Category: The Anarchist’s Tool Chest

I will not give away my hard-earned skills to a machine. It’s a bit like robbery with violence, for (machines are) not only intended to diminish my bank balance, but also to steal my power.

— John Brown (1932 – 2009), Welsh stick chairmaker

The taste or style (or lack of it) of the hollowed tree-trunks of far back in the Middle Ages was probably founded upon (1) necessity, (2) usefulness, (3) the primitive tools of that day, and (4) the fact that there was no previous furniture from which their primitive imaginations might wander to other things.

But let us doff our hats to those people of the past, for their age represents the birth-time of our English furniture. Later in the Middle Ages, when our forbears were learning how to work up wood, the chest must have stood as a standard from which a new style was to evolve. When it had evolved, and chests were seen for the first time, they must have been regarded as not being far removed from the miraculous.

Probably that was the greatest change in furniture that has been made in its history.

— The Woodworker, April 1933

But to get the best out of it, we have to let it absorb us, to take us right out of ourselves. Then it will be the best kind of antidote to brooding and worrying and war nerves. And to do this, we want to make it as many-sided an interest as possible. Not to be content with advancing the skill of our hands alone, although this is no small thing, but to find out all we can about furniture – good furniture – and design, all we can about past masters of the craft.

And last, but not least, to train ourselves to see beauty in all its forms, from a shaft of sunlight striking like a shining sword athwart a dingy street, to the glory of an evening sky; to watch for it in books, in pictures, in poetry, in music, anywhere and everywhere, according to our own natural predilections.

For it is that which moulds the taste, makes us able to create lovely things as well as appreciate them.

— The Woodworker, June 1940

Of all the men who feel the attraction of woodwork, who vaguely feel the urge to make things with their hands, there is a very large number who never let it get any further than that, or who, having started, give it up as soon as the first real difficulties make their appearance.

They say it would be easy, of course, if only they had all the proper tools, and will toy for a long time with the idea of magnificent tool chests, just as if an elaborate equipment could supply the lack of the kind of determination which counts for much more than equipment, and manages to rub along on very little.

Or they will tell you that they haven’t anyone to show them how. If they could study under a really good instructor they would soon be able to master it.

I wonder.

— The Woodworker, May 1940

It takes an age of democratic peace and plenty to produce gimcrackery. Will furniture, like houses, revert to a more substantial form? We know, all the too well, the type that could never survive anywhere within sound of a falling bomb. Having been blown together in the first instance, it would take so very, very little to blow it apart.

It seems to me that we may live to see a definite revival of craftsmanship in furniture making, because strength and soundness of construction, which have been the least of our demands in the latter years of this industrial civilization, will have acquired a new importance.

Or rather, one would say, their old importance.

— The Woodworker, January 1940