Category: Honest Labour

“Time brings its revenges. Nowadays the secular world which dispossessed the monks has entered into an age where few of its own treasures are respected by an enemy. To-day a new generation of craftsmen is rebuilding the roof [on] Gray’s Inn, bombed during the war, rebuilding it to the old plan, perhaps even inwardly rebellious because, being used to the new materials, the new methods, the new tools, to them hammer beams and fretted vaults may well seem little more than dust traps. And indeed sometimes one wonders whether there is any sense in patching up old buildings when the spirit that once gave them life is lost. Yet how can do we otherwise when so many associations, so many sentiments and traditions of the past are linked up with them. Blot out a building and you blot out so much more than a building. You blot out something of the past. And however much times and methods and tools may change the past gives us back our courage and pride.”

— Charles Hayward, The Woodworker magazine, 1950

“Persistence and the courage that goes with persistence are needed, but as the work grows so does the interest. We end by finding ourselves entering upon a new and most illuminating heritage, illuminating because only by the intent, patient work demanded by a craft do we really discover ourselves, our possibilities, our strength, and our weaknesses. By committing ourselves to it we grasp a chance to develop as personalities, ready to act, to accept challenges and have a kind of endurance. We learn to reason our way out of the bad patches and with the help of a little ingenuity to rectify our blunders. Better still, we learn how to avoid them. Best of all, we discover the amount of quiet satisfaction that grows in us once our creative instincts have found an outlet. Fine furniture is always a joy to behold. It is a greater joy still to make it.”

— Charles Hayward, The Woodworker magazine, 1962

“The making of fine furniture – the very words have a full, rich ring to them, bringing the craftsman into line with his forebears, the men who created the English tradition of fine workmanship, and throwing a glow of hope and inspiration upon the future. Here is something for which a man does not require worldly wealth, but the riches of his own personality, the powers which can be cultivated, the judgment which can be trained. Fine furniture is not showy or extravagant – it is the furniture which is wisely planned and beautifully made. The choicest wood can be marred by careless handling, sound homely stuff transformed by good design and first-rate workmanship into something anyone would be proud to own. Nowadays we cannot heap up worldly goods arounds us – prices are too high. The old Victorian plentitude – with its rooms full of gleaming mahogany, too big and cumbersome for modern taste and modern homes – has gone with very little likelihood of return. But our very limitations can be our gain if we see that what we have is as good as we can make it. The grand thing about fine furniture is that, properly treated, it grows still more gracious with time, when the scars and scratches it acquires from the exuberance of a young, growing family need be no disfigurement. It is marvellous how regular, routine polishing, continued over a long period, will mellow them till they look no more disfiguring that the lines on a comely old face. They are landmarks, taking us back over the years, the guides and pegs around which memories will cluster and which, when we reach old age, will be there to remind us of the lives they have shared, of the sorrows and happiness the past has brought us, which now, like a rich tapestry of many hues, can be enjoyed in tranquility.”

— Charles Hayward, The Woodworker magazine, 1949

“We are all apt to cling to youth as if it were the whole of life, the remainder an uncomfortable margin that does not really count. The obvious attractiveness of youth, its bounding health and vigour, its enthusiasms and ambitions, conspire to hide from our eyes the pleasures and discoveries that can come with maturity.

‘Grow old along with me
The best is yet to be
The last of life, for which the first was made’

“wrote Browning in ‘Rabbi Ben Ezra,’ that beautiful poem in which he unfolds the whole panorama of life and experience. It is an inspiring panorama if we accept it in its wholeness, not youth only, that time of raw beginnings, but those later years in which we garner the fruits. Little by little the really experiencing man learns to know more about himself and his potentialities. So often the beginning of wisdom comes when we discover for ourselves some simple truth that we have taken for granted since childhood, and the discovery within ourselves of unguessed powers when we learn to harness and discipline the character. The young man who could never bring a job of woodwork to a successful conclusion because he was far too impatient may learn patience in the school of life, so that when later he turns back to woodwork there will no longer be that human failing between himself and the job, and the young man who could never finish without scamping become in his maturity an excellent craftsman.

“To see life opening out before us as something rich in possibilities, of developing interests, is to feel a quickening of the spirit, a sense of purpose that will carry us a long way. What we have to forget are the shallow judgments, our own and other people’s, which may have coloured and restricted our youth. If we cling on to them still, then our whole lives may remain enclosed in a narrow groove. We have to be adventurers and explorers, having the initiative and courage to find out our own capabilities, not only in the things that have come easily to use, but in the more difficult things as well. Limits we must have, but we shall now, if we are wise, yield to these too tightly. ‘You never know till you try’ is one of the old adages that no one can safely ignore. Sometimes it takes us to the fullness of maturity and beyond to find out how true it is, and we may be sure that a contented old age will go to the triers. They will see, looking back, that life has been but an apprenticeship and will glimpse a greater purpose behind, and what appeared to them once as the end of it all be but a greater beginning.”

— Charles Hayward, The Woodworker magazine, 1949

“Perhaps that is the most precious part of the gift a handicraft like woodwork can bring with it, and as our power to concentrate deepens so will the quality of our skill. Fortunately for us constant repetition will always bring a skill of its own, it being another mystery of living that there is in man something which adapts itself with wonderful readiness to any action or set of actions repeated over and over again. Whether we are learning to use tools, or play the piano, or to swim, tumbling and floundering along till we think in disgust we shall never master the thing, the process is always the same. Almost unawares we find that ability comes, our muscles have learned to co-ordinate, our fingers the trick of it, and we progress with an increasing sureness of touch till we have the mechanics of the thing within our grasp. And it is possible to end there, having achieved just the competence we wanted. But with anything creative, any kind of craft, it is also possible and greatly rewarding to go a great deal further. Sometimes as we contemplate it that awkward self of ours comes to life on another tack, tugging at us with the thought that we’re just ordinary fellows with an ordinary handyman talent and any finer flights of workmanship are quite beyond us. It is the child again, crying distrustfully: ‘I can’t. It’s too difficult,’ and we need to say to ourselves, just as would to a child: ‘Come on. Snap out of it and try.’

“It is here, I think, that what I have called ‘the eye of the vision’ will help us most. Let us cease to worry about our own skill or lack of it but keep instead our imagination fixed on the kind of work we aim at achieving, holding firmly to a mental picture of what our next finished piece is going to look like, colouring it in fancy with all the detail of a perfect finish such as we have most admired in the best specimens of craftsmanship that have come our way. The man running a race keeps his eye on the goal and not upon the feet which are taking him to it and we should be wise to do the same. We need to see the goal with the eye of vision in order to keep our interest and enthusiasm alight: more men have failed from lack of imagination than from lack of skill. For skill, regarded only as the technical ability to do a job, although never unsatisfying, can be of purely limited interest. But regarded as a means of creating beauty through a standard of workmanship aiming at perfection, it gives us entry into another world. It is a world full of human interest, linking us in fellowship with all the craftsmen past and present, in whose work we see evidence of the quality we seek, extending through them our knowledge not only of how things are done but why they are done and how people have lived and furniture changed in a changing world. It helps us to enjoy fashion and yet be above it, in that, arriving at our own judgments, we choose our styles as we will. That many people nowadays have technical ability unblessed with imagination is only too evident in the new hideousness of our towns, but the woodworker who has the true craftsman’s spirit and an imagination attuned to beauty will create at least his home surroundings according to his liking, keeping alive in his own and other men’s minds the knowledge of what can be done.”

— Charles Hayward, The Woodworker magazine, 1956