The first workshop I spent time in was more of a dumping ground in a shared space at the back of a large antique furniture warehouse. There were no benches and it seemed that wherever you stood you were in somebody’s way. As a shy, awkward and probably monosyllabic adolescent in the dying throws of a lacklustre attempt at education, it was my first glimpse of what adult life might be like if I pursued a career in antiques. Looking back, I can see that it wasn’t a real workshop at all and not really a true reflection of the trade I had set my eyes on either.
One of the most frequently used words I hear to describe a workshop is ‘sanctuary’. I get it, but I find it a bit odd as it suggests a place to hide from the outside world rather than a place to unravel its secrets or contribute to its development. In this context ‘sanctuary’ seems somewhat divisive and out of bounds. Workshops can be social places, the ones I’ve most enjoyed working in certainly have been, one minute a place for quiet contemplation and intense moments of concentration, the next a hotbed of creative energy.
If you’ve ever shared space in a communal workshop you’ll recognise that rhythmic cycle. It’s a force every bit as infectious and involuntary as yawning. Then there’s the language; somewhere between building site and back office. The same I’m told can be said of dressing rooms and studios the world over.
This is the workshop where I discovered a passion for learning and language and furniture. This is the workshop that we’re visiting this month and it’s where we caught up with antique furniture restorer and fourth generation cabinetmaker, John Hartnett. It’s not however, where our story starts and he makes it clear he’d rather be skiing…
The French connection
Grandpa Spawtz, as John calls him was a 19th-century ebonist from Luxembourg, specialising in parquetry and decorative floors. His skill and expertise were such that he travelled widely throughout Europe plying his trade in the most fashionable houses of the time. It was during one of these visits to England that he met his future wife, a Frenchwoman, and decided to stay, planting roots in north London. A century later and a complicated family history worthy of an episode of Who Do You Think You Are, and the family business is still going strong albeit not pursuing quite the same line of work.
I’ve known John for more years than I care to remember and I’ve done a lot of what he does as a job for most of that time. Even so, I still find it hard to put a finger on what he actually does for a living. If it were just a case of fixing things that would be easy, any practically minded, hand tool competent person could do it. The core skill here, I believe is managing people’s expectations and that takes nerve. Building things from scratch is child’s play by comparison, you make the rules and you decide when and where to break them. Invisible mending on the other hand is sorcery that would baffle the Magic Circle.
“I never tell customers I can make a repair disappear. Under promise and over deliver is the best approach if you want to encourage repeat business,” he advises and in a nutshell there you have it, the most important word missing from most craftspeople’s vocabulary; business. “You can have all the skills and experience in the world but it means very little if you can’t run a business”.
Max Wall and other storage
If they ever do a Hard Rock Café for woodworkers this is what it would look like. The walls in John’s workshop are filled with rows of neatly displayed tools, metal clamps by Record mostly and not a Bessey in sight, no plastic or garish bright colours here. By the looks of some of them John isn’t the first owner but they all work with precision and ease. “There’s nothing worse than a clamp sticking when you come to use it. Rather than wear out, these old clamps just seem to get better with age”, he said, “providing you look after them of course.” It’s a practice that I can see he not only preaches but lives by.
Among the hundreds of tools on the wall hardly any are from this century and quite a few date from the one before that. They are a mixture of good users and keepers. A Marples Ultimatum brace sits pride of place above the door to the ‘shop flanked by a Norris A5 and A11. “I used to have a lot more before I built this workshop but during the move from my last workshop they sat in boxes for so long that when I got round to unpacking them I just felt the time had come to sell them.
The rest I thought were worth putting on display. I did quite well out of the sale. They probably paid for the roof on this place”. There’s a completeness in knowing that these old tools are in some way still able to contribute to the built environment for which they were made. It’s even more fitting perhaps that they are doing it without breaking a sweat. Age and wisdom it seems, pulls rank every time. There’s an interesting moulding plane on a purpose-built shelf above the bench. The near perfect circle shape of the top of the wedge suggests it’s an early one. “Oh that, I just liked the shape. I used to sell hundreds of these when I had the shop in Church Street. That’s one of the nicest I’ve seen so I kept it”.
I can personally testify to that as the shop in Church Street was where I worked on Saturday mornings, after school and during the holidays until I could work full time after failing most of my exams. It was my first taste of a proper workshop; a dedicated space where old things were dismantled and then re-built, stripped of their finish and re-polished or just generally tinkered around with until they were fixed.
In recent years the work of the conservator has quite righty been recognised for the role it plays in preserving much of our heritage. It is, if you like, the academic branch of the antiques trade, less concerned with monetary value and more concerned with the preservation of knowledge and artefacts. Conservators fight on the side of inanimate objects to ensure they have a voice when it comes to deciding their fate. It can be a tough job but technology and forensic science make for powerful allies.
No such luck I’m afraid for the restorer, when it comes to doing battle with something far more emotive; the very personal and often unrealistic expectations of the general public. “You’ve got to be good with people and not just things,” he says, although I get the feeling terms and conditions may apply to this arrangement.
A new breed of recruits
Self-employment, albeit a forced option, began for John back in the 1960s after a string of what he describes as ‘character building’ jobs. Missing out on conscription by about six months his generation were the first of a new breed of raw recruits.
After a short spell working at Selfridges on Oxford Street John made the move to the south coast and worked for his uncle’s firm Eurotherm International doing deliveries all over the country. “I’d go from Brighton to Carlise, Doncaster and up to Glasgow and through a lot of industrial cities that were really buzzing at the time. They weren’t that pretty to look at but were real hives of industry. You couldn’t imagine it then, but just 10 years later all that had gone. When I had to replace some saws after we had a fire here at the workshop during the building works I was really pleased to be able to buy some new saws that were made in Sheffield.”
He leans over the bench to a neat row of Thomas Flynn’s mounted on the wall next to his boxwood handled paring chisels, also ex Sheffield. I asked him why the clinical approach to racks and organisation: “It might have something to do with going to boarding school. You either looked after your stuff or you lost it. And I like to have things where I can get hold of them easily, especially clamps when you’re working on your own.”
Temperamentally unsuited to the position
“I always enjoyed looking around antique shops. There was one down near the station in Lewes, run by a very well connected lady. I started talking to her one day and said that I wanted to learn about antiques and she mentioned that her son had just left a restorers in the town, Davenport’s. I went straight round there and said I’d heard they had a vacancy.”
The proprietor Ernest Davenport told him they weren’t employing any more youngsters. Undeterred, John offered to work for nothing between 5.30pm and 7.30pm after he finished his job at the local builders’ merchants. A full-time position came about after John had an accident with some cast-iron guttering back at the builders’ yard. “I cut my arm quite badly and went into the office and asked my boss to run me up the hospital. He shooed me out and complained about dripping blood on his carpet. After I’d been stitched up I went back and told him where he could stick his job and his guttering. It wasn’t a bright move because I didn’t have anything else to go to”.
John still wanted to get into the antiques business so offered to work at Davenport’s for £5 a week, whereas all his friends of the same age were earning £15-20 per week. “Ernie [Mr Davenport] wasn’t that keen but his son John who was a bit older than me pointed out it was only £5 a week and he should just give me a job.” For the next 18 months John worked alongside Ernie in the polishing shop and occasionally with his son in the cabinet shop carrying out repairs.
“Ernie was very particular about the furniture we would work on. Queen Anne and Georgian mainly. He wouldn’t touch Victorian furniture”. At that time the two Johns would go out on site to carry out repairs and refurbish architectural joinery and cabinetry that would fall outside the remit of a general builder. “It was always interesting work and every day was different. I much preferred the cabinet work to polishing.”
As John tells it: “The 60s was a time when anything became possible. The likes of Jagger and the Beatles made it possible for working class people to enter worlds that were previously off limits. Before then the antique trade was a closed shop ran by upper class people. You wouldn’t get a look-in if you were working class. In fact a lot of trades were like that. But then suddenly if you could demonstrate you could do it and had a bit of drive, banks would lend you money and you could start a business.”
Lucky break
Temperamentally unsuited to the position of employment John left Davenport’s to set up shop in Brighton. “It was a huge step and I had to work evenings as a silver service waiter in a restaurant in Brighton to help pay the bills”.
Customers were a mixture of antique dealers bringing things in for repair and items that John had bought and restored for resale. A frequent customer in the shop and antique dealer from Paris came into the restaurant one evening. He recognised John and greeted him politely not wanting to embarrass either of them. The next morning he pulled up outside the shop in his little corrugated Citroen van and asked if John would like some work. “I couldn’t believe it, the van was packed to the roof. My bill to him when he came to collect was £200. My rent at the time was only £6 a month including rates. That was it, I was off and running with my own business”.
Over lunch I asked John if he remembers hitting on a particularly rich seam of clients or even a golden era when things were noticeably easier than today. “Yes, before Tony Curtis published his antique buyer’s guide with estimated values. I was at a party where a lot of us told him it was a bad idea to effectively mark everyone’s card. It was bad for the antique trade but not for him obviously as the book was a tremendous success”. It opened the door to a new breed of antique dealers; Knocker Boys.
A succession of TV programmes like Going for a Song with Arthur Negus and then The Antiques Roadshow, plus the numerous revisions of The Lyle Book Of Antiques have changed the trade for good.
So as we pack away the lights and prepare to shut the doors on John’s workshop I reflect on the conversation we’ve had today. It’s not the interview I was expecting to get, full of tips and tricks and nerdy talk of tools but more the story of one man’s business and how it began. “People think that the key to a successful business is a lot of hard work. There’s plenty of that but you also need luck and I’ve had a lot”.
