Cloth was the industry of this Buckinghamshire village, like so many places in Britain. Being close to the river Wye, paper mills appeared; in common with other villages in the south of the midlands straw plaiting was an occupation for women, as was lace making. It was though furniture making that would enable High Wycombe to stamp its mark, although being the Operations Control Centre of Bomber Command in the Second World War was certainly higher profile for a number of decades.
First a word about paper making. The earliest records show paper making from rags pounded to pulp in the chalky water from the river Wye in the late sixteenth century. One of these early mills, Glory Mills at Woodburn Green, was bought by Wiggins Teape in 1894. Much later Wiggins Teape would have a research centre at nearby Beaconsfield. The mill finally closed in 1999. I write more about paper making in my blog on Hemel Hempstead, also on the Wye.
I am grateful to L.J. Mayes for his book The History of Chairmaking in High Wycombe for a fascinating description of the industry. Before referring to this, the Wycombe Chair Museum offers a list of furniture makers. It runs to some sixty-three pages and so offers a sense of just how widespread this activity was. Having said that, I suspect it was no more widespread than the plaiting of straw and making of hats in the dwellings of Luton or the spinners and weavers of the northwest.
Mayes offers a description of the chair making process of which I offer a precis, for my back hurts just to write it. We have to imagine an elm tree some forty feet tall. It has to be felled, stripped of its branches and bark. It then has to be sawn into planks two inches thick. This process is of course not unique to chair making; I refer to it also in relation to the naval shipyard in Portsmouth. Sawing was most often done in the wood where the tree was felled. A saw pit is dug some seven feet deep and in its stands the sawyer who will do most of the back breaking work. The prepared tree is moved over the saw pit and a second man first marks a straight line with string and chalk. He then stands on the tree holding the top end of the seven foot saw which he guides along the line whilst his mate sweats and is covered in saw dust. I was astonished to read in the context of shipbuilding that the sawyers of Portsmouth resisted the move to powered saw mills.
The plank is cut into sections to provide the seat for the chair. In order to make it into the seat of a comfortable Windsor chair, the seat has to be shaped. Next come the legs and and laths which are cut from green beech by 'bodgers' who also work within the wood from a simple shelter which they build themselves. The young tree trunks are roughly shaped and divided before being finely shaped by a simple pole lathe - a tool that has been used for centuries. All the parts including ash to be bent for the bannister are then assembled in the workshop using simple drills and chisels, everything done by experienced eye. The finished chair is stained by immersing it in liquid and then polished ready for sale. Mayes suggests that this manual process was still in use in the 1950s by a few chair-makers.
Industrialisation did impact Wycombe chair-making, but indirectly. The growing number of skilled men working in manufacturing around the country were being better housed and the houses needed well made furniture. Equally mechanisation reduced the workforce in paper making and farming releasing labour who found work in chair making. Increasingly the processes were broken down in a division of labour. Steam power came in the saw mills and massively increased output compared to saw pits. Bodgers continued to bring bundles of their work to the workshops. Relatively unskilled factory work came in with chair-seat caners, many of whom were women. The assembly of the chair, though, remained a skilled occupation for many years. In terms of selling, furniture vans would leave Wycombe on a tour of towns to sell their wares. In time retailers stepped in and catalogues were produced by the larger companies.
1851 saw Wycombe master chair-maker Edmund Hutchinson awarded the title of Champion Chair of the Exhibition. Already company names were emerging ahead of the pack: Gomme, Skull, Glenister, Dancer & Hearn.
Mechanisation increased with steam powered circular saws and borers. In 1874 the output of the town was estimated at one and half million chairs worth a quarter of a million pounds. The population had trebled over a quarter of a century, but without the utilities in place to cater for it; the river Wye was filled with waste. In time matters improved.
Wycombe had gained a reputation for cheap furniture. This stung and a number of companies embraced new styles. E.G. Punnett was engaged to design pieces influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement.
The coming of war in 1914 saw an immediate fall in demand for this higher end furniture and skilled workers were redeployed on short term public projects including wood panelling the Guildhall. Demand for lower end furniture was strong with orders for the many new barracks. War meant an end to competition from German and Austrian furniture makers and so in due course skilled men found themselves back in demand. Men volunteered or were called up and so manpower shortages became an issue. As elsewhere, the end of the war saw an upturn in demand but this was short-lived and unemployment loomed.
With the challenges of the interwar years many companies were reluctant to invest in mechanisation to reduce costs, an exception being E. Gomme & Sons which went from strength to strength. Mechanisation helped but more was needed.
Aircraft were built requiring woodworking skills. Dancer & Hearn in particular formed a relationship with de Havilland (the two owners were friends) and during slack periods parts were supplied for the Mosquito. Others followed with Gomme supplying fuselages and Baker's veneers.
Ercol was set up in Wycombe in 1920 by Lucian R. Ercolani and new designs began to appear.
The Second World War saw High Wycombe identified as a place where London based manufacturers could re-locate to escape bombing. Amongst these were Cossor which manufactured radar screens and cathode ray tubes. A number of medium sized furniture manufacturers took advantage of the opportunity to leave an industry that was becoming ever more challenging. Those that remained had the challenge of utility furniture of which I wrote in Vehicles to Vaccines.
The fifties saw a change in the way furniture was marketed. Hitherto it had been the wholesalers and large retailers which had controlled what was produced. Parker-Knoll had begun their own consumer advertising and this was followed by Ercol and Gomme. Ercol chose the windsor style chair as their theme. Gomme preferred a series of furniture units which could be added to as required - G-Plan. I write of the further development of the British furniture industry in Vehicles to Vaccines.
The fifties saw consolidation among the furniture companies and the eighties and nineties closures and relocation. Glenisters closed; Gomme moved to Melksham, Parker-Knoll to Chipping Norton and Ercol to Princess Risborough.
At the beginning of this blog I referred to the Bomber Command Operations Centre. This has been written about extensively elsewhere. However the presence of the RAF and a major US Airforce base impacted on the town. Towards the end of the First World War the towns furniture makers who were busy supplying wooden components, set up The Aircraft Manufacturing Company. It came too late to contribute much, but its premises were re-purposed by woodworking tool maker, Broom and Wade, as the factory in which they manufactured pneumatic equipment amongst much else. They became the town's biggest employer and merged with Holman of Cambourne to become International Compressed Air (later Compair) in Slough. Other more recent aircraft related businesses are Springtech which manufactures precision springs, and Sabeti Wain which designs and manufactures aircraft interiors.
Further reading:
- James Rattue, High Wycombe Past (Chichester: Phillimore, 2002)
- L.J. Mayes, The History of Chairmaking in High Wycombe (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960)
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