Since I have done little in the workshop in the last few weeks there is nothing to report, so I thought you might be interested if I went back in time to my days as a blacksmith (not a farrier) and describe something of the 30 years I spent labouring at the anvil and some of the things I made during that time. A different sort of metalworking.

My first forge was lent to me in a village in south Oxfordshire and I started to teach myself the rudiments of the skills needed to make all the objects traditionally associated with what is commonly thought of as wrought ironwork, different types of scrolls, leaves, twists, railing points etc. etc., but most importantly all hot forged in the traditional way.  More complex item such as gates frames would be made without recourse to arc or gas welders but be constructed by traditional fire welding, mortice and tenon joints, and decorative scrollwork secured by rivets and collars.

There was to be no cold bent work as is so commonly offered to the buying public as “wrought ironwork“, hastily stuck together with a Mig welder and sprayed with glutinous black paint in a vain attempt to hide all the spatter and ill fitting ‘scrolls’.

A course at the Wimbledon workshop of The Council for Small Industries in Rural Areas (formerly The Rural Industries Bureau [it’s amazing how titles grow to keep up with expanding bureaucracies] !! ) led by a highly skilled smith called Tony West, gave me a whole range of skills to take home and put into practice. The RIB had published  several excellent books on the subject with clear step by step instructions and photographs which were almost as good as individual tuition.

Soon after, we moved back to Dorset, having started our married life there, and I rented an old smithy in a village near Sherborne and got to work in earnest. At that time there was a great resurgence of interest in traditional crafts, and associations and guilds were springing up everywhere which provided group support for markets and exhibitions, so I wasn’t working in isolation and I became quite involved in the Dorset Guild for a number of years. Soon after the move to Dorset news reached me on the grapevine of the formation of a new national blacksmithing organisation with an inaugural meeting at a large commercial forge in Leatherhead. I duly booked myself in for the weekend and came away as a founder member of the British Artist Blacksmith’s Association which became the mainstay of support, encouragement and knowledge for the following 30 years.

So, what did I make? Well, until you make a name for yourself it’s a matter of the smaller things that people want in their homes and which can be sold at craft markets and through exhibitions, fire irons, fire baskets, fire screens, chestnut roasters, coat hooks, candlesticks, etc., etc. Word soon gets round the locality that “we have a blacksmith in the village” and then it’s on to garden and drive gates, railings, odd bits of repairs to sundry objects that people cherish, and maybe the occasional agricultural repair, my favourite being welding up rusting muck spreaders on hot summer days !! (A true ‘camp fires of the desert’ experience!)

I bought books and read about techniques and the history of decorative ironwork, how it had flourished at the turn of the 18th century leaving us a legacy of magnificent work to be seen in churches, cathedrals (St Paul’s and Lichfield to name but two), and gates to the entrances of parks and stately homes, the Fountain Court Screen at Hampton Court Palace is a particularly magnificent example. The onset of mass produced cheap lookalike cast ironwork spelt the death knell of this fine tradition from which it has never really recovered, aggravated since the war by the advent of machine made weld-on “wrought iron components” used and sold as the genuine hand made article.

However, I was determined not to go down that road but try to emulate the same standard of design and workmanship of the great masters of the past, albeit on a much smaller scale. Looking back through piles of photographs I was surprised at the quantity and range of things I had made, so here are a few representative pieces to illustrate how I worked and what I was asked to make. In part 2 I will describe how I moved from traditional to contemporary design and what drew me in that direction.

Double click on photos to enlarge. Or play slideshow.

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