The Wheelwright's Shop

By George Sturt

This volume contains a detailed insight into the life and work of the wheelwright. The object of “The Craftsman Series” is to make this literature available in a form convenient for school use. The series consists entirely of books in which the craftsman speaks for himself, and in every volume the text is solely that of the author. George Sturt, the author of this volume, was a lover of the English countryside. Before the publication of 'The Wheelwright’s Shop' in 1923 he had written several other books on rural topics, including 'The Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer', 'The Bettesworth Book', and 'A Farmer’s Life'. The chapters of this book include: 'The Wheelwright’s Shop', 'Timber – Buying', 'Timber – Carting and Converting', 'The Sawyers', 'Timber – Seasoning', ''Wheel-Stuff'', 'Hand-Work', ''Bottom-Timbers'', 'Wagons', 'Learning the Trade', 'Wheels – Spokes and Felloes', 'The Smith – ''Getting Ready''', et cetera. This volume is being republished now complete with a specially-commissioned biography of the author.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: Apr 16, 2013
• ISBN: 9781447493020

Book preview

EDITOR’S PREFACE

An examination of the literature suitable to the needs of adolescent readers and available for their use, especially in schools, brings to light the fact that it includes few books which reveal the personality of the craftsman as well as the interest of his work. Yet no reflective person can fail to realise how great a part the development of constructive activities in the sphere of material things has played in the progress of mankind.

That young people are interested in craftsmen and their work is clear from the popularity, particularly among boys, of books dealing with the more spectacular achievements of the engineer and inventor. But such books are for the most part written more with the aim of presenting technicalities in a popular and readable form than of showing us the craftsman himself—the man behind the work. Moreover, their literary standard is such that they are not usually regarded as subjects for other than purely recreative reading.

Records of their work written by practising craftsmen, or by those who, while directing the work of others, show an intimate knowledge of a craft gained only through an arduous apprenticeship, are not common. Such records, however, do exist, and contain literature of real worth, full of human as well as of technical interest.

The object of The Craftsman Series is to make this literature available in a form convenient for school use.

The need for books of this type is especially obvious at the present time, when so much attention is being given to the practice of crafts as a part of general education.

The Series consists entirely of books in which the craftsman speaks for himself. In every volume the text is solely that of the Author, abridged it may be, but strictly in the literal sense of the term. Apart from the work of selection and arrangement the Editor’s contribution is limited to an introductory chapter, and, where necessary, occasional notes and linking-up passages, the authorship of which is clearly indicated.

George Sturt, the author of this volume, was a lover of the English countryside. Before the publication of The Wheelwright’s Shop in 1923 he had written several other books on rural topics, including The Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer, The Bettesworth Book, and A Farmer’s Life. His last book, A Small Boy in the Sixties, was issued in 1927, the year in which he died.

The original edition of The Wheelwright’s Shop is much larger than this volume. The whole of it is fascinating reading, but not every part is equally easy for young readers to understand.

That a writer of George Sturt’s capacity should find in the trade which circumstances compelled him to enter such scope for his literary powers is itself no mean testimony to the living interest of his subject. The knowledge displayed in the book belies his modest estimate of his own ability as a craftsman also.

In The Wheelwright’s Shop he has left us something that stands by itself—a record of his craft by one who, both in study and workshop, was a master craftsman.

A. F. C.

1930

INTRODUCTION

In The Wheelwright’s Shop you will read much about tools and their users in the later years of the nineteenth century.

No one knows how long it was after the appearance of man on the Earth that he discovered how to make even the crudest tools, but it is certain that many thousands of years have passed since that time. The improvement of tools and of the methods of working with them has been a very, very slow process.

The men of the Old Stone Age used chipped flints as tools. At first these were rough and clumsy; as the centuries went by an improvement was made here, another there, until in the New Stone Age men became expert in sharpening, polishing and using tools of stone.

Again many years passed before the use of metal was understood. Not until about 3000 years before Christ, countless generations after the first tool-users, were metal tools developed to such an extent that their users, the ancient Egyptians, could construct chairs, tables and beds much like those of the present day.

From that period until the time of which this book speaks—the time of our own grandfathers—the tools of the craftsman, and especially of the craftsman in wood, changed very little. The use ofsteel has brought about improvements in cutting edges, and there have been a few other changes, but in their essentials these tools are much the same as those used by the early Egyptians.

In the days of the Old and New Stone Ages each man used his own simple tools for his own purposes, but as time went on, and men began to collect in larger and more settled communities, those who were most expert in tool-using became the makers for the others. Thus began that division of men into craftsmen and others, and later of the craftsmen into stone-workers, wood-workers, metal-workers and the like, which persists into our own time.

There were no books then, and men learned to use tools, and to use them very cleverly indeed, without ever learning to read or write. Boys worked with men to learn their crafts. Some knowledge they could pick up by watching their masters at work, but their real skill came only through long practice and experience.

Such workmen, the craftsmen of the Middle Ages and of later days almost up to our own time, were proud of their trades and jealous of outsiders. They kept their knowledge to themselves and to their apprentices. They formed themselves into trade societies or groups and had their own rules and secrets, some of which they preserved in the form of verses.

In the later Middle Ages in Europe these societies of craftsmen became the craft gilds. The gilds had great power, and were often granted special privileges by those who governed the countries in which their members worked. They were rightly jealous of the reputation of their crafts, and did much to preserve ideals of fine workmanship.

In the days of the gilds practically all craftsmen carried on their trades in small workshops, but, by the middle of the eighteenth century, factories containing crude machines driven by water power had largely displaced the small workshops in trades such as spinning and weaving.

The next century saw steam power applied to industry, and an enormous increase in the number and size of factories. These still further absorbed the small workshops in all but a few trades which had to be carried on where their products were required.

Such a trade was that of the wheelwright, which is described in this book.

With the coming of factories the craft gilds disappeared, and with them their influence on many trades. But as you read this book you will realise that the old gild spirit of pride in fine craftsmanship was not entirely gone in workshops such as Mr Sturt’s up to thirty years or so ago.

Now, however, even the wheelwright’s trade has fallen before the advance of the factory system; or perhaps it would be truer to say, before the advance of the motor-car, the child of the factory system. Motor-cars and tractors are commoner now in country roads and farms than carts were forty years ago.

And so the wheelwrights of this book are among the last of their race. The fine work that they did is not being reproduced in factories; the demand for it has passed, and the craftsmen of to-day have different problems to solve. Yet we must remember that without the age-long growth of experience and skill in crafts such as this our modern machines could not have been developed; nor can they continue to work without the skilled craftsman behind them, inventing, improving, and directing. The machines are tireless; they can do heavier and quicker work than men, but they cannot originate; they can merely reproduce what craftsmen set them to do.

It is fortunate that George Sturt lived in time to write us this book about his dying trade. He tells us how the timber was grown, felled, selected, seasoned and used for its particular purpose; how wheels were built up and tyred; and how waggons were designed and built. And he tells us all this with the love for his trade that was a mark of the old master craftsman.

CHAPTER I

THE WHEELWRIGHT’S SHOP

To say that the business I started into in 1884 was old-fashioned is to understate the case: it was a folk industry, carried on in a folk. method. And circumstances made it perhaps more intensely so to me than it need have been. My father might just possibly, though I don’t think he would, have shown me more modern aspects of it; but within my first month he took ill of the illness he died of five months later. Consequently I was left to pick up the business as best I could from the men. There were never any hands with us. Eight skilled workmen or apprentices, eight friends of the family, put me up to all they could: and since some of them had been born and trained in little old country shops, while this of my father’s was not much better, the lore I got from them was of the country through and through.

The objects of the work too were provincial. There was no looking far afield for

Reviews for The Wheelwright's Shop

[thorold_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Rather like Thomas Hardy, George Sturt was the educated son of a country craftsman, growing up with one foot in late-Victorian intellectual life and the other in the last relics of the pre-industrial culture of southern England. He was working as a grammar-school teacher in the mid-1890s when his father fell ill and he unexpectedly had to take over the running of the family business. This book is his classic account of how the traditional wheelwright gets from a felled tree to a completed farm-wagon or cart, described with the unique insight of someone who knew the business intimately at a time when everything was still done with hand tools, but is able to step far enough back to give a clear explanation to outsiders of why things were done in that particular way. One thing he makes very clear is his view that the farm-wagon - probably the most complex and sophisticated wooden machine in common use, if you exclude ships - was not an arbitrary, aesthetic form, but the result of a long process of evolution and purposeful refinement. The complicated curves and tapers were all there for good reasons, the size of the wheels was determined by nature of the terrain the wagon had to travel over, even the orientation of the planks on the floor was determined by the need to unload using shovels. What is also very striking is the timescale the business worked on. Materials had to be bought about ten years ahead of the time they wee likely to be needed: the wood had to be seasoned slowly for the wagon to have the necessary strength and longevity. Farmers would order new wagons in spring and pay for them at Christmas; a new wagon would be expected to last at least the lifetime of its purchaser (but might come in for repairs after 20 or 30 years); the shop kept patterns for wagons that had been adapted to suit the slightly different conditions of all the local farms, even though it was unlikely that any given pattern would be used more than once or twice a century. When you put that business model together with dangerous tools, cold, dark and dirty workshops, hard, repetitive but precise work, and the need for skills that take many years to learn, it isn't hard to work out why you don't see many wheelwright?s shops around nowadays.