Whenever I write, whether it’s a blog post, article, book or simple email to a friend, I’m thinking about what readers may make of my words – not only my words in a literal sense (especially when I use a term of art, a foreign name or a four-letter expression that starts with the letter F), but the points I aim to convey. As someone who was fortunate to have teachers who were strict about standards and liberal with criticism, I internalized the most challenging critiques that came my way, a practice that has served me well. Over the years I’ve augmented those critiques with thought-provoking comments from others, among them the kind of uncharitable characters who read everything with an arched brow and think they know the author’s mind better than she knows herself. (Really…just spare me.)
As the publication of “Shop Tails” nears,* I thought it would be helpful to answer a few questions from my inner dragonAva Hunting-Badcocke as a heads-up to those who may be interested in buying the book.
Dido, a kitten I adopted from a salvage yard.
I just saw that you identified your medical diagnosis as “adenoma of the pancreas” in one of your early chapters. Don’t you even know that the name of your disease is adenocarcinoma, not to be confused with the rarer form of pancreatic cancer, the neuroendocrine variety that killed Steve Jobs? How can you expect anyone to grant you a shred of credibility after reading that appalling mistake?
I make my share of mistakes. I cannot tell you how many times I read the manuscript, not to mention how many articles in medical journals I have read about pancreatic adenocarcinoma. And still I missed this poop pile while cleaning the yard. So now I’m covered in it. We will forewarn readers with a note on the ordering page.
Joey and Tony in the early daysof Tony’s regime.
Most publishers look for consistency in a manuscript – consistency in voice and chapter length, as well as spelling and punctuation. Your manuscript reads more like a lorry packed with the assorted contents of a shuttered Oxfam shop that’s spilt its load all across the motorway, leaving a trail of tacky Beatles portraits on velour, melamine ashtrays with burnt spots, hand-knitted Shetland jumpers, crotchless knickers and worn plimsolls with missing laces. The first few animal stories read as though they were written by a child. The rest are what we expect from you. Some of the chapters are 30 pages long, while others are only four – or in one case, two! What is that, even? How can a chapter be two pages long? I can’t believe that your publisher agreed to invest in this farce. — Miss Ava Hunting-Badcocke, 1973
Consistency may be overrated. I wrote the first few chapters from the perspective I recall as a child, when I lived with the animals in question: Sidney and Phoebe (both dogs), Binky (a mouse), then David (a guinea pig). One pre-publication reader described these chapters as “sweet.” The sweetness vanishes with “Oscar”; he was my first dog as an adult, so the narrative voice reverts to that of the adult who wrote the first two introductory chapters.
My goal is to convey important information and entertaining stories, and sometimes introduce a reader to new perspectives on familiar subjects. I’m writing about real life, and at least in my experience, real life is more like the contents of that overturned lorry than the polished near-perfection of your sitting room-turned-security–checkpoint-homework-checking station, with your line of girls and Gaston, your farting pug.**
My husband, Mark, with Henny.
I thought this was a book about animals and woodworking, but the first two chapters read like someone’s private cancer journal.
By the time Lost Art Press sent me a contract to publish this book, I’d been writing the stories about individual animals for about 15 years. My relationships with non-human animals have brought me comfort and joy (and the occasional heartbreak). They have also taught me important lessons about life and my relationships with my fellow human animals. What precipitated the contract was my diagnosis in November 2020, so as I began to work on the book as a project for publication, my mind went naturally to the circumstances that had prompted the opportunity.
When Christopher Schwarz was designing the book, I told him it would be fine with me if he wanted to excise the first two chapters, or parts thereof. I worried that there might be too much introspection and blow-by-blow accounting of what was going on in my head. He replied that he wanted to leave them in because they show how my mind works and add richness to the stories that follow. You can just skip those chapters and go straight to the animal tales if you’re so inclined. There will not be a test.
Edie’s puppy Poika looking like a sheared lamb.
I see you’re trying to con us into believing that blurb from “Edith Sarra of Harvard and Indiana University” is legit. We know the two of you are friends, and we’re here to out you.
No one is trying to pull the wool over your eyes. Edie is one of my dearest friends. We met in 2006, by which time I’d been hearing for years from my friend Ben Sturbaum that I just had to meet this woman who lives in his favorite house in the world because we would love each other. And love her I do. However, I didn’t ask her for what publishers call a “comment”; that blurb is an excerpt from a personal note she sent to me after she had read the manuscript of “Shop Tails” a few times. She’d been interested in the project for as long as she had known of it, because she, too, is a serious lover of animals (especially dogs, but don’t tell anyone). My friend Edie has delivered some world-class withering comments, sometimes by saying nothing, so I trust her not to be giving me an easier time than she would give most other people. She implicitly affirmed this by granting us permission to quote her remarks as a blurb for the book.
William reading the comics.
So, Lost Art Press gave you a contract because you had cancer?
Pardon me while I wipe the tears of laughter out of my eyes. I know… I’m not supposed to be laughing, right? Because I have an incurable life-threatening illness. But why go on living at all if I can’t keep laughing?
Seriously, though, I get your point. When I sent my pitch to Chris and told him that writing this book could provide the motivation I needed in order to face chemotherapy, I added that I was simply stating the truth, not inviting a pity party or being emotionally manipulative. Or something like that. I trusted that he would get where I was coming from, because he is a straight shooter. I was relieved that his response included something along the lines of Lost Art Press does not engage in pity publishing. So, yeah, no.
The following is excerpted from “Mechanic’s Companion,” by Peter Nicholson. It is one of the foundational English-language texts in woodworking and the building trades. First published in 1812, “Mechanic’s Companion” is an invaluable and thorough treatment of techniques, with 40 plates that provide an excellent and detailed look at the tools of the time, along with a straightforward chapter on the geometry instruction necessary to the building trades.
If you work with hand tools, you will find useful primary-source information on how to use the tools at the bench. That’s because Nicholson – unlike other technical writers of the time – was a trained cabinetmaker, who later became an architect, prolific author and teacher. So he writes (and writes well) with the authority of experience and clarity on all things carpentry and joinery. For the other trades covered – bricklaying, masonry, slating, plastering, painting, smithing and turning – he relies on masters for solid information and relays it in easy-to-understand prose.
PLATE VII. Fig. 1 the axe used in chopping timber by a reciprocal circular motion, generally in a vertical plane, and with the cutting edge in that plane. Fig. 2 the adze used also in chopping timber by a reciprocal motion, generally in a vertical plane, but with the cutting edge perpendicular to the plane, and thereby forming a horizontal surface. Fig. 3 the socket chisel used in mortising; it must be observed, that the socket chisel is not always the breadth of the mortise, but generally less, particularly when the mortise is very wide. Fig. 4 mortise and tenon guage. Fig. 5 the carpenters’ square. Fig. 6 the plumb rule. Fig. 7 the level. Fig. 8 the auger. Fig. 9 a hook pin for drawboring. Fig. 10 the crow.
§ 1. CARPENTRY in civil architecture, is the art of employing timber in the construction of buildings. The first operation of dividing a piece of timber into scantlings, or boards, by means of the pit saw, belongs to sawing, and is previous to any thing done in carpentry.
§ 2. The tools employed by the carpenter are a, ripping saw, a hand saw, an axe, an adze, a socket chisel, a firmer chisel, a ripping chisel, an augur, a gimlet, a hammer, a mallet, a pair of pincers, and sometimes planes, but as these are not necessarily used, they are described under the head of joinery, to which they are absolutely necessary.
§ 3 OF SAWS. A saw is a thin plate of steel, indented on the edge, so as to form a series of wedges, with acute angles, and for the conveniency of handling, a perforated piece of wood is fixed to one end, by means of which the utmost power of the workman may be exerted in using it.
Saws have various names, according to their use. It is obvious in order that the saw should clear its way in the wood, that the plate should decrease in thickness from the cutting edge towards the back, and for this purpose also, besides this additional thickness, most saws have their teeth bent towards the alternate sides of the plate, this must always be the case where the plate is broad: in very narrow plates the cutting edge is made thicker than usual. Such saws as are not intended to cut into the wood their whole breadth, have strong iron or brass backs, in order to stiffen them, and keep them from buckling or bending ; both external and internal angles of the teeth of saws are made to contain sixty degrees, and the magnitude of the teeth is proportioned to the size of the saw, and accommodated to its use.
Some saws are used for dividing the wood in the direction of the fibre, and to any extent of distance exceeding the breadth of the plate, at pleasure; others are only employed in cutting in a direction perpendicular to the fibres, to any breadth or thickness; the former case requires the front edges of their teeth to stand almost perpendicular to the line passing through their angles, in order to cut through, or make a way through in less time than if set backwards, which is better adapted to the latter case: for otherwise, the points of the teeth would run so deep into the wood, as to prevent the workmen from pushing the saw forward without breaking it. The saws commonly used by the carpenter, are the ripping saw, and the hand saw; which are particularly described under the head of joinery, as well as other saws used in that branch.
§4. THE AXE Is an edged tool, having a long wooden handle, for reducing timber to a given form or surface, by paring away slices of unequal thickness ; is used by a reciprocal motion in the arc of a circle, generally in a vertical plane, forming the surface always in the same plane, and has therefore its cutting edge in a longitudinal plane, passing through the handle ; the slices cut away are called chips, the operation is called chopping, and the surface reduced to its form is said to be chopped ; but among woodmen the operation is called hewing.
§ 5. THE ADZE Is also an edge tool with a long wooden handle for reducing timber to a given form of surface, by paring away thin slices of unequal thickness, by a reciprocal motion in the arc of a circle, and in a vertical plane ; but its cutting edge is perpendicular to a longitudinal plane passing through the handle. It forms a much more regular and smooth surface than the axe. The operation is also called chopping. The use of the adze is to chop and pare wood in a horizontal position.
§ 6. THE SOCKET CHISEL Is used for cutting excavations ; the lower part is a prismoid, the sides of which taper in a small degree upwards, and the edges considerably downwards: one side consists of steel and the other of iron : the under end is ground into the form of a wedge, forming the basil on the iron side, and the cutting edge on the lower end of the steel face, From the upper end of the prismoidal part rises the frustum of a hollow cone, increasing in diameter upwards ; the cavity or socket contains a handle of wood of the same conic form : the axis of the handle, the hollow cone, and the middle line of the frustrum are all in the same straight line. The socket chisel, most commonly used, is about an inch and quarter or an inch and a half broad. It is chiefly used in mortising, and is the same in carpentry, as what the mortise chisel is in joinery.
§ 7. THE FIRMER CHISEL ls formed in the lower part similar to the socket chisel ; but each of the edges above the prismoidal part falls into an equal concavity, and diminishes upwards, until the substance of the metal between the concave narrow surfaces, becomes equal in thickness to the substance of the metal between the other two sides, produced in a straight line, meet a protuberance projecting equally on each side: the upper part of the protuberance is all at, or straight surface, from the middle of which rises a pyramid, to which is fastened a piece of wood in the form of a frustrum of a pyramid, tapering downwards; this piece of wood is called the handle : the middle line of the handle, of the pyramids of the concave, and of the prismoidal parts, are all in the same straight line.
§ 8. THE RIPPING CHISEL ls only an old socket chisel used in cutting holes in walls for inserting plugs, and for separating wood that has been nailed together, &c.
§ 9. THE GIMLET Is a piece of steel of a cylindric form, having a transverse handle at the upper end, and at the other end a worm or screw; and a cylindric cavity called the cup above the screw ; forming in its transverse section, a crescent. Its use is to bore small holes; the screw draws it forward in the wood, in the act of boring, while it is turned round by the handle ; the angle formed by the exterior and interior cylinders, cuts the fibres across, and the cup contains the core of wood so cut: the gimlet is turned round by the application of the fingers, on alternate sides of the wooden lever at the top.
§10. THE AUGER Is the largest of all boring tools, it has a wooden handle at the upper end at right angles, to a long shaft of iron and steel ; at the lower end is a worm or screw of a conic form, for entering the wood ; so far it is similar in construction to the gimlet: the lower part of the shaft, axis, or spindle is steel, and is of a prismoidal form, to a certain distance, from the end upwards. The edges are nearly parallel, and the sides taper in a small degree upwards; the part of the shaft above the prismoid is arbitrary; but it is obvious, that in order to pass the bore freely, its transverse dimensions must be less than the lower part. The worm has its axis in the same straight line with the axis of the shaft. The lower end is hollow, or cut into a cavity on one side of the cone, and forms a projecting edge on the narrow surface of the prism called the tooth, which is brought to a cutting edge.
The part of the lower end on the other side of the cone projects before the face of the prismoidal part in the form of a wedge, the line of concourse of the two sides of the wedge forming a cutting edge. The vertex of the cope is the greatest extremity of the lower end ; the cutting edge of the tooth is something higher or nearer to the handle, and the cutting edge of the wedge-like part stilI nearer to the handle. Any point being given as the centre of a cylindric hole on the surface of a piece of timber, the vertex of the conic screw is placed in that point; then keeping the middle line of the shaft perpendicular to, or at the inclination to be given to the surface of the timber; turn the auger round with both hands, the screw will draw it downwards into the wood, and when it has got a certain depth, the tooth will begin to cut a portion of the cylindric surface of the hole: when the part of the cylindric surface is cut half round the circumference, or perhaps a little more, the projecting wedge-like part will begin to cut out the bottom, and the core will rise in the form of a spiral shaving, by continuing to turn the handle. This construction of the auger is of very late invention, and is certainly a great improvement.
The lower part of the old form of the auger is a semi-cylinder on the outside, and the inside a less portion of a larger cylinder, the bottom of the cutting part is formed like a nose-bit : before this auger can be entered in the wood, a cavity must be first made with a gouge.
§11. THE GAUGE Is made out of a solid piece of wood notched with an internal right angle, or consisting of two narrow planes perpendicular to each other; one of these straight surfaces forms a shoulder, the other surface has two iron teeth placed in a perpendicular to the intersection of the two surfaces, so distant from one another as to contain the thickness of the tenon, or breadth of the mortise, and the tooth next to the shoulder so far distant from the intersection, as the tenon is distant from the face. When you gauge, press the shoulder close to the wood, and the other surface of the gauge which contains the teeth, close to the other surface of the wood to be gauged; then draw and pull it backwards and forwards and the iron teeth will scratch the wood so as to make a sharp incision or cut. When carpenters have occasion to alter their gauge for other work, they either file away the old teeth and put in new ones; or, if the distance between the old ones will answer, they cut away a parallel slice from the shoulder, or put a new piece on before it.
§12. THE LEVEL Consists of a long rule, straight on one edge, about 10 or 12 feet in length, and another piece fixed to the other edge of the rule, perpendicular to, and in the middle of the length, and the sides of this piece in the same plane as the sides of the rule ; this last piece having a straight line on one side perpendicular to the straight edge of the rule. The standing piece is generally mortised into the other, and firmly braced on each side, in order to secure it from accidents, and has its upper end kerfed in three places, one through the perpendicular line, and one on each side. The straight edge of the transverse piece has a hole or notch cut out on the under side equal on each side of the perpendicular lines. A plummet is suspended by a string from the middle kerf at the top of the standing piece, so that when hanging at length, the bottom of the plummet may not reach to the straight edge, but vibrate freely in the hole or notch. When the straight edge of the level is applied to two distant points, and the two sides placed vertically, the plummet hanging freely, and coinciding with the straight line on the standing piece, then these two points are level: but if not, let us suppose that one of the points is at the given height, the other point must be lowered or heightened according as the case may require; and the level applied each time, until the thread is brought to a coincidence with the perpendicular line. By two points, is meant two surfaces of contact, as two blocks of wood or chips, or the upper edges of two distant beams.
The use of the level in carpentry, is to lay the upper edges of joists in naked flooring horizontal, by first levelling two beams as remote from each other as the length of the level will allow ; the plummet may then be taken off, and the level may be used as a straight edge. In the levelling of joists, it is best to make two remote joists level first in themselves, that is, each throughout its own length, then the two level with each other; after this, bring one end of the intermediate joists straight with the two levelled ones, then the other end of the joists in the same manner, then try the straight edge longitudinally on each intermediate joist, and such as are found to be hollow, must be furred up straight.
§ 13. TO ADJUST THE LEVEL. Place it in its vertical situation upon two pins or blocks of wood then, if the plummet be hanging freely, and settle upon the line on the standing piece, or if not, one end being raised, or the other end lowered, to make it do so, turn the level end for end, and if the plummet fall upon the line, the level is just ; but if not, the bottom edge must be shot straight, and as much taken off the one end as you may think necessary; then trying the level first one way and then the other as before, and if a coincidence takes place between the thread and the line, the level is adjusted; but if not, the operation must be repeated till it come true.
§ 14. THE PLUMB RULE ls a prismatical piece of wood, with a line drawn down the middle of one of the· sides, parallel to the two adjacent arrises on the same face. Its use is to try the vertical position of posts, or other work perpendicular to the horizon, by means of a plummet suspended from the upper end of the rule, and a notch cut out at the foot, in order to allow room for the plummet to vibrate freely.
In order to put up a post perpendicular to the horizon, place the bottom of the post in its situation, and the sides as nearly vertical as the eye may direct; if the post stands insulated, it must be fixed in this position with temporary braces, at least from two adjoining sides; but if very heavy, from all the four sides; then try the plumb rule upon one side, and if the thread coincides with the line, that side of the post is already plumb, but if not, the top must be moved forwards or backwards, accordingly as it leans or hangs, as much as appears to be wanted, by previously moving the front and rear braces, and fixing them anew, while the other two remain, to stay the other sides : apply the plumb rule again as before, and if there be a coincidence between the line and the plummet thread, then that face is perpendicular, but if not, the several similar operations must be repeated till found to be so. Proceed in the same manner with the other two parallel sides of the post, until they are made plumb, and by this means the post will be set in a true vertical position.
§15. THE HAMMER Consists of a piece of steel, through which passes a wooden handle perpendicularly; the steel is flat at one end, or in a small degree convex. The use of the hammer is for driving nails into wood by percussive force. The other end of the hammer, that is not used for driving nails, is sometimes made with claws, and sometimes with a rounded edge, like a semicylinder. The claws are for laying fast hold of the head of a nail, to be drawn out of a piece of wood; for this purpose the back of the hammer is rounded, so that the hammer, in the act of drawing the nail, may not penetrate with its other extremity into the wood; and this also lessens the distance of the force to be overcome from the fulcrum, and consequently increases the power employed. When the hammer is used, place the back of it upon the wood, and the claws so as to have the nail fast between them, lay hold of the handle and pull the contrary way to that side of it on which the nail is; then, if the force be sufficient, the nail will be drawn out of the wood, and the nail thus drawn will come out almost straight. Some people, instead of pulling the handle of the hammer the contrary way to the side on which the nail is on, (and thereby making it describe a circle in a plane, perpendicular to the surface of the wood, and through the longitudinal direction of the head,) turn the hammer sideways : the nails easier drawn by this way, but then the surface of the wood is more injured, as well as the nail, which is frequently so much bent as not to be of any more use. Claw hammers are chiefly used in the country; and those with their other extremity rounded like a cylinder, are used in town for clinching and rivetting. In driving a nail, when the hammer comes in contact with the head of the nail, if the striking surface is not perpendicular to the shank of the nail, the nail will not be driven into the wood, or only in a small degree, but will be bent sideways towards an oblique angle, and will thus frequently break the nail, unless it be well entered, and so strong as to resist the force acting thus obliquely. The reader must here observe, that no force can act with its full effect upon another, unless in a line perpendicular to the surface of contact.
§ 16. THE MALLET Is similar in its construction to the hammer, but the head is a thick block of wood, of a structure in form of the frustum of a pyramid, the side of this frustum tending to some point in the handle continued. It is used for mortising and driving pins into wood. The object is struck by the narrow sides of the mallet.
§ 17. THE BEETLE OR MAUL Is a large mallet to knock the corners of framed work, and to set it in its proper position, and is sometimes used for driving short piles into the ground, where it would be unnecessary to use greater power. The handle is about three feet in length, and for these heavy purposes both hands are employed. This is more used in the country than in London, where they use a sledge hammer for the same purpose.
§ 18. THE CROW Is a large bar of iron, used as a lever to lift up the ends of heavy timber, in order to lay another piece of timber, or a roller, under it. One end of the crow has claws.
§ 19. THE TEN FOOT ROD Is a rod about an inch square, divided in its length into feet and inches, for the purpose of setting out work. The method of raising a perpendicular by a ten foot rod, is described in the Practical Geometry, page 25. Prob. III. Instead of a ten foot rod, some use two five foot rods for the same purpose.
§ 20. HOOK PIN Is a conical piece of iron, with a hooked head, declining upwards in the form of a wedge. The top is flat, for the purpose of driving it down; and the shoulder which rises from the cone, stands perpendicular to the axis, and is used for driving it out of a hole, when it is fixed fast. The hook pins are the same in carpentry, as what the draw bore pins are in joinery, viz. they are employed after the tenons have been entered in the mortise and bored, as shall be presently shown, in drawing the shoulders of the tenons home to their abutments in the mortise cheeks : when there are several mortises and tenons in the same frame, as many hook pins are employed. The method of boring, and using the hook pins, is thus: bore a hole first through the mortise cheeks, not very distant from the abutments; enter the tenon, and force it home to its shoulders as near as you can ; mark the tenon by the hole, and draw the tenon out of the mortise. Then pierce a hole through the tenon, about one third of its diameter nearer to the shoulder, and enter the tenon again, bringing the shoulder as near to its abutment as possible; drive in the hook pin with considerable force; the convex circumference will bear upon alternate sides of the mortise and tenon, viz. upon the farther side of the hole of the tenon, and upon the nearest side of the mortise from the joint ; the shoulder of the tenon being brought home to its abutment, the hook pin may be drawn out of the hole; for this purpose there is a hole through the upper part of it, by which it is sometimes drawn out with another hook pin; but if driven in very fast, it will require the assistance of a hammer to strike it upon the shoulder upwards, and two or three smart blows will soon loosen it ; when drawn out, enter the pin, and drive it home with force, or till it be sufficiently through and fast, so as not to be driven farther without breaking.
§ 21. THE CARPENTER’S SQUARE Is a square of which both stock and blade consists of an iron plate of one piece ; it is in size and construction thus : one leg is eighteen inches in length, numbered from the exterior angle, the bottom of the figures are adjacent to the interior edge of the square, and consequently their tops to the exterior edge: the other leg is twelve inches in length, and numbered from the extremity towards the angle ; the figures are read from the internal angle, as in the other side ; each of the legs arc about an inch broad. This implement is not only used as a square, but it is also used as a level, and likewise as a rule : its application as a square and as a rule is so easy as not to require any example : but its use as a level, in taking angles, may be thus illustrated; suppose it were required to take the angle which the heel of a rafter makes with the back, apply the end of the short leg of the square to the heel point of the rafter, and the edge of the square, level across the plate, extend a line from the ridge to the heel point, and where this line cuts the perpendicular leg of the square, mark the inches, and this will show how far it deviates from the square in twelve inches.
Art Deco inspiration. “I love Art Deco design,” writes JoJo Wood. “I have always had a great fondness for it — one of the many reasons I love visiting the States: such inspiring architecture. When Sean & I got married we made our own wedding rings out of old silver spoon handles, with Art Deco designs on them. My Art Deco spoons started with inspiration taken from our wedding rings, and have evolved from there… I take a lot of pictures of cool buildings, amongst other things, to translate into spoon designs.”
In the late 1990s, when JoJo Wood was just a few years old, her parents moved from the county of Essex, northeast of London, to Edale in the Peak District of Derbyshire, between the industrial cities of Sheffield and Manchester. A tiny village in a remote corner of north-central England, Edale attracted hikers, especially during late summer and fall, when its hills were cloaked in purple heather. Many of these visitors also turned out to be interested in another local offering: spoon carving courses taught by JoJo’s parents, Robin and Nicola. When JoJo was about 13, the family moved from a stone cottage “in the middle of nowhere – the last house on the Pennine Way” – to the village center, where they taught their craft in the village hall. “Rob would do all the axing and rough carving, and then Nic would finish them. She has a design background and eye for aesthetics.”
They often roped their daughter into helping. JoJo can’t recall exactly when she started using a knife, but she knows it was when she was “definitely very young. I had quite a short attention span,” she continues, “so I never really made objects. It was mostly swords and spears to fight my brother with.” (That’s her younger brother, Ollie, now 24.) People would come for the courses and stay in the village, carving spoons during the day, then tack on a couple of days to go walking in the hills.
Start them young. Nicola showing JoJo how to work at a shavehorse.
A quick study. JoJo at the shavehorse, working on her own.
Robin’s teaching wasn’t limited to the village hall in Edale. He taught in other parts of England, as well as internationally, and always tried to take the family with him when he traveled. That’s how JoJo came to meet famed Swedish woodcarver Wille Sundqvist, whom many consider one of the fathers of green woodworking, when she was just 8 or 9. While she appreciates the honor of having met Wille in person, she admits that as a kid, “all the talk about knives got boring.” Still, when their hosts brought out knives as gifts for her and her brother, she accepted hers graciously and says “That was my first knife of my own.”
JoJo and Ollie with Wille Sundqvist.
Fast forward a few years. “Every teen-ager goes through a stage where everything their parents do is the least cool and they want nothing to do with it.” So she explored other things. JoJo took the GCSEs (General Certificate of Secondary Education) at 16, then went to what Brits call college – usually what’s known as technical or community college in the States – in Chesterfield to study art. “I struggled a lot with my mental health,” she says, acknowledging a challenge faced by many at the transition to adulthood. As a result, she didn’t get far before dropping out. The following year she tried A-level studies (roughly equivalent to junior and senior high in the States) but dropped out at the start of her second year due to depression and anxiety.
“I was later, in my early 20s, diagnosed as autistic,” she explains. “That probably has a lot to do with my struggling…. This undiagnosed autism made me not fit in very well. It helps me be kinder to myself about some things, because I really struggle in a lot of situations. I remind myself that it’s not my fault; it’s just the way my brain works.”
At 18 or 19 she dropped out the second time. “I spent time in my depression hole,” she continues. While JoJo was growing up, her mother attended graduate school, where she earned a doctorate designing multimedia resources for teaching craft skills. She always spoke about how great it was to go back to university as a mature student. Thanks to her mother’s perspective, JoJo understood that she could return to the world of formal education someday if she needed a qualification. “That was a different opinion,” she says, from the prevailing assumption that anyone who did not complete a degree straight after high school was something of a failure. “It’s kind of sad that that’s how everybody viewed me when I didn’t go to university.”
Weaving a chair seat at Mike Abbott’s, here with “Danish cord,” a paper-based material, in a wavy twill pattern adapted for chair seats from the world of weaving. “I spent a lot of time seat-weaving during my time at Mike’s, and adapted quite a few patterns,” writes JoJo. The chair is a Mike Abbott-designed “lath-back.”
She spent a summer assisting Mike Abbott, who teaches chairmaking in Herefordshire, southwest of Birmingham. “You’d spend a week living in the woods, cooking on wood fires, sitting around the campfire, and you’d make a chair. Assistants help with projects, make tea, and so on. There I spent more time doing woodworking and also my first big teaching, although informally.” After helping people to make chairs and understand how wood “works,” she showed them how to carve spoons in the evenings.
When her dad was organizing the first Spoonfest with his friend Barn, she found herself once again roped in to help. She’d carved a few spoons by that time but “nothing that seriously.” One of her jobs was to put together the festival T-shirt, which had to list the instructors. “They’re all men,” she noted. It struck her as odd – those who’d attended her parents’ courses were fairly evenly mixed by gender. But there didn’t seem to be any women carving spoons professionally at that time, she says. “So…in a fit of feminist stubbornness, [I] decided that by the following year I would be good enough to teach.”
New and improved instructor line-up.
She spent the year practicing, and sure enough, was teaching that following year, 2013. “I was hooked,” she says. “Couldn’t put it down.”
If it seems a stretch to go from a remote village in the countryside of northern England to teaching internationally, all without the benefit of conventional higher education, JoJo’s trajectory is a little easier to comprehend when you go beyond her parents’ example and how they immersed their daughter in craft from her earliest years to consider the passionate interest and ambition her father demonstrated in researching and reviving a branch of woodcraft that might otherwise have been lost to history. Google Robin Wood and you’ll find he has “MBE” (Member of the Order of the British Empire) appended to his name, a great public honor recognizing his contributions to the survival of traditional British craft. For much of his life, Robin has made a living by turning bowls. No ordinary bowls, these; Robin revived the craft of pole-lathe turning last practiced by George Lailey six decades earlier. After Lailey died in 1958, his workshop was moved to the Museum of English Rural Life. Robin studied Lailey’s lathe and tools and reverse-engineered them, in effect teaching himself from scratch. He took his foot-powered lathe with him to craft fairs to demonstrate the process. The power of such an example, as well as the opportunities Robin shared with his family, should not be underestimated.
Going farther afield
Forage your material, in this case birch bark for a canoe.
JoJo at work on the canoe.
Robin and JoJo enjoy the fruits of their labor.
JoJo stayed in Herefordshire during her early 20s. By that point she was teaching internationally; one year she taught courses in England, France, Germany and Sweden, in addition to the United States, where she was one of the instructors at the first Greenwood Fest in Plymouth, Mass. She’d visited the States a couple of years before with her dad; they spent a few weeks with Jarrod Dahl in Wisconsin, building a birch bark canoe, an experience she describes as “amazing! Really cool.” They also traveled to a spoon gathering in Milan, a tiny town “in the middle-of-nowhere Minnesota and to Northhouse, where Robin taught a course. Peter Follansbee took that course. “In the evenings we did spoon carving,” JoJo goes on. “Peter’s spoon carving background is from the Swedish bent-branch world; at Northhouse, he was carving from a straight piece of wood. “I probably said something fairly unflattering – I can show you a better way to do that.” Instead of being insulted, he was impressed, she says. “We got on great.” So when he was organizing Greenwood Fest, he invited her to teach spoon carving.
Faceted backs of spoons.
The spoon carving world is quite a small one, JoJo says, though it’s getting bigger. “Everybody seems to know everybody. We were all on Facebook and Instagram, posting about our various things.”
“I’ve been very lucky. I grew up around amazing craftspeople and have been lucky to get to know everybody. A lot of the woodworking community is dominated by old men. When people are looking to book some people to change the demographics a bit, I bring the age significantly down. And I don’t have a beard, which is a change,” she laughs – “ticking two boxes at once!”
JoJo in instructor mode with a student named Julie, before “Spoon Day” in 2019.
Pathcarvers: enhancing mental health through making
With her partner, Sean, she operates Pathcarvers in Birmingham, where she moved in 2017. Pathcarvers teaches woodcarving as a way to help people with mental and physical health challenges – “a tool for positive social change.” Through Pathcarvers, they set up events that give people access to craft. “The act of making is intrinsically human,” JoJo points out. “A lot of people don’t have creative outlets that can really help. Jobs are becoming more screen-oriented. People get home and put the telly on or Netflix because we’re so tired. Making is something that can be beneficial in so many ways.”
They work with groups as well as individuals, bringing together people from diverse backgrounds. “You sit down and do some carving. It helps you talk about things. You have to concentrate on that sharp thing in your hand because you don’t want to hurt yourself. It gives you space to quiet your brain down.”
When she was teaching elsewhere, she says, she’d notice that there always came a point where “everybody goes silent because they’re so focused on what they’re doing. The world disappears. At the end of the course, they’ve got this thing in their hands that they’ve made. They can go away and use that in their kitchen and be reminded of this experience. So many people never get to experience that. They don’t even know it’s an option. Pathcarvers is about making this as accessible as we can, and making it affordable. With craft courses there are endless [opportunities] to go away in the woods, but there’s not that much in the cities. [Thanks to Pathcarvers], people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford to do it can do it.”
They are a social enterprise (known in the United States as a non-profit). Until now, they’ve been self-funded. Course fees have made it possible for them to subsidize training for those who can’t pay. After woodworker, author and lawyerKieran Binnie took his life in April 2021, Christopher Schwarz, Megan Fitzpatrick and Rachel Moss (Kieran’s spouse) wanted to do something to memorialize him and create a positive legacy. “He’d brought so much to so many people in his life,” JoJo comments, “and we wanted to continue that. Kieran lived in Birmingham, too. It seemed a good fit. He, too, thought about community.” Chris and Megan put her and Sean in touch with Rachel Moss, Kieran’s wife. “It’s been really amazing, the amount of support,” JoJo says of the contributions brought in following a post about Pathcarvers and the Kieran Binnie Memorial Fund for Craft. The fund will enable them to do more work free of charge, and to work with other organizations to help people with their mental health.
With his black leather nose and beautiful eyes, Oscar reminded me of the puppies that often appeared on boxes of chocolates in England in the early 1980s.
Editor’s note: If you ever meet me at a dinner party and ask me what sort of books we publish, I’ll give you a two-word answer: hard ones.
When John and I founded Lost Art Press in 2007, we knew that the world didn’t need another book of router tricks, or plans for the same generic semi-Shaker furniture pieces we’ve seen a dozen times.
Most woodworkers love a good challenge, especially if it opens their minds or trains their hands to do new things. So for the last 14 years, we have tried to offer books that no one else would publish.
Gather together the best writing on handwork in the 20th century from Charles H. Hayward (a seven-year project)? We are up for it.
Publish a book about animal companions in the workshop? Plus the life lessons they offer? By one of our favorite woodworking authors who is fighting pancreatic cancer? Whew. Yes. We’re here for that.
“Shop Tails” by Nancy R. Hiller is our most unlikely woodworking book, but it is also one of my favorites. (I’ve never designed a woodworking book while actively sobbing.) Nancy’s clear-eyed and unflinching prose about the craft, the work, her non-human companions and death are something you won’t find anywhere else.
I think this book will make you look at the world, the work on your bench and the cat at your feet all anew. It might not show you how to make a crazy coping sled for your router, but who needs that, anyway?
Whenever someone at Farmstead Furniture asked what type of dog Oscar was, my boss replied “a Hearthrugger.” He was a large black dog with wavy hair that gave his lanky frame the appearance of at least 50 percent more than his highest-ever weight of 45 pounds. Spread out on the floor, he bore a striking resemblance to a sumptuous long-haired animal skin rug, the kind that lends a primal edge to a crackling log fire, leaving you all the cozier for knowing that you are not on a patch of frozen ground beneath the stars.
I was able to take Oscar with me to work at Farmstead because at 27, I had finally earned my driver’s license. I bought a used Ford Escort van through a classified ad in the local newspaper. For years, I had resisted the pressure to learn how to drive, daunted by a vehicle’s potential to kill. Many of my school friends in London had learned to drive at 17, an age when I wondered why I should learn to drive when public transportation was so readily available, not to mention that there was no way I’d be able to afford a car in the foreseeable future. Instead, I decided to let circumstances dictate when it was my time to learn to drive, and even considered going my entire life without driving a car, as Grandma Stepha had.
My resistance to driving lasted well after I left London. When I was 19, my boyfriend, Patrick, and I moved to the burg of Friday Bridge in Cambridgeshire, where my mother and stepfather had bought an old schoolhouse that came with an attached cottage, the former schoolmaster’s home. We moved into the simple brick cottage – two rooms upstairs, two rooms downstairs – and my stepfather built a small addition for a kitchen and bathroom. I got a job at a metal-casting factory that summer and rode my bike to work. After signing up for City & Guilds furniture-making classes at the community college in Wisbech, four miles away, I rode my bike to and from school in all weather. I did the same at my first cabinetmaking job, when I went to work for Raymond Green shortly after my City & Guilds training.
When I started work at Farmstead in 1986, a few years after that first cabinetmaking job, Oscar and I were living in a row house in Cambridge with three strangers. Two of my fellow tenants, Mel and Paul, quickly became friends. By this time Patrick and I had married, then divorced.
Each day I rode my bike to the train station, put it in the baggage car and rattled along until we reached the country station closest to the workshop, then retrieved the bike and rode the rest of the way. Anyone who lived in England in the mid-1980s will know that back then, sunny days were few and far between. No matter the season, most days were chilly, beneath an overcast sky – character-forming, and it certainly made the occasional sunny day all the more worthy of wonder. Riding a 10-speed bicycle through the dark in lashing December rain only to wait on the wind-swept platform for the train back to Cambridge did nothing to bolster my spirits. It was finally time to learn how to drive.
I inquired with a driving school and found a teacher who would cram the instruction into a single week. Now I just had to arrange for time off from work. My bosses wouldn’t give me a week off but agreed to let me take driving lessons for half of each weekday, so that’s what I did. I’d heard stories about the difficulty of passing the driving test on the first try. I really needed to get this thing done, so I took every chance to practice. And it wasn’t as though I had to force myself; I found I loved the process of driving, the way I could turn my will to go from A to B into action through a gear stick, steering wheel and pedals. (Nearly all English vehicles back then came with manual transmission.) The car became an extension of my body. To my relief, I passed the test on the first try. Now I could take Oscar with me to work instead of leaving him in my room at home. A few years old and safely beyond the destructiveness of puppyhood, Oscar was well-behaved. He stayed by my bench most of the day while I worked, leaving briefly at lunchtime to hunt for dropped bits of ham sandwich or breadcrumbs off a fellow worker’s Scotch egg.
He was the best kind of dog – affectionate, loyal, attentive. He loved to chase a ball but was equally glad to take off across a Fenland field in pursuit of a jet from the nearby Royal Air Force base. As a pup he’d been endlessly curious. He loved to snuggle and play. When thwarted, his need for attention occasionally turned to damage, as when he pulled the copy of Ernest Joyce’s “The Technique of Furniture Making” that I had borrowed from the Isle of Ely College library off the bookcase at home and tore its 495 pages into a paper puzzle, wolfing down a chunk of the spine and chewing the top right inch and a half of the clothbound cover. Aside from making me pay for a replacement copy, the people at the library wanted me to return the original. I persuaded them to let me keep it and spent hours piecing the pages back together with cellotape that has since turned yellow-brown. Oscar and I were together for 13 years. Then I let him go in a moment I will always regret. What follows is his story.
In the summer of 1980, several years before I worked at Farmstead, I was close to completing my coursework in furniture making, when our neighbor’s red setter, Sherry, gave birth to a litter of pups. My mother’s bearded collie, Alistair, was the father; he’d escaped from the backyard of their house in Friday Bridge and run across the road when Sherry was in heat. Alistair wasn’t alone in wandering the ’hood; a compact, light-brown, smooth-coated dog named Sniffer was quite the lad and likely had many a litter to his name. But there was little doubt these had come from Alistair – the doghouse was squirming with red and black puppies, not a brown or smooth-haired one among them.
We hadn’t had a dog since Sidney and Phoebe. Now that I was an adult and nearly finished with my training, I longed for a dog of my own. I felt a sense of obligation to our neighbor, given that my mother’s dog was responsible for the pups. They spilled out in a clambering mass, falling over each other to meet the visitor. A few moments later, a tiny black face with intense brown eyes and a rumpled moustache poked out, peering around to assess conditions. That was my dog: the loner, the shy boy, the cautious one. I reached inside the opening and pulled him out the rest of the way.Oscar loved to run. Unfortunately, I did not know how to train him. I had an ordinary collar and lead, not the kind that would have discouraged a dog from pulling; he would lean so hard into our path that I could scarcely contain him. It was exasperating. I yanked his leash angrily, too ignorant to know how ineffective (not to mention dangerous) my correction might be.
Patrick and I were married in 1981. By then, we were both working for my first cabinetmaking boss, Raymond Green, building kitchens in a frigid old horse-stable-turned-workshop. A couple of years later, we moved to the industrial town of Reading. By then I was ready for a change – not just a new location, but a new line of work. Although I’d learned a lot from Raymond about the business of cabinetmaking, as well as new techniques, I felt emotionally and physically beaten down by my two-plus years of professional woodworking. The work had become depressingly monotonous and repetitive. I wanted to make a living in a more social setting, ideally an office.
At first we stayed with Patrick’s mother at her council flat in Bracknell, on Reading’s outskirts. She doted on Oscar and spoiled him like a grandson. She always had a box of Good Boy Choc Drops on hand, and after a few tries, loved to take him out for walks. He slept in the guest room with us and stayed home with her while we looked for work.
I’d answered an ad for a clerk position in the travel office at the students’ union of Reading University. What clinched the hire was my happy guess at the capital of Yugoslavia, as it was then known: Belgrade. I could not believe my luck in getting the job; I would be working in an office with several women, all of us under 35. The office was not in a freezing barn, but a comfortable building. The position involved selling tickets to professors who were going on book tours around the United States and agricultural students flying home to Dakar or Denpasar. Those were the days of hand-written airline tickets on paper and bookings made over the phone. There was a lot to learn, and I found all of it a welcome challenge.
My mother’s mother, Esse, had always said she wanted to help me buy a house and make a home. Reading looked and felt like home, so one day I made a very expensive transatlantic collect call from a pay phone and asked if she would help us buy a row house about a mile-and-a-half from the office where I worked. A basic two-up, two-down with a tiny kitchen and bath in a lean-to addition at the back, the house was one away from the precipice at the end of Edgehill Street, which was aptly named. The neighborhood was still decidedly working class, so it was affordable, even to people like us who made close to minimum wage. I comforted myself with the observation that the house at the end would go over the hill before ours did. Esse was ill with pancreatic cancer at the time, so my grandfather flew over by himself to look at the house, gave us the down payment (around ₤5,000) and co-signed for the loan. I was ecstatic and have never stopped being grateful for that help.
Each morning I got up early and took Oscar for a long walk, then had breakfast and walked to work. Sometimes I took him with me. My co-workers loved him, and Bronwen, especially, always made a fuss over him. Oscar couldn’t get enough. A few years later Patrick and I moved to the old cathedral town of Saffron Walden in Essex, where our marriage fell apart. There, Gregor, a classmate during our training as furniture makers, took over from Bronwen as Oscar’s favorite friend. He took Oscar for walks to Audley End Park and sneaked him the odd treat from the fish and chip shop. Gregor would occasionally drive over in his jeep and pick us up. One day he parked the jeep in front of the house where Patrick and I had lived and Oscar refused to get out. He sat there, eyes forward, as if to say You can’t make me get out. There has been too much disruption of late, and I’m staying put. I’m going wherever you go.
I moved back to the States in the summer of 1987. My sister had moved back several years before, and my mother and stepfather had followed; they were living in the house where we’d lived with our father before our family split up. It would make an ideal place to land and make a plan.
My mother with her German shepherd, Zak, and Oscar.
I’d visited New England the previous winter. I knew I wanted to be in the Northeast – if I had to leave England, it would be for a part of North America that looked and felt as close to England as I could find. I’d rented a car on that trip and first explored the Hudson Valley, then gone as far as western Massachusetts, where, after a long expanse of no towns, I came upon what appeared to be a semi-abandoned industrial town, North Adams, which had had a thriving mill industry thanks to its location on the Hoosic River but now seemed more like a beautiful mirage full of 19th-century houses with turrets, fretwork and other elaborate architectural details. I might not have a particular place in mind, not to mention a job, but New England would be my general destination.
I sold some of my possessions, gave a lot of others away, then had the rest shipped with a moving company, to be held at the Port of New York until I had a place to live. My friend Edward was going to America with me.After putting Oscar in the officially mandated crate, I said goodbye at Heathrow, praying he would survive the eight-hour flight in the hold.
At Miami International Airport, Edward and I went through baggage claim and customs. I spotted Oscar across the hall. No sooner had he glimpsed me than he let out a heartbreaking, groggy howl, still under the influence of the sedative he’d had for the ride. But the most rewarding reunion came when my mother picked us up and took us home. She and my stepfather still had Alistair, Oscar’s father; they’d brought him when they moved from England. When the two dogs saw each other for the first time in years, they sniffed each other tentatively. Then, all of a sudden, there was a frenzy of perked-up ears and wagging tails. It was enough to bring tears to my eyes.
I bought a used two-door Ford Escort car, and after several days, Edward and I set off with Oscar on the drive north. We stayed in motels that allowed dogs, and finally stopped in South Hadley, just outside of Amherst, Massachusetts, where I signed a lease for a one-bedroom apartment on the second floor of a house. Edward found a job in Worcester and moved there. I applied for office jobs but was turned down for every one. While looking through job ads in a local paper I came across one for furniture makers at a business in Vermont. By this time I’d had my fill of rejection; perhaps I should give my own trade another chance, instead of trying to fit my square peg into another round hole. I called. The people seemed genuinely nice. We set up a meeting.
I drove up with Oscar for a visit. The company had arranged for me to stay at a bed-and-breakfast. Before the interview I was so nervous that I bought a package of cookies and ate the entire box, diverting a few from my mouth to Oscar’s. It was comforting to have an ally on this journey away from a home that was not yet home.
I took the job gratefully when they offered. Oscar and I moved to Montpelier, Vermont, the closest sizable town to the shop, where I rented a small apartment in a depressing house with stained shag carpet and fake wood paneling on the walls. Oscar and I were together. We would make it work. …
Spot the dog. Oscar in a field of lupines on a day trip to Idaho.
“The story of my life is a whole series of failures in lots of ways,” says David Savage, an artist, designer, maker and founder of Rowden Atelier, a furniture design school and workshop in North Devon, England. “You don’t look at how you fall over, but it’s kind of how you get up again, the whole process.”
And David did get up, again and again. Some may call that a solid work ethic, perseverance, moxie. Or, when a young family is in the picture, survival. Perhaps, though, the getting up again is simply the root of being a maker.
David says it took a visit from Christopher Schwarz in 2015 to define the culture of Rowden. It was then that Chris noted a strong line of identity coming from the Arts and Crafts Movement to Rowden students.
That, says David, is what Rowden is. “It’s not the celebration of the flowery wallpaper of Arts and Crafts, but the celebration of who a craftsperson is — the treatment of a maker not just as a pair of hands to manufacture stuff but as a genuine contributing human being making something that’s worth having. The celebration of that is what we do here at Rowden.”
Every time David faced a challenge or failed in some way, the act of starting over came from an acknowledgement of worth. Sometimes it took an outsider. Sometimes the realization came from within. But it was the title of maker, with all its history and meaning, and the innate desire to make something worth having, that pushed David to get up and create, not just a piece of furniture, but a life, and one he deemed worth living.
Art in the Place of Speech
Born David Binnington in 1949, David grew up on the Yorkshire coast in post-war Bridlington. Both his parents were entrepreneurial and relatively prosperous. His mother, a hairdresser, owned several shops in town. And his father, an importer and manufacturer of soft drinks, owned a small factory.
“My childhood and youth were afflicted by a stammer,” David says. “Have you seen that movie, ‘The King’s Speech?’ Then you appreciate a little bit of what it’s like to have a stammer. Being inside that person with a stammer is awful in that you know where the problem lies, you know that words beginning with ‘b’ are a nightmare because you’re blocked with those. You can see those words coming up in the sentence ahead of you so the tension gets even worse. I describe it as being like trying to talk and eat a very droob-ly bacon sandwich at the same time. It’s just awful.”
David grew up quietly, rarely speaking but always listening — a skill that has served him well. “One of the great arts of being a designer is to be a very good listener so you hear what the client is actually telling you,” he says. “Most of us don’t hear. We only perceive a certain proportion of anything. I was a good listener because I didn’t say anything.”
With conversing being nearly impossible, David was drawn to art, which required little to no speech. His dedication and strong portfolio earned him a spot at The Ruskin School of Art at the University of Oxford in 1968.
“It was unlike a lot of the current art schools in that it was very requiring of you to gain skill in drawing, especially,” David says. “Mid-Atlantic expressionism was the happening thing. So you have studios filled with dry ice and naked bodies. This is the liberated 60’s and everybody is having a gas. They’re all on acid and weed and it’s a blast. But I didn’t go that way. I wanted to learn. Something told me I needed to learn how to do this. I needed to have a skill in order to be expressive. What was being thrown out at that time was the very idea that you needed a skill to be expressive, that skill was an inhibition to expression. I think that’s nonsense.”
The school, originally called the Ruskin School of Drawing, was founded by John Ruskin in what is now the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology. (In 1975 the school moved to its current location on High Street.)
“So I went to this very fussy old art school, which was in a brilliant place,” David says. “It was in a few rooms in this fabulous museum. … It has all kinds of things from Egyptian sarcophagi to Samurai armor to Greek sculpture. Fantastic Greek sculpture. So if you’re me and 19 from Yorkshire, this is a mind-blowing experience.”
Much of what David learned wasn’t necessarily taught, but rather absorbed through the skin. “If you want to go out for a cigarette you have to walk from the studios through the Greek sculpture collection to sit right outside the door so it just becomes a part of your day, looking at genuine Greek sculpture from 400 BC carvings.”
David describes the school’s teaching methodologies as old-fashioned: You couldn’t draw the life model until you spent the better part of three months drawing Greek casts. “You were asked to use your eyes,” he says. “You used drawing as a means of looking very hard, because that’s really what drawing is: It’s looking very hard and exercising your eyes and your hands and actually coordinating them.”
Learning how to draw this way has allowed David to see better and that, he says, is the key to becoming a good maker.
“The thing I teach my students now is if you want to be a really good maker you really need good eyes and you need a hand that draws well enough. You don’t have to draw like an artist. You just have to draw well enough.” This, his says, provides you with another tool. “Drawing enables you to work out the inside of that joint and how those two parts come together. You can sketch it out, you can draw it, you can think it out, you can X-ray the joint in your head and sketch it out immediately. It’s a tool.”
This tool allows makers to create their own visual vocabulary, outside of images found online. And this, David says, he learned way back in the 1960s.
A drawing by David Savage.
“When you sit down and you draw something, some of it you like the shape of it,” David says. “It may be a seashell or a bit of a twig or maybe the shape of a woman’s leg. You sit down and you draw it and you put down five or six well-observed honest lines. You don’t need to draw it anymore. That image goes into the back of your head, into your visual vocabulary. It becomes part of your visual vocabulary and you build up that visual vocabulary in your lifetime. And so you sit down 30 years later to draw a table leg and what pops off on the end of your pencil in your complete unconsciousness is something observed maybe 30 years ago. This is part of your visual vocabulary, it’s the stuff you internalized. This is very different from Pinterest or Instagram, which is external, not internal. So I learned to draw, which is a very powerful thing.”
After earning his undergraduate degree David says he had another amazing stroke of fortune: He won a postgraduate place at the Royal Academy Schools in London. Centered smack-dab in the middle of the art world on Cork Street and Bond Street, among all the galleries, was David, “this guy from Yorkshire who stammered a lot,” he says. He was given a grant, a studio and the pick of teachers for three years. “Crikey,” he says. “It was a wonderful experience.”
After graduating from the Royal Academy of Schools in 1974, David teamed up with a fellow student, Desmond Rochefort, and together they created The Public Arts Workshop. It was after living in, what David calls, “the guts of the art world,” he became more interested in something that didn’t exist in Britain at the time — public art. “I didn’t want to get involved with the galleries or selling the commodities of paintings,” he says. “But I wanted to be a painter.”
“In 1939, an organization called the British Blackshirts tried to march through a very largely Jewish area in East London,” David says. “They tried to have this march down Cable Street, and there was a huge riot. They were stopped from marching — the local uprising actually prevented them from doing that march and it became very famous. It was called The Battle of Cable Street. And it was one of those events that prevented the growth of fascism in Britain in the 1930s.”
Beginning in 1977, David raised money and worked on designs for a 70-foot-high mural depicting the battle on an old wall of what used to be Stepney town hall on Cable Street. He had hoped to have two assistants, but there was never enough money for that. So for three years David ran up and down the scaffolding that covered the wall, drawing and painting.
And then, a right-wing organization vandalized it.
“I crashed and burned,” David says. “I was left damaged and with no confidence and thinking, I don’t want to be a mural painter anymore. If I go back to Oxford on a scaffold, it’s going to kill me. So I pulled out. And I’m not greatly proud of that, but I knew that I had to, to stay alive.”
The project was picked up by someone else and completed, as David says he knew it would be. But then he wondered, What next?
The Origins of a Furniture Maker, in the Style of Gimson
David liked being physical. He didn’t mind running up and down that scaffolding — he knew it was good for him. He wanted to use his brain. He wanted to use his hands. “I wanted to use all of me and I was fed up of not making a living out of this.”
In the meantime, he made some furniture. “When I say ‘furniture,’ this is just four bits of wood held up with screws,” he says. He made something for the garden, using pine, screws and glue. This led to a new train of thought: “Maybe I could make things,” he says. “Maybe I could use my hands and my knowledge. I wanted something to use my aesthetic sense and what became particularly inspiring for me was the Arts and Crafts Movement.”
Particularly, Ernest Gimson — trained as an architect he set up a workshop in the Cotswolds countryside where he made what was at the time (he died in 1919) modern English furniture. “I thought that was a role model that I could follow,” David says.
David also looked to Edward Barnsley, another key figure in the Arts and Crafts movement, along with The Edward Barnsley Workshop. And then came Alan Peters, author of “Cabinetmaking: The Professional Approach” and former apprentice of Barnsley. David visited Alan and enrolled in a short, two-week course with him.
“He was instrumental in turning me into a functioning furniture maker,” David says. “It was his example that I very much took to heart. I wanted a workshop like Alan’s. And I wanted to be a craftsman.”
There were other influences. David was inspired by James Krenov’s aesthetic. And John Makepeace’s clear idea on how to run a business. “His example was you needed three legs to stand on and I thought that was interesting,” David says. The legs? Technique, design and business. “And I thought, Hey, that makes sense.”
At this point David was still living in London, living on social security. “They didn’t think very much of my retraining myself but they had a kind of tolerance of it for a little while,” he says. That tolerance, along with the bit of money people began giving him to make pieces, allowed David to learn.
“I read a lot of books,” he says. “I read Charles Hayward, anything by Hayward I could get a hold of. I read back copies of The Woodworker magazine. I was very good at using the library. My local librarian was my best friend and she would get me books from all over the country.”
Around this time David also met someone, a friend of his first wife. “He was a wonderful craftsman and he didn’t want to teach me anything,” David says. “So I said, ‘I’ll come work for you. You don’t have to pay me anything.’ And he thought that was very unusual. So I’d go and spend time in his workshop when I could and he had a very Japanese way of teaching in that he would completely ignore me. And then when he saw me in a desperate trouble he’d throw a scraper blade at me and say, ‘No! No. You do it this way’ and walk away again. But his example was very powerful.”
Upstairs in David’s house was a small studio, which David turned into his workshop. He struck deals. He told family and friends that if they bought materials and paid him enough to buy a new tool, such as a router, he’d make them a piece of furniture. “It was a step,” David says.
His client list, and reputation, grew.
Then, the IRA bombed London. David’s wife at the time had just finished training to become a teacher and was looking for a job. So they looked outside of London and ended up in Bideford, a port town in north Devon.
“Everybody that spoke to us said you’re crazy moving out of London,” David says. “You’re crazy moving away from anybody who might want to buy anything you want to make. And that was true. But it also made some kind of sense. We actually needed to get out of the bloody city and now I know why. It was actually the requirement to be in the countryside.”
(We’re skipping ahead now, just for a moment.) Rowden overlooks a meadow, a lake and trees. It’s not far from the beach, shells and water. David needed to be rooted in the countryside, in the same way Ernest Gimson did. It wasn’t until years later that David made this connection of craft and place — of what’s required, for some, to be a maker.
A Change in Name, Success and Failure
In Bideford, David says a very curious thing happened. His first wife’s surname was Savage. Although not married at the time, they had lived together nearly 20 years and in Devon, while looking for a property to buy, David would tell agents his last name was Savage. “I couldn’t say my own name, because it began with a ‘B.’ Binnington is still a word I would rather not say if I could.”
But Savage.
That was a name he could say with confidence. For the first time in his life, David could finally introduce himself. “And it was a new town so no one knew us,” he says. “And curiously, it kind of unlocked things. If you can say who you are, if you can introduce yourself, then it kind of became slightly easier. So that rather changed things.”
David legally changed his name to David Binnington Savage. And with his new name, his stammer began to lessen.
In 1983 David established David Savage Furniture Makers in Bideford. He found a big building that needed a lot of work, and he rented it. He also began writing for magazines. He would teach himself how to sharpen a scraper or use a hand plane and then, he’d write about it. Between 1983 and 1990 he wrote a monthly column in The Woodworker magazine called “The Craft of Cabinet Making.”
He made furniture for clients in London and assembled kitchen furniture for a builder on a monthly basis. Then a local furniture maker who was teaching students wanted to stop teaching. He asked David if he would take on two students who still needed to finish out their course. David said, “No.”
“And then I went back and started assembling these kitchen cabinets and I thought, Maybe it would be easier than actually doing this.” So he agreed to take on the students, who had only made a bench and an oilstone box in their first six months. “They came and they started to pay me money,” David says. And he taught them things he, himself, had only just learned how to do.
This, too, David realized, tied back to the Arts and Crafts Movement. Over the next few years he established a system where he allowed students, but always had more craftsmen than students in the workshop. This resulted in him being able to choose his best students as employees. “None of this was my great plan,” he says. “It just evolved that way.”
By now David was making pieces every day, and every single piece coming out of his shop was his design, his imagery.
One of his early students and a former PR executive, Malcolm Vaughan, taught David the art of writing a press release and the importance of nice photographs. “It was almost that not a month wouldn’t go by when a piece made by David Savage wasn’t in the magazines,” he says. “One of them went viral and boom! We were making Camelot chairs for everybody and everyone.”
Camelot dining chair by David Savage
The first Camelot chair was for now longtime clients Mary and Derek Parks.
David had made a large walnut reception desk for a corporate client in London. “A few weeks later I got a phone call saying they’ve sold the building [what was then the new Covent Garden site] and I said, ‘Horray!’ But they didn’t want one of my desks.” The new owners wanted a different desk, and David says he was heartbroken. And then mad, when he learned that the desk had gone to the managing director’s country house in Dorset.
“I tried ringing up this woman and I was not happy that it had all gone wrong,” David says. He finally got a hold of the managing director’s wife, Mary Parks. She loved the desk and wanted David to build more furniture.
David was bitter. But a few days later he drove to the Parks’ residence in Chelsey. “Money was pouring out of the whole place, you could see it,” he says. David met Mary and the two discussed design options for a dining room table and chairs. “And then her husband, Derek, walks in and he’s three sheets to the wind, totally pissed,” David says. Derek invites David to his house in Dorset. “And I was thinking, Christ. These people are going to be my clients and I hate it.”
Two weeks later David met Derek at his 15th-century Dorset manner house. “Derek was then a totally different person,” David says. “He was in the process of restoring [the house] in the most exquisitely sensitive way.” But more inspiring to David was this: “He took me around and he introduced me to all his gardeners and his chauffeur and the guy who polished his shoes, and he’s speaking to them, telling me about their children and about who they are and what they were doing. And he blew me away because I got the sense that this guy was operating on a totally different plane from me. He was an extremely high-functioning man. He was able to deal with people in a way that I couldn’t conceive of dealing and I was blown away by that.”
Derek and Mary spoke to David about their wants and needs, and David listened. And that, David says, was the first time he thought, “I can actually do this.”
“If I can find people that want to have really good furniture, I can do this,” he says. “I can do this and I can make a profit out of it.”
David hired a photographer to take a picture of one of the Parks’ dining room chairs and it struck a chord: “That photograph of that chair was in every color supplement of every glossy magazine for the next two years,” he says.
David had made it.
“It’s those kind of steps which are invisible, in that you don’t know you’re going to do that but then you do,” he says. David didn’t intend to build a furniture business, but he did. In 1984 David became a member of the Devon Guild of Craftsmen followed by the Fellowship of the Society of Designer Craftsmen in 1992.
Love Chairs Version 2
Honduras Rosewood Chaise Lounge/ Day Bed
Perseus
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He was happy. “Happy as a clam!” he says. “Totally involved. Totally engaged. I didn’t know where we were going but I was making furniture and getting more confidence in dealing with people.”
Then, bankruptcy.
“Things are flying along really well,” David says. “I made a great mistake in buying another workshop.” At the time David and his employees were in a 2,000-square-foot workshop and they were simply out of space. Fifty yards down the road was a 3,000-square-foot workshop — well insulated with three-phase electric. For years it was for sale but David could never afford it. Eventually the price came down to a point where he could no longer resist. He bought it.
“And that was a disaster in that you no longer have one workshop, you have two,” he says. Employees argued over who got to work in the new shop. “It was not a cohesive unit in that everybody could sit around the fire at lunchtime and they could have a conversation. They could have two conversations and that was a nightmare. That was a big mistake.”
Around this time David was coming out of the recession. He had laid off staff, but things seemed OK. Until, “I got in another classic mistake,” David says. “I got a big customer. A big customer that wanted a lot of furniture, really liked my work, his wife really liked my work.”
The customer was a city trader. He had just come from the United States and bought a house in London. “I did a load of drawings and made the mistake of saying, ‘Yes, we can do all of that,’ which mean that I pretty much had one customer for a period.”
The work, which was spread over four or five benches, was intended to be done in three stages. David and his employees completed the first stage and they were paid. “It was the second stage that got me,” David says. “I went up there and he wasn’t there. The house was closed up and he had gone back to America. I couldn’t get a hold of him in any way. I couldn’t get a hold of him through his company. They wouldn’t let me speak with him. So I was left with a pile of furniture I couldn’t sell. No money coming in and bills to pay. My only option was to go bankrupt, which I did, which is a bit of a life-changing experience.”
David closed the Bideford workshop. “I was thinking, What the hell am I going to do now? I’ve got a young family, a baby of 18 months, and what am I going to do now?”
He says the experience was akin to stepping off the conveyor belt of life. “When you’re on the conveyor belt of life you’re moving and this time you can take a step off it and you can observe the conveyor belt and see what is happening.”
Sometimes, though, it takes someone else to push you back on the conveyor belt. And for David, one of those people was a client, Maggie Rose.
The Value of a Craftsperson, Both as Maker and Human Being
David’s tools, benches and furniture in process were all slated to be sold at auction. Maggie called and asked if she could buy the unfinished pieces of furniture and then give them back to David for finishing.
“Then someone rings up and says, ‘I really like those chairs you made for me and I’d really like a desk,’” David says. “And I knew all these craftsmen in all these workshops so I was all set up doing drawings for clients and selling furniture and having it made in various workshops around me.”
This worked for 18 months.
“That was really quite good,” David says. “I hadn’t a workshop but we were actually functioning. We were doing the jobs of meeting clients, doing drawings, taking orders, getting furniture made, getting paid. Everybody was happy. Until my second wife, Carol, said, ‘David, you know that room you’re in in your office?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ She said, ‘Well, you can’t have it anymore.’ And I said, ‘Why?’ And she said, ‘Because I’m pregnant. I’m going to have a baby.’”
So then David was faced with putting his foot back on the conveyor belt, the one that required a workshop. He was tentative, but knew he had to take the plunge. He wrote an advertisement for the local paper: “furniture maker looking for barns to convert.”
“I wanted to be out in the countryside,” he says. “I wanted the green fields around me. So I found myself at Rowden.”
David met a maker, Nick Chandler, who he employed. For four or five years the two of them worked together, and David calls that time a period of great liberation. Without having many employees to support, David was able to take more risks with his designs.
Solid Ebony and Pearwood Lamp Table
“My wife encouraged me to be more free,” David says. “She was saying, ‘Go on. You can do all sorts of stuff. You’re a crazy artist. That’s what you should be doing.’ And we did all sorts of pieces that are important now, things that are central pieces.”
In the end, bankruptcy, David says, was “an enormous blessing.”
“Change is a wonderful thing,” he says. “It’s always energizing. It’s always a great thing to embrace. Moving out here and working with Nick was a great thing. He was a wonderful guy to spend time with.”
With time, Rowden developed into what it is today: a furniture design school that offers classes in drawing, design, woodworking and business. David is mostly retired, having delegated teaching to former students (with the exception of head craftsman Daren Milman). Fellow furniture designers and makers now on staff include Ed Wild, Jon Greenwood, Jonathan Walter and Lakshmi Bhaskaran.
Although Rowden’s focus is almost primarily on education, David will occasionally make a piece of furniture for someone he knows and cares about — currently that’s a desk and chair in pear wood.
“It’s great,” David says. “It’s a great thing now.”
David’s home in Devon.
David and his wife, Carol, live in the oldest continually inhabited house in the county. It’s since been split into 13 units, and they live around the back “in a courtyard and I think cows probably lived where lived or it was a dung heap,” he says, adding that it’s great fun.
He has two children, a daughter who recently earned a degree in psychology and a son who is in his second year of university. For now, they’re not interested in making.
“When I was quite young it was kind of expected of me that I might follow my father’s direction and I didn’t want to do that,” David says. “So I’ve never in any way laid this on them. I want them to do what they want t to do. So it will be here, hopefully for them when they need it, or hopefully it will provide them income after I’m long gone. But we’ll see.”
And so Rowden exists, not as a factory for employment or as a means to an end, but in celebration of craftsmanship and making things, and a testament to the life David lives.
“I feel extremely fortunate that I’ve lived a varied and challenging life,” he says. “It’s been great. I’ve been having a great time. Yeah, very fortunate indeed. Very fortunate.”
