Category: Welsh Stick Chairs by John Brown

For better or worse, my chairs tend to flirt with stretchers. Should the chair have them or not?

While common sense might dictate that all chairs should have stretchers between their legs for added strength, the historical record disagrees. Early chairs were just as likely to skip the stretchers.

Why? It’s anyone’s guess. Chairs with stretchers are almost certainly more durable. The legs are less likely to come loose when someone kicks them inadvertently or drunkenly. But chairs without stretchers are far easier to repair if a leg does become loose.

Chairs with stretchers are certainly more complex and require additional time to build. But they offer another opportunity for the maker to embellish the chair with turnings, balls and tapers.

Stretchers are a good place to put your feet. But they take a beating from feet and can look like dog crap in short order.

For me, however, stretchers can grant me a good night’s sleep.

This week I’m building a couple of Welsh stick chairs in some crazy curly white oak. This particular design, one I’ve developed through 15 years of flailing, doesn’t use stretchers and looks just fine to my eye. That is, until it doesn’t.

The front legs of this design use a 16° resultant angle to set the legs’ rake and splay. The back legs use a 22° resultant angle. While reaming the front legs I grabbed the wrong bevel gauge. As a result, the front legs are splayed out more than expected. And the legs rake forward more than expected.

When I finished the job, I knew it was wrong. But when I assembled the chairs and put them on the ground, I was happy with the additional rake and splay. It made the chair look rakish and splayish.

I sat on the chairs to see if they were solid. They felt fine, but I asked some friends to sit in the chairs and I watched the legs. They moved too much for my taste. I lost confidence in the chairs as-is.

So I started making stretchers for both of the chairs. This added two hours of work to the job, but it set my mind at ease. It made me wonder: Is this how stretchers were first invented? Perhaps an ancient chair without stretchers flexed just a little too much and the builder thought: I have to put some sticks in there to fix that.

Or not. Whatever.

— Christopher Schwarz

This is an excerpt from “Welsh Stick Chairs” by John Brown.

Probably the first record of a back chair is in the manuscript of the laws of Hywel Dda (Howell the Good), a 10th century Welsh king. The surviving document, inscribed in the middle of the 12th century, has an illustration of a judge sitting on what is clearly a back or stick chair.

The history of the English chair since about 1800 is well recorded. The first chair factories with division of labour were working during the Napoleonic Wars. There are no such records of the early Welsh chairs, or the late ones for that matter. The stick chair on this side of the Atlantic is a peasants’ chair, of little value, and therefore not worth recording. Welsh stick chairs were not built by chair-makers, but almost certainly were the work of the village carpenter, wheelwright or coffin-maker. A house would be built by a group of people from the area, men of various skills who could afford the time. They were not builders as such. The trades were for the important things in life, the blacksmith and the wheelwright for agriculture. Household wares, such as furniture, were the luxuries of life which came after the provision of food. People had to do several things. A farmer might be a good hand at plastering, or the blacksmith’s wife made candles. Furniture was made by men who were handy with tools. We see only the best of it, poorly made pieces have long since fallen apart. Many of the implements used on the farm had components of wood: plough beams, harrows, wheelbarrows, sleds and gates, and for economic reasons a good proportion of these would have been user-made.

Tracing the provenance of individual country chairs is a complicated business, probably with few exceptions, impossible. There is no scholarly standard work to refer to. Chairs with similar characteristics are found in different parts of the country (Plate 14). They cannot, with any certainty, be regionalised. Carmarthenshire, with large areas of good farming land and a high proportion of better houses, is known for the quality and elegance of its locally-built furniture. Chairs found in the county, whilst unmistakably Welsh, have a greater sophistication than those made in the more remote parts further north (Plate 20). Dating Welsh stick chairs is very difficult. Whether these Carmarthenshire chairs were made concurrently with their more ‘folk art’ cousins from further north is difficult to say, but it looks as though they might have been. There is the possibility of another regional style. Some Welsh chairs have a wide lozenge- shaped seat, with only three or four untapered, heavier long sticks at the back. This type appears to come from the north (Plate 8, a & c).

As the standard of living improved, throughout Wales primitive furniture and chairs were made. By whom and for whom it is difficult to say. For certain, these items did not find their way into the squire’s house and they were almost entirely rural. The one thing about the chairs is that they all fulfilled the strict definition of ‘Windsor’, in that they grew from a solid wooden seat, having legs and sticks socketed into that seat. The termination of the long back sticks was normally a comb, that is a piece of wood, sometimes curved, sometimes straight, into which the tops of the sticks were mortised. Rarely, a few later chairs have a steamed bow or hoop (Plates 16 & 20). Many of the chairs terminated at the arm, that is the rear sticks did not come up to the level of shoulders or head. These arm-chairs, quite common, are the forerunner of the smoker’s bow or captain’s chair (Plate 14).

What is it that makes these chairs so attractive that now they have become highly sought after collectors’ items? Could it be some extension of the old Celtic art which makes them so appealing? – a naive folk art uncluttered by association with the contemporary urban styles. Many characteristics of the design are extremely good, and represent what we look for today in a well proportioned chair.

— Meghan B.

One of the things I love about how chairmaker Chris Williams works is that he tries – at every turn – to reduce the tools and contrivances needed to build a chair. One of the big things he offers is that you don’t need a shavehorse to make sticks, stretchers or legs.

Instead, you use a small block of wood in your vise and a block plane to do all the shaving.

I have 100 percent embraced this method from Chris (and John Brown), and I encourage you to give it a try.

Of course, I had to tweak the process a bit for my own liking. Instead of a flat block of wood, I plowed a V-groove in mine, which helps prevent the stick from wandering as you rotate it.

Honestly, you don’t need the V-groove to make this work, but it is nice.

— Christopher Schwarz

For at least the 12th time this month I’ve looked at the work on my bench and found that the odder it looks, the better.

I’m building a near-replica of a chair on display at St Fagans National Museum of History, and replica work is not usually my bag (or it hasn’t been for a long, long time). At every turn, this chair does the opposite of what I would do if it were my design. But I vowed to stick as close to the original as possible.

Why am I doing this? To attempt get inside the head of the original Welsh maker and perhaps learn something.

Why this chair? A drawing of it appears on the cover of John Brown’s “Welsh Stick Chairs,” and so he must have also seen something special in this chair. I adore it, too, but exactly why I like it is difficult to explain.

I began by making full-size drawings of the chair based on the photos I took during my visit to St Fagans with Christopher Williams. Even from the drawings, I knew this would be an odd ride.

The Undercarriage
The seat is unusual by modern standards. Though it’s about 22” wide, it’s only about 13” deep. It’s quite thin, unlike some of the chunky seats you see on many Welsh and Windsor chairs (up to 2” thick). The legs are delicate – just 1-5/16” at the floor – and they taper up to the seat.

The seat’s shape defies classification. It’s like a D-shaped seat that has been stretched with a rolling pin. There’s a big flat area where the four back sticks reside.

The original chair once had stretchers (now long gone) that ran between the front and back legs. It might have had a medial stretcher, but perhaps not. On this version, I’m building the chair as it appears now, without stretchers.

One change I have made to my chair is to lightly saddle the seat. The original seat is as flat as a board. (My saddle shape is based on other chairs from St Fagans.)

The Sticks & Armbow
The sticks on this chair are about 5/8” and don’t taper much, if at all. But it’s the armbow that has caused me the most head-scratching. The original’s arms are likely made from a curved branch. Then the two pieces that make the arm were joined by a large half-lap joint.

I wasn’t able to find a branch that works for this chair. So I made an arm with a plank that had some curved grain, but it looked like crap. So I switched gears and tried to make one from compression wood (aka cold-bend hardwood). Fail. So I made two arms using bent laminations. One was a total fail (my fault), and the second was a partial fail. Plus I didn’t like the way they looked in the end – too modern.

So I went to a sawmill in the country and dug through the 8/4 oak to look for a more suitable board. I found one with lots of curve. So last week I finally got an armbow that looked right. Well, “looked right” is not right. The armbow looks like an exaggerated harp, which matches the seat shape. As a result, the angles for four of the sticks were totally wack-doodle. But the wronger it felt, the righter the whole thing looked.

The Crest
The crest (sometimes called the comb) was the most difficult shape to reproduce. It is composed of multiple tapering curves. After drawing and drawing, I had to put down the pencil and just grab a rasp to make it look right.

Bemused by the whole experience, I knocked the finished crest in place and walked away to the machine room to put something away. When I returned, I caught the silhouette of my chair out of the corner of my eye and felt the same pang when I saw the original at St Fagans.

It’s then that I saw something I hadn’t seen before. Unlike many Welsh chairs, this one has a lightness and femininity that many Welsh chairs eschew. It’s not a passive chair by any means (sometimes femininity is wrongly equated with passiveness). It still looks like it wants to bite your shin if you mistreat it. But it works. And now I know exactly why.

— Christopher Schwarz