School Woodwork Lessons

Since my ramblings last week, extolling the virtues of cookery classes in schools, I’ve had a thought.

Are lads still being taught woodwork?

It’s probably known as something fancy, like organic technology, these days, or, in the case of most of the DIY merchants who pop up on telly, re-designing entire homes in the space of 60 minutes, a dozen ways with the sheet of MDF. And it’s not just jobs for the boys.

Plenty of women I know are pretty handy with the electric drill, and some I’m acquainted with carry little packs of screwdrivers in their handbags. I’m not sure why. I’d be hard pressed to know one end from another.

I stick to the culinary arts in this household, because guess what? Himself went to woodwork lessons as a lad – and reckons he knows it all.

In his defence, he quite enjoys a spot of doing-it-himself. Shelves have been known to stay on the wall, so well in one instance that, when it came to taking them down, he took away most of the plaster, creating such havoc and mess that we were down to the wattle and daub, let alone the bricks. And the cost of the re-plastering doesn’t bear thinking about.

He’s also handy with a paintbrush and a tin of silk finish emulsion, can hang a curtain rail in more or less a straight line, and has been known to lay the odd carpet. As the result, we have a very odd carpet. But in moments of nostalgia, when he’s wittering on about the magic of rawl plugs, and brandishing his late father’s prize chisel, he takes me through his prowess at the school woodwork bench.

And if we gels began our path to gastronomic delights with the humble rock bun, then the world’s future chippies, in the 50s, honed their practical skills on a teapot stand. This was, he recalls, a case of two pieces of wood, chiselled out and made into the form of an X. And, dear reader, if you’re holding your breath in anticipation of hand-made wooden nails to tack this work of art together, don’t bother.

"It was glued," he announces. Glued? Oh yes, but not your ordinary, everyday glue which has to be forced out of a tube. This was "proper" glue, boiled up in a metal pot, from ingredients too awful to think about. And the smell was horrendous.

This first-former’s pride and joy was held aloft to disinterested aunts and uncles for the first few weeks, and sat under the family tea-pot until it disintegrated. No doubt the glue wasn’t as sticky as it should have been.

Moving on into the second form, the class graduated to making book-ends. And this was to be his undoing. It required a knowledge of dovetail joints. And he never did get the hang of them. But, he says, he persevered gallantly, though boredom set in along the way. It took him five years – the rest of his schooldays – to finish them off. They wobbled. They didn’t match. His mum and dad thought they were wonderful. He’s not sure if the aunts and uncles enthused quite as much.

Meanwhile, his fellow-students returned home triumphant, holding aloft items of furniture of Sheraton lines and proportions, perfect in every dovetailed detail.

Along with a myriad of lathes, files, screwdrivers, hammers and screws, inherited over many years, the old man can’t resist the latest must-have gadget even though they rarely come out of the packaging, and people can be forgiven for thinking that our garage is Mr Chippendale’s very own workshop. Sadly, when it comes to craftsmanship, he ventures no further than a flat-pack, an Allen key, a tube of super-glue, and a packet of No-Nails.

Friend and fellow-columnist Anton Rippon joked recently that when he was a kid, he had a part-time job as a wringer-out for a one-armed window cleaner. And I can’t resist letting him know that as a child in the Matlock and Darley Dale area, such a window cleaner existed.

I recall his name was Philip Willets, and he was a familiar sight atop his ladder, outside businesses, banks and shops, as well as private houses, for years. He must have been good because he was always working. And as far as I know, he rung out his own window leather. And unlike today’s breed, who probably call themselves glass hygiene operatives, who pocket their fiver, promise to see you in a month, and never darken your patio door again, he was regular, reliable, and probably did the insides as well as the outsides for the equivalent of today’s ten pence.

Even at that price, hiring a window cleaner was a luxury. Housewives’ backsides perched on bedroom window sills as they polished the outside glass within an inch of its life, was a familiar sight where I came from.

There was also a one-armed painter and decorator operating in Derby a few years ago. And I’m always tickled when I see the window cleaner’s van advertising his business. It’s called Mister Bit.