Lost Art Press

Category: Honest Labour

No Mere Chattel

Posted on by Kara Uhl

Happy New Year! The following is excerpted from “Honest Labour: The Charles H. Hayward Years” – a collection of essays from The Woodworker magazine while Charles H. Hayward was editor (1936-1966). Please excuse the male-centric language. We are all products of our time, and this essay, written in 1955, was no exception.

—now that we are in the early days of another year here is something to which we can set our hand that is infinitely worth doing

Since the days when the first hunter devised the first hunting knife, people have always shown themselves eager to possess anything that had a rarity value, something a man had made or, having discovered, had wrought upon with such skill that it became infinitely desirable. The puzzle of it is that today so many men accept passively the idea that they should have nothing in their own homes of rarity value, forgetting that in their own two hands they have the power of making, and that which they make will be of necessity unique. It may only be a chair or a table which, at a glance, may look very much like any other chair or table. The fact remains that on every small detail in the making the craftsman is able to consult his own choice: he will put in a small bit of carving on this knob just for fun, or he will give a steeper rake than usual to the legs to suit his fancy, or change the thicknesses of the original design to something that pleases him better. He will have an eye for the room, even the position in it that the pieces is to occupy, and he will judge the size accordingly. At every point he is able to consult his own wishes so that, in the finish, this is no mere chattel turned out by a machine like hundreds of others, but something unique and personal to himself. The points of difference may be very small, but they are there, and through every tin variation they proclaim the impress of his personality. That is why it is always the immediate contact with the maker that men value, the statuette or piece of pottery that is an original and not turned out from a mould, an original painting, the first impressions of an etching, giving new minted the true value of each line nearest to the artist’s hand, and not least the original work of the craftsman with the tale of his infinite patience and skill written in each sensitive line for the discerning eye to find, if it but seek.

***

How many of us in times past have started the New Year with new resolutions of the most ambitious kind, especially when we were very young and there seemed no reason to our ardent imaginations why the highest honours should not be within our eager reach. It takes the passage of the years to convince most of us of our limitations, and a maturer wisdom to learn how to work within those limitations and produce our own particular type of achievement. We are not all cast in the mould of elder statesmen and great leaders of men, but we each have our own particular innate gift of creativeness which, if developed, can give us both the outlet and sense of achievement we all need. That power to introduce something that is unique into our surroundings; that power to give an added grace and charm to the things we use, distinguishing them from the impersonality of manufactured articles, is the power of the free man. It will grow stronger with use for, once we begin to make things to suit ourselves, our outlook undergoes a subtle change. We begin to look at our surroundings with new eyes in a way that is both critical and discriminating. Critical, because once we are able to mould them more or less to our wishes, we begin to see that there are quite a number of things we would like to change, and that there is no reason why we should not change them. Discriminating, because once we begin making in good earnest we learn from first-hand experience the essential qualities of a first-class article, and in the attempt to achieve these qualities in our work to distinguish them in other things. The man with the trained eye and hand is as sensitive to the lines and shapes of pottery, for instances, as he is to those of a fine piece of furniture, and that quality of uniqueness, once started, can spread itself to the rest of his surroundings. That does not mean that he will be living in a little paradise of eccentricity, fantastically different from his neighbours. It does mean that his surroundings will be stamped with an essentially personal quality, which will have just that touch of distinction and interest which makes for pleasant living.

***

It is as well to remind ourselves, now that we are in the early days of another year, that here is something to which we can set our hand that is infinitely worth doing. To build up a home that makes a gracious and pleasant abiding place for our family and for the welcome of our friends, one in which we can feel free in spirit and in purpose, is to have achieved no mean ambition. The very fact that our personality has found expression through our own creativeness is to grow both in personality and freedom and with the actual doing the power of achievement grows. This is the kind of power that neither corrupts nor brings unhappiness in its train. Rather it brings with it the satisfaction of one of our deepest instincts and an interest and awareness in life and living that is something altogether different from the eager greed of a man pursuing the glittering prize which the world calls power. For indeed, it is power over himself which the craftsman knows and which has adorned the face of the earth with the lovely monuments of his skill.

The Rejoicing Spirit

Posted on by Kara Uhl

The following is excerpted from “Honest Labour: The Charles H. Hayward Years” – a collection of essays from The Woodworker magazine while Charles H. Hayward was editor (1936-1966). Please excuse the choices of pronouns. We are all products of our time, and Charles Hayward (born in 1898) was no exception. Every time we re-read one of these essays, we’re struck by how so much of it still resonates today. May our shared interests in the craft continue to be the “best kind of aid to living.”

So often it would seem that the wrong kind of memories attach themselves to Christmas. For some people there is a convention of sadness. Things are not what they used to be. Sons and daughters have married and gone their way and left the home hearth desolate. Death has made gaps in the family circle, beloved friends are with us no more, and the tide of mournful reminiscence flows on. But so does the ever-recurring pattern of life. We cannot halt the process. Only the intensely selfish and possessive would even wish to do so.

But surely we can persuade ourselves to an acceptance of the passage of time. The sad things and the bitter things lose their keen edge with the years, but, like the sundial which tells only the sunny hours, we can cherish the happy memories and rejoice in them as being something truly precious of our own.

Once when I was on a train journey, a small boy and his mother came tumbling breathlessly into the compartment, waved off by a happy throng of youngsters. As the train drew out of the station the boy sat back silently, little smiles chasing one another across his face. His mother looked down. “Tired?”

He shook his head and heaved a sign of contentment. “No. I was just thinking. I’ve had such a perfect day.”

Often I thought of him while the war was on, for that time he would have been old enough to fight. Did the memory of his perfect day spent in an English garden amid the happy laughter of his friends come back to him then? I have always felt sure that it did.

And then there are the absurd things in our lives which unite us to “the inextinguishable laughter of the gods.” Once when I was walking behind a friend in a narrow country lane, my foot slipped and I went headlong into a deep ditch. The side was almost perpendicular and for the life of me I could not manoeuvre myself the right way up again. My friend, meanwhile, who had been talking to me over his shoulder, struck by the sudden silence, looked round and found to his amazement I had completely vanished. Looking up and down and round about he saw at last a pair of feet projecting from the ditch. The moment when his horrified face came peering over the top at me, then to all intents and purposes standing on my head, still remains one of the funniest moments of my life. Indeed, we were both so paralysed with laughter that rescue by means of his helping hand was a slow business.

It still remains a memory which can set me chuckling at any time—and, oh, life is so mercifully full of them, if we know how to enjoy them and make them truly our own.

Then there is the chronic idea of loneliness, which is becoming one of the great bugbears of our age. Unfortunately, it is real enough for a great many people. What always seems so unreal are the means taken to alleviate it. The Christmas parties, the communal get-togethers, television and the like, are panaceas which bring their moments of happiness, but they cannot provide any real cure for loneliness. As with so many other problems, only the person concerned can find the answer. A rejoicing spirit will rarely be a lonely spirit, for he or she will be able to enter with liveliness and interest into whatever part of the human scene their lot is thrown. Moreover, for anyone who has been able to develop some definite interest or practical skill, there is always too much to occupy him for the thought of loneliness to enter in. The important thing is to find an interest in life which accords with the needs of one’s own nature.

For the man who is essentially practical a handicraft is the answer, one in which he can turn any skill which he already possesses to better and finer use, right up to the point where his craftsmanship enters the realm of true art and becomes a source of increasing satisfaction.

And there is no reason to limit his interest to manual skill. There is a whole wide field of literature dealing with furniture making and its allied crafts and the social history behind them. In fact, there are all manner of related interests which can be pursued by anyone who is prepared to take sufficient time and trouble. To start with only a meagre equipment of knowledge is no handicap in these days of good libraries and easy accessibility of objects of superb craftsmanship in famous houses and museums. We can browse among them all and follow up any particular trails which most take our fancy.

Interests will open up as we go, leading to many a fascinating bypath which at the beginning could never have been foreseen. A man has to care sufficiently to make the initial start and to be sufficiently persistent till the thing grips him. After that he will insensibly acquire those inner resources of his own which, in the long run, are the best kind of aid to living.

‘A New Year Spirit’

Posted on by fitz
Note: The above image is unrelated to the column below – but we needed some illustration! It’s from Vol. 3 of “The Woodworker: The Charles H. Hayward Years.” That volume, along with the three other volumes that are currently out of stock, will be available again soon!

The following is excerpted from “Honest Labour: The Charles H. Hayward Years” – a collection of essays from The Woodworker magazine while the legendary Charles H. Hayward was editor (1936-1966). These columns are like nothing we’ve ever read in a woodworking magazine. They are filled with poetry, historical characters and observations on nature. And yet they all speak to our work at the bench, providing us a place and a reason to exist in modern society.

It always gives one a little sense of shock, I think, to come up against fresh evidence of what a very ancient craft woodwork is, and how very slow to change. During the re-building of the Bank of England, which took place a short time ago, workmen excavating the foundations came down to the peat bed of the old Wal­brook, a stream which once ran right through the heart of the City, and in it they found an old Roman barrel in a remarkable state of preservation. This barrel is now on exhibition in the British Museum, in the gallery devoted to Roman remains in Britain, and is a magnific­ent example of how traditional craftsmanship has a continuity of its own. The metal bands have perished, leaving only a faint discoloration behind showing their position, but the wood itself is in a remarkable state of preservation, thanks to the action of the peat. And it shows in a startling degree how very little cooperage has changed in the last fifteen hundred years. There is the same treatment of the wood, with diagonal scraping over the inner side, the same bevelling of the timber edges. I nearly said the same bung-hole, but in this instance there are two bung-holes, the theory being that one bung may have got too tightly wedged in, and it was easier to make another hole than to force it.

To me there is always a thrill in discoveries such as these. They leap over the barriers of time, language and race—though even our word “cooper” comes from the Latin cuparius—and show us the men themselves, facing the same difficulties and overcoming them in much the same way as we do to this day. Man’s conquest of material was extraordinarily effective even in the ancient civilisations, and at the highest point of develop­ment in the civilisations of Greece and Rome was in no whit behind our own. If we want to see, for example, what the Greeks could do with stone, we have only to look at the Elgin marbles in the British Museum and see (broken fragments though they are) how they are penetrated with life and feeling; or to look at the marvellous Winged Victory of Samothrace in the Louvre to see how life and movement at their loveliest were wrought into stone, so that we are no longer conscious of it as a stubborn, inert material. Nowadays, by the development of machinery, we have discovered quicker methods for the handling of material, making large scale production possible, but we have carried creative art no further, because that is something which has its genesis in the spirit of man and not in his tools.

I wonder if we are not rather too content nowadays to leave creation alone. Even to let our woodwork confine itself to a few repair jobs about the house, a few useful labour saving articles, and not to set our­selves to conquer our material in real earnest and become expert craftsmen. We are not even dealing with a dead thing. Wood is a living, sympathetic material, having none of the stubbornness of stone; it is man’s oldest friend, and capable of giving beauty as well as service. A good many of us, I think, have the urge for achievement: what is really lacking is the faith to persevere, a faith which becomes increasingly difficult in a world where so little is done by hand. The older type of craftsman saw men all around him working in the same way: he knew what could be done and took it all for granted. But nowadays nothing is easier for the man who works with hand tools to develop a kind of inferiority complex and doubt his own powers, especially if he is doing the thing as a hobby and is out of touch with fellow workers. We need to remind our­selves not only of what is possible but of what other men have done; that a real flame of enthusiasm, combined with determination to become skilled, will liberate powers of doing and creating of which we can only be dimly conscious while we are content to potter.

For there is a dynamic quality about enthusiasm which nothing can resist. You can see it in the street orator, whose whole heart is in his argument, swaying a crowd. You can feel it in the work of any artist—painter, writer, musician, or whatever he be—if he has put himself into the thing he has wrought in, felt it enough, suffered it enough. And the beginning of the year is a good time, it seems to me, to set about enkindling our enthusiasm afresh. For life is a dead thing without it. Make it woodwork, if our tastes lie in that direction; make it stamp collecting; make it anything in the wide world so long as it is alive and vital.

Living as we have all been living, first in a war-weary world and then in a world distracted by slumps and war rumours, it has not been altogether easy to keep any enthusiasm alive. All the more reason then for renewal when the year begins afresh. And we can remind ourselves that some of the best work of the world has been executed in turbulent times. We can see it in the pages of old Vasari, the painter of the Italian Renaissance who has come down to fame, not by reason of his own pictures, but from the fascinating record he has left us of the Florentine craftsmen­—mostly painters and sculptors—of the period. It has long been a habit of mine, whenever I want real refresh­ment of the spirit or feel that I want to recapture the spirit of enthusiasm, to turn back into the pages of old Vasari and read just how those men worked, with a fire, a zeal, a soaring ambition which has never since been equalled. It is a mine of good stories and sage maxims, and the men with all their oddities and idio­syncracies are made to live again. In Florence enthusiasm was communicated from one man to another to a marvellous degree. It is quaintly summed up in the words of an old painter to the young Perugino, who asked him why it was that in Florence men became so perfect in all the arts. It was because, he said, in Florence there was such a spirit of criticism abroad that men judged work upon its own good qualities rather than from the name of its authors. Then prices were so high that they spurred a man on to make money; and thirdly, the very air generated a thirst for honour and glory, since no man of ability would suffer himself to be outdistanced by other men “fashioned like him­self, even though acknowledged to be masters.” Which gets to the root of the matter pretty thoroughly!

— Excerpted from “Honest Labour: The Charles H. Hayward Years“

Craft Companionship

Posted on by fitz

The following is Excerpted from “Honest Labour,” a collection of essays from The Woodworker magazine while the legendary Charles H. Hayward was editor (1936-1966). This book is be the fifth and final volume in our series from The Woodworker.

And here’s hoping that, if you want to, you get to enjoy a few hours alone in the workshop today.

— The finest of all tools, the human hand, is determined by the will, mind, character of the man who wields it.

It often surprises me to find how few people can bear to be alone. It is almost as though they regarded time as a vacuum to be filled rather than as something to be used or enjoyed for its own sake. A man will drift along to the local, the club, or the pictures “to pass away the time” rather than spend a few hours in his own company, and yet it is just those hours when one might be alone that can be turned to the most valuable account. But to bear to be alone one needs an interest—any deep, abiding interest will do. With Paolo Uccello, the Italian painter, it was the interest of perspective which he pursued in all its most intricate forms and which so held him enthralled that we are told: “When engaged upon those matters Paolo would remain alone, like a hermit, with hardly any intercourse for weeks or months, not allowing himself to be seen,” taking pleasure “in nothing except the investigation of difficult and impossible questions of perspective.” A passion for the solving of a problem, an impulse to achieve something is already halfway to creation, and it is in the doing of a creative job that we really lose ourselves to find ourselves, and are no longer the bored, indifferent passers of time, but are unconscious of time.

It would be too much to claim that the man who follows a craft like woodwork is never lonely, but it is certain that he will never know the worst kind of loneliness, the apathy of mind and body which is the negation of life. The very acquisition of skill enriches the personality, adding to a man’s resources, making him more independent, developing his judgment and giving him more confidence in his own powers. We never know our powers, indeed, until we begin to use them, and then it is a lifetime’s job to find out how far they will go. Skill develops with the use of skill and it is one of the few things that can be carried to perfection in a lifetime. For, as we learn from the study of the arts and crafts of the past ages, there is no progress in the capacity of the human hand. The knowledge of tools and machines increases as time goes on, but the finest of all tools, the human hand, is determined by the will, mind, character of the man who wields it and does not develop from one generation to another. Indeed, there are examples of arts and handicrafts centuries old that will stand up to any comparison with the best work of today.

It is a humbling but heartening thought. We are challenged by the past to stand or fall by our own merits. It is commonly recognised nowadays how much the mind is bound up with the skill of the hands. It is in the mind that a job is first seen, planned, willed, and, says Ruskin, the work “is noble or inferior, first, according to the tone of the minds which have produced it and in proportion to their knowledge, wit, love of truth and kindness; secondly, according to the degree of strength they have been able to give forth, but yet, however much we may find in it to be forgiven, always delightful so long as it is the work of good and ordinarily intelligent men.” For indeed it is for a man to choose how he will use his mind—“discovering always, illuminating always, gaining every hour in strength, yet bowed down every hour into deeper humility; sure of being right in its aim, sure of being irresistible in its progress; happy in what it has securely done, happier in what day by day it may securely hope; happiest at the close of life, when the right hand begins to forget its cunning, to remember that there was never a touch of the chisel or the pencil it wielded but has added to the knowledge and quickened the happiness of mankind.”

The Christmas Feast

Posted on by Kara Uhl
Originally published in The Illustrated London News, January 9, 1915.

Publisher’s Note: Please excuse or ignore the choices of pronouns and male-centric language. We are all products of our time, and Charles Hayward (born in 1898) was no exception. It’s interesting to note that as the magazine entered the 1960s, the language and pronouns began to modernize as well. (I’m sure my own writing will be interpreted as specist in 2243 by our squid overlords.) Hayward’s insight and inspiration are legitimate, honest and important – no matter which pronouns are attached to the ideas.

There was that unforgettable incident at the beginning of the 1914 war, when on Christmas Eve in a spontaneous movement of goodwill the British and the German soldiers clambered out of their trenches and exchanged greetings and carols. According to a writer in The times at the time: “Not once or twice but again and again we hear of this sudden change upon the night of Christmas Eve, how there was singing upon one side answered by the others, and how the men rose and advanced to meet each other as if they had been released from a spell. Everyone who tells of it speaks also of his own wonder as if he had seen a miracle; and some say that the darkness became strange and beautiful with light as well as music, as if the armies had been gathered together there not for war but for the Christmas feast.” If only that spirit of goodwill had been allowed to develop instead of being, as it was, quelled by army orders, the history of Europe might have taken a very different turn and we should not now be living under the shadow of the atom-bomb.

***

Most men want peace, although we do not appear to be progressing in the right direction for it, not only because of the constant talk of war but because men are losing their interior peace. There are doctors to-day who believe that the modern advance in material benefits is not bringing with it all the blessings of health and happiness that were once anticipated. While diseases that were recognized as the scourges of mankind are gradually being eliminated, their place is being taken by the “stress diseases,” which have their roots in men’s own inner conflict and are far more difficult to treat. Life is getting altogether too bewildering and complex. We need the simple life lines of faith and belief and good work to our hands to help us steer a course through it.

***

We have only to look at the serene face of some old craftsman who has found his life’s work in the exercise of his skill to realise that here is one way in which a man can find peace. If by responding to the natural urge for creation that is within him his hands have learned to follow the behests of his mind and his whole being is working in unison, he knows the absorbed, integrated peace that to-day is found by few. The world is so busy pandering to our human nature that the very memory of the hidden depths it contains becomes overlaid. No wonder so many men are bewildered and frustrated, seeking their pleasures in eternal things, while the sheer satisfaction that could be theirs of finding and cultivating their own powers in some creative skill of mind and body remains hidden from them. It is not until something happens, some need or enthusiasm which touches off a spark, that the possibilities begin to dawn. Most people nowadays have sufficient time in their leisure to enable them to do the things they really want to do. Every man in his own way can become a craftsman. There are good tools, good materials, good instructors to be had where needed, and anyone who is willing to make the effort and be a little patient with himself can learn. The woodworker has the additional advantage of dealing with one of the very foundation materials of man’s existence, from the time long centuries ago when he first kindled a fire from the boughs of the forest trees right down to the present when timber from the world over provides the material to make his home a gracious and friendly place. And with the feast of Christmas upon us we know that it can be a sanctuary as well, but this is something more than craftsmanship, resting upon the living truth behind it all.

— Charles Hayward, 1957; excerpted from Honest Labour: The Charles H. Hayward Years