The story of a saw

Like many woodcarvers and other woodworkers, I have a lot of old tools: some with names of previous owners stamped on them. Sometimes I wonder about these tools. Were they once used to produce pieces that I have admired in some great cathedral or stately home by a journeyman worker whose name is now forgotten?

It's rare that the story of one of these tools turns up unexpectedly. That happened with this saw. 

It is a tenon saw made by the firm of W Tyzack, Sons and Turner. The blade is stamped with the words 'Made specially for John Hall, High St, Bullring, Birmingham'.

I inherited the saw from my grandfather Norman. Although still pretty sharp, it had some damage to the handle and so I've displayed it on the wall of my workshop, rather than risk further damage in use.

Norman was brought up in the slums of Birmingham and wrote about his early years in a few short essays, a copy of which has been preserved in the city archives. I'd never read it until last week.

One of the chapters talks about the Bull Ring, the market area of Birmingham at the time. In a paragraph, the story of the saw came to life:

'Higher up in High Street, stood a gas-lit ironmongers, John Hall. It was from this shop that my father, who had just started work at a cabinet makers, bought his first saw. It was brass-backed and cost three shillings and sixpence, which he paid off at sixpence per week. This saw, of a quality not found today, Is now about 90 years old (author's note: this was in 1989) and is a prized possession in my tool kit.'

I never knew that Fred, Norman's father, was ever a cabinet maker and nothing that he made has been passed down in the family to my knowledge. 

Both men have now passed away (Fred before I was born) but I feel closer to both of them when I look at this saw.

Eighteenth century woodworker's clothing and equipment, shown as part of the Hellbrunn Mechanical Theatre in Salzburg, Austria

The Hellbrun Mechanical Theatre is a huge automaton. It was built between 1748 and 1752 and is housed in the Hellbrun palace in Salzburg. The machine was built by a salt miner called Lorenz Rosenegger and was commissioned by Archbishop Andreas Jakob Graf Dietrichstein. 

I came across this animated sculpture while watching a fascinating BBC programme called 'Mechanical Marvels: Clockwork Dreams' which was written and presented by Professor Simon Schaffer. That's him standing in front of the mechanical theatre in the image above. All of the images of the Mechanical Theatre used in this post are screen shots saved from this documentary.

The theatre shows a scene of different trades and professions busily working, watched by the governing elite whose figures move relatively little.

Apart from the incredible skill of Rosenegger in carving the 200-odd figures used in the machine and animating most of them with a water-powered system of mechanisms (together with a water-powered musical organ to cover the sound of the workings in action), I was also struck by the glimpse that the theatre gives into the clothing and tools used by the woodworking trades of the time.

The woodcarver has his workpiece held on a kind of rotating spit-like frame. Chris Pye notes that this type of device is still in common use in some places, such as Southern Germany. I've seen it on illustrations of medieval woodcarvers at work centuries before the Hellbrun machine was constructed. Many contemporary carvers prefer to work on larger pieces with the carving held vertically instead of horizontally, so that it is orientated the same way that it will eventually be displayed.

This frame for holding work is in the studio of Jón Adolf Steinólfsson in Rekjavik, Iceland

This frame is in Joachim Seitfudem's studio. Jo is based in Bristol but trained in Bavaria. 

The sawyers at work. All of the tradesmen are shown wearing aprons and many have coloured lederhosen-style braces across their chests. I wonder if the colours of their hats or braces mark them as members of different craft guilds, or if they are just random?

The turner is at work on a pole lathe (which I imagine would be powered by a springy frame rather than a pole, as it is indoors). His tools are hung on the wall behind him. 

The timber framers build a roof. Two workers wear caps, the others are dressed very similarly to each other with black hats. Journeyman carpenters from this region wear their brimmed black hats as one of the signs of their status even today. Are the two workers lower down the roof journeymen, or do these figures represent different trades altogether?

The cooper works with drawknife and shavehorse to make barrels and buckets. As with the pole lathe shown above, modern green woodworkers use equipment that has basically changed very little from that shown by Rosenegger. This pole lathe and shave horse (made by Tom Redfern) were in use when teaching these skills at the Green Gathering a few years ago.

Schaffer also notes that there is another, darker side to the Hellbrun mechanical theatre. The salt miners were 'radicals and insurrectionists' and Rosenegger had an armed guard to keep him at his work. The machine was not just an entertaining snapshot of life at the time. To its intended audience of wealthy aristocrats, it gave a view of workers behaving themselves in an 'ideal society'.

Woodcarving and woodworking tools seen at the British Museum; from ancient Nubia and Mesopotamia around 4,000 to 5,000 years ago

The British Museum is so full of incredible objects that a visit can be a bit overwhelming. Sometimes it is nice to just pick out a particular theme and to follow that through the galleries. On a recent visit, I took the chance to explore the history of woodcarving tools a bit further. A lot of the factual information here came from museum labels for the exhibits.

Ancient Nubia

Many sophisticated cultures developed in Nubia (along the Nile river in what is now northern Sudan and southern Egypt) in ancient times. This copper adze blade and axe head were found at the site of the ancient city of Faras. The remains of the city are now under the waters of Lake Nasser, having been flooded following the building of the Aswan dam.

They date to around 5,000 years ago and were probably imported from Egypt, Nubia's powerful neighbour. You can find out more about ancient Egyptian woodcarving and the making of copper alloys by visiting my previous post about it.

The Kerma civilisation developed in Nubia from about 4,500 years ago. It was based around the urban centre of Kerma, which the ancient Egyptians called 'Kush'. The city was known for skilled bronze (copper alloyed with arsenic or tin)  workers. Going from left to right, this stone axe head, stone grinder and whetstone (for sharpening metal blades) date to between about 3,760 and 3,560 years ago. The whetstone was one of ten hones interred with a sacrificial burial. It has traces of red pigment on it. I wonder if that was purely ritualistic, or if these stones were used with some kind of compound such as ground ochre to improve their sharpening performance?

Early Mesopotamia

These tools date from about 8,000 to about 6,200 years ago, to the early days of farming and of the development of towns and villages. The copper chisel in the centre was found at Tell Arpachiyah, in what was Northern Mesopotamia and is now near Mosul in Iraq. It is one of the earliest copper tools ever found. The tool to the left is a bone awl from the same place, set into bitumen. Between them is a sickle blade, also set in bitumen. Behind is a worked stone hoe blade and on the right, a stone mace head. In northern Mesopotamia, flint and metal were used for tools whereas in the south, pottery was generally used.

Ancient Sumerian

The Sumerian city of Ur was located at the site of what is now Tell al-Muqayyar in southern Iraq. At its peak, it was very powerful and wealthy. Some believe that Abraham (Abram or Ibrahim), the great prophet of the Jewish, Muslim and Christian faiths, may have been born here about 4,000 years ago. Archaeologists discovered a large cemetery area here dating to the Early Dynastic III period, about 4,600 to 4,300 years ago. Many of the stunning treasures excavated from this area are now in the British Museum. The copper used to make many of the tools probably came from Oman. 

These copper alloy chisels all have a flattened, triangular-shaped end away from the cutting edge. It doesn't look like a useful shape to be struck with a mallet or held in the hand, so I wonder if that end would have been held in some kind of handle? If that was the case, the shape wouldn't have been easy to drive into a wooden handle (like modern square- or round- sectioned tangs), so maybe that had a slot cut into it and was then bound together with the blade held inside? Perhaps the blade was simply wrapped in leather or another material to make a handle? I don't know of any evidence for this, by the way.

The chisel blade furthest on the right has an original engraving in cuneiform script on it.

The image below shows whetstones and chisel blades found in the tomb of Puabi, a very powerful and wealthy Sumerian woman. The beautifully-shaped honing stones on the right were found being worn by several of Puabi's male attendants buried with her.

The chisels are, according to the exhibit label, 'made of base gold with the surface artificially enriched'. Gold seems a strange choice for practical cutting tools. It is quite soft and so doesn't usually hold a cutting edge well. Perhaps, like the model tools found in the grave of the Egyptian king Khasekhemwy, these were meant as representations of (rather than working examples of) actual tools.

Several adzes were found in the Ur cemetery area. Unlike many ancient adzes the blades have a socket for the handle attached, rather than being lashed to the wooden handle like the adze blade shown above.

You may have noticed that two of the copper alloy adze blades have an animal's leg design engraved into them. Many tools and containers in these 'royal' graves have the same mark. No one is sure if it was the emblem of the royal house, the emblem of the manufacturers or something else.

The graceful-looking adze head in the central picture above is a replica of one in the collection of the University Museum in Philadelphia. The original is made of gold: another non-working representation of an actual tool? The objects shown with it are a gold spear head, a cluster of arrow heads corroded together and a whetstone.

The axe heads shown below illustrate something that is worth considering when looking at these objects.

The one on the right is made of silver - perhaps another mainly ceremonial representation. These objects probably came from the tombs of very wealthy and powerful people. It is hard to say whether these axes were just for use by guards and, if so, would they have looked considerably different to those used by craftspeople? During these times, there doesn't generally seem to have been the large differences in axe head shape according to the job required from it that can be seen in later axes, for example from the Anglo-Saxon times in Britain. However, perhaps the specialist craftsperson's hewing axes just weren't preserved in any graves?

Akkadian Ur and Canaan

From 4,300 to 4,150 years ago, the city of Ur was ruled by the Akkadians who succeeded the previous Sumerian rulers. The adze head below comes from the late Early Dynasty III or Akkadian periods. The handle is modern.

Notice the axe head shown bottom-right in the collection above. It is very different in shape to the earlier ones. This 'fenestrated' shape ('fenestrated' because of the 'windows' in the axehead) developed between 4,500 and 4,000 years ago, in the area around what is now called the Levant. The Canaanite axes below show this form with complete sockets for a handle. These windows meant that the whole axe was lighter in use. I wonder if this development was confined to military axes, given that the lighter weight would also benefit other people using them. Would these heads have been too vulnerable to distortion by twisting or side-to-side movements if embedded in timber? It's hard to say without any practical testing.

Ancient Babylonian

A hoard of 86 copper alloy and bronze tools and farming implements was found at Kutalla (what is now Tell Sifr in Iraq). They are about 4000 years old. Some were in a good, usable state although others were damaged. Axe heads (note: not of the fenestrated type), a chisel and a saw can all be seen amongst other tools. It is thought that they were held originally in a big agricultural establishment, where it would be customary to check the total weight of items issued and returned at the end of each season.

Meeting Tim Gatfield at the Cherry Wood Project, a centre for green woodworking, practical woodland management and education

The Cherry Wood Project is situated near Marshfield in South Gloucestershire.

Eight years ago, Tim Gatfield began the sustainable woodland management project and he and his family live onsite, together with apprentices who stay and work alongside them.

The project has a strong emphasis on living with minimum impact on the environment and also on education, especially in using woodland products. There are several green woodworking courses run there every year and guests can stay in cabins next door.

Thursday is volunteer day and I travelled to Cherry Wood along with my friend Alex Arthur, an expert charcoal burner based around Bristol. Alex is regular visitor there and on this trip was planning to move and set up a charcoal kiln for a burn.

The morning was spent levelling an area for the kiln to sit on, then moving it down the slope from a previous site. It was hard work in the hot sun, but there was a very infectious enthusiasm amongst all the volunteers and I didn't hear any complaints.

It was clear that the people helping really enjoyed being there and the hard work was repaid by a great lunch of chilli, rice, bread and salad and also tea and delicious cake later in the day. The food was cooked in the wood-fired cob oven and hob on site.

After lunch, a group of disengaged young people helped with the kiln and there were plenty of people there, so I lent a hand cutting timber (milled on site from larch trees that grew in these woods) for a reciprocating roof on the new roundhouse.

After a while, there seemed to be enough folks to help there too, so it seemed like time to wander back towards where all the woodworking is done.

Tim (on the left in the picture below) and Charlie, one of the apprentices, were busy sharpening tools for an upcoming green woodworking course and it was definitely a good opportunity to help out. Sharpening carving knives is something that I can happily do all day!

It was also very interesting seeing Merlin nearby, bringing an old two-man saw back to the correct set and sharpness for use on hardwoods. Many of the folks there on Thursdays are obviously also fellow tool nuts and really enjoy discussing sharpening methods etc. I felt right at home!

When the saw was ready, he and Tim put it through its paces and it cut beautifully.

It was a great way to spend a Thursday and thanks to Tim and everyone else for making me so welcome. If you would like to volunteer, visit or are interested in a course, contact details can be found on the Cherry Wood website. I hope to be able to drop by again soon!