment and giving him more confidence in his own powers. We never know our powers, indeed, until we begin to use them, and then it is a lifetime’s job to find out how far they will go. Skill develops with the use of skill and it is one of the few things that can be carried to perfection in a lifetime. For, as we learn from the study of the arts and crafts of the past ages, there is no progress in the capacity of the human hand. The knowledge of tools and machines increases as time goes on, but the finest of all tools, the human hand, is determined by the will, mind, character of the man who wields it and does not develop from one generation to another. Indeed, there are examples of arts and handicrafts centuries old that will stand up to any comparison with the best work of today.

It is a humbling but heartening thought. We are challenged by the past to stand or fall by our own merits. It is commonly recognised nowadays how much the mind is bound up with the skill of the hands. It is in the mind that a job is first seen, planned, willed, and, says Ruskin, the work “is noble or inferior, first, according to the tone of the minds which have produced it and in proportion to their knowledge, wit, love of truth and kindness; secondly, according to the degree of strength they have been able to give forth, but yet, however much we may find in it to be forgiven, always delightful so long as it is the work of good and ordinarily intelligent men.” For indeed it is for a man to choose how he will use his mind—“discovering always, illuminating always, gaining every hour in strength, yet bowed down every hour into deeper humility; sure of being right in its aim, sure of being irresistible in its progress; happy in what it has securely done, happier in what day by day it may securely hope; happiest at the close of life, when the right hand begins to forget its cunning, to remember that there was never a touch of the chisel or the pencil it wielded but has added to the knowledge and quickened the happiness of mankind.”

Publisher’s Note: Please excuse or ignore the choices of pronouns and male-centric language. We are all products of our time, and Charles Hayward (born in 1898) was no exception. It’s interesting to note that as the magazine entered the 1960s, the language and pronouns began to modernize as well. (I’m sure my own writing will be interpreted as specist in 2243 by our squid overlords.) Hayward’s insight and inspiration are legitimate, honest and important – no matter which pronouns are attached to the ideas.

There was that unforgettable incident at the beginning of the 1914 war, when on Christmas Eve in a spontaneous movement of goodwill the British and the German soldiers clambered out of their trenches and exchanged greetings and carols. According to a writer in The times at the time: “Not once or twice but again and again we hear of this sudden change upon the night of Christmas Eve, how there was singing upon one side answered by the others, and how the men rose and advanced to meet each other as if they had been released from a spell. Everyone who tells of it speaks also of his own wonder as if he had seen a miracle; and some say that the darkness became strange and beautiful with light as well as music, as if the armies had been gathered together there not for war but for the Christmas feast.” If only that spirit of goodwill had been allowed to develop instead of being, as it was, quelled by army orders, the history of Europe might have taken a very different turn and we should not now be living under the shadow of the atom-bomb.

***

Most men want peace, although we do not appear to be progressing in the right direction for it, not only because of the constant talk of war but because men are losing their interior peace. There are doctors to-day who believe that the modern advance in material benefits is not bringing with it all the blessings of health and happiness that were once anticipated. While diseases that were recognized as the scourges of mankind are gradually being eliminated, their place is being taken by the “stress diseases,” which have their roots in men’s own inner conflict and are far more difficult to treat. Life is getting altogether too bewildering and complex. We need the simple life lines of faith and belief and good work to our hands to help us steer a course through it.

***

We have only to look at the serene face of some old craftsman who has found his life’s work in the exercise of his skill to realise that here is one way in which a man can find peace. If by responding to the natural urge for creation that is within him his hands have learned to follow the behests of his mind and his whole being is working in unison, he knows the absorbed, integrated peace that to-day is found by few. The world is so busy pandering to our human nature that the very memory of the hidden depths it contains becomes overlaid. No wonder so many men are bewildered and frustrated, seeking their pleasures in eternal things, while the sheer satisfaction that could be theirs of finding and cultivating their own powers in some creative skill of mind and body remains hidden from them. It is not until something happens, some need or enthusiasm which touches off a spark, that the possibilities begin to dawn. Most people nowadays have sufficient time in their leisure to enable them to do the things they really want to do. Every man in his own way can become a craftsman. There are good tools, good materials, good instructors to be had where needed, and anyone who is willing to make the effort and be a little patient with himself can learn. The woodworker has the additional advantage of dealing with one of the very foundation materials of man’s existence, from the time long centuries ago when he first kindled a fire from the boughs of the forest trees right down to the present when timber from the world over provides the material to make his home a gracious and friendly place. And with the feast of Christmas upon us we know that it can be a sanctuary as well, but this is something more than craftsmanship, resting upon the living truth behind it all.

— Charles Hayward, 1957; excerpted from Honest Labour: The Charles H. Hayward Years

The following is excerpted from “Honest Labour.” This column was first published in The Woodworker in 1949 – please excuse the gendered terms as a product of their time.

Woodworkers deal in the very kindest of materials, the friendly, living wood. I think there can hardly have been a time when men were not tree lovers, for even if we go right back to the time when cave men piled brushwood on their fires to scare away prowling beasts, the living trees had always something to offer man. It is almost as if some sense of kinship, some sense of “mystery in the trees,” comes to us when we view sturdy trunks bearing witness to lives which long outlast our brief span bearing on them the scars of their own struggle for existence and hidden in their innermost being the life rings which make up the tally of the years. Not without awe does one see them when a tree has been felled and its life secret is bared as we count the annual rings. Two hundred? Why this tree was a slim sapling when Dr. Johnson was rising to fame in the literary world of the eighteenth century, when the Stewart cause was going down in final defeat at Culloden Moor and North America was still only a little group of English Colonies contested with the French. And here in this wide ring was a good year in which the tree grew apace, and here was a wild, cold, hard year when life was a battle for survival and growth was slow, a year which toughened the limbs and sent roots digging down deeply into the soil to keep the tree in heart.

•••

No wonder trees are an ever-recurring theme in literature and art, especially in English literature and art, because here in this miniature land of ours they have a character and individuality which are one with the landscape and yet help to give it an infinite variety. So many trees, those which are native—the oak, the ash, the thorn, beloved of Kipling, the yew of churchyards that bred the mighty bow of Agincourt, the poplars and their “whispering, cool colonnade,” the beech for restful shade and the turned bowl; and those others, imported through the centuries till now they seem at home on our soil as on their own familiar ground—the plane trees which have become such a typical feature of London, the walnut, originally a native of the far Himalayas, the lovely, symmetrical horse chestnut which in the springtime gladdens the eyes of suburban dwellers with its flame-like blossom, the larches and the firs in dreaming blue copses—all have something to give. No wonder that our two great countrymen painters, John Constable and John Crome, responded with such wonderfully intimate studies of trees. No hazy splashes of colour for them, but careful, loving work showing the trees in their own individual character, growth and structure, so that at once one may know them for what they are, elms, poplars, willows, oaks, rejoicing in the light and air, with the wind whispering through their branches.

•••

In one of Hardy’s novels, The Woodlanders, an old man becomes ill through fear of a tree which stands outside his cottage and which, in his sick fancy, he sees threatening him. It was planted on the day he was born, he says, and has human sense and has grown up to rule him and make a slave of him. When reasoning fails, his doctor orders the tree to be cut down, unknown to the sick man, and the elm of the same birth year as the old woodman is brought to the ground as silently as skilful hands can contrive it. But the next morning, when the old man sees the vacant patch of sky where once the lattice of the tree had been he has a stroke and, after lingering all day, dies as the sun goes down. “Damned if my remedy hasn’t killed him,” murmurs the doctor. Although mercifully one need not anticipate quite such devastating results from a tree felling, to see a mighty tree brought low by the woodman’s axe does induce a feeling of regretful sadness. Here was a living sentient thing which could, if we are to believe the poets and our own imaginations, take pleasure in the sun and rain and the life it lived. And now this is the end.

•••

But is it really so? Isn’t the life that is ended only one part of the story? Rather it means that new life is beginning, one which will take a new direction in house or ship or barn or fence. Maybe a century or more of growth has formed the oak which has gone into our gateposts, and they may still be standing when we ourselves are no more. It is a humbling thought, and yet because there is so strange a parallel between man’s life and the life of a tree there is comfort in it too. So often in life we feel that everything for us is over when plans we made and rejoiced in have been axed at the root. But it may be something which only seems the end and is a beginning, opening up new, unlooked-for possibilities at present hidden from us. There is much more of a pattern in life than we are often ready to credit, it unfolds so slowly. That is what makes youth so difficult a time. If its joys are keen, so are its sorrows. For youth cannot abide frustration and takes it so hardly when plans go awry. But if we will but possess our souls in patience, opportunity comes again in full cycle, not the less because it comes along unexpected paths. It is something the woodworker will understand better than most. He knows the living wood, knows how generously it gives in the patient hands of a craftsman, and that the real end comes only with decay. Life is not always a woodland dream, but it has its moments. And if we keep our belief in it to the end, some of them will be great moments.

In these latter days of war it is sometimes difficult to hold firmly to the vision that was ours in times of peace. We may be craftsmen who once had high standards of accomplishment which the rush and tear of wartime production, or lack of proper materials, have insensibly lowered; or we may simply be amateurs suffering from fatigue and scant leisure who have lost our one-time zest for creative work. Creation implies effort, and effort—whether of body or brain, or both—is not always an easy thing to produce when both are wearied. It could make things easier if we could recapture the vision, if we could consider anew the point of honour which existed among older craftsmen almost as though it were a natural law. A many might only be making a chair rung; if it fell short of his best the customer might never know, but he, the maker, would know and feel no satisfaction in his work.

***

But the attitude of mind which can be sensitive to our own shortcomings must needs be sensitive to perfection everywhere. That is another of our difficulties and dangers at the present time. When there is so much destruction wherever one looks, one’s finer senses are apt to become dulled. Even to lose hope is to let something slip which needs cherishing. Hope and vision cannot be separated, and the one will depend upon the other in the post-war world. But how are we to keep them alive? To do so we need to be able to refresh our minds and give them new courage and stimulus; and it is by contact with lovely things, either of the hands or the spirit, that this is best done. It has been no mean deprivation of the war years for people living in towns that they no longer have contact with the many beautiful things in our museums and picture galleries which have been sent away for safety. Until the time comes when they will be brought out of their hiding places, books are our best substitute ….

— Charles Hayward, The Woodworker magazine, 1945, excerpted from “Honest Labour“