— Charles Hayward, The Woodworker magazine, 1950
Category: Honest Labour
The Adventure of Living
“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
— Charles Hayward, The Woodworker magazine, 1949
Life’s Handicaps
“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
The Eye of Vision
“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