Bob Delderfield’s History File
September 1997
Jack Whalley, Woodsman
From time to time we volunteers have found ourselves involved in what can only he described as the traditional woodland crafts. We have made, with varying success, barriers, gates, cut firewood and experimented with rustic furniture as well as trying our hands at the more contemporary craft of making planters.
Led by enthusiast such as Gerry Bullock we have had to rediscover appropriate techniques since there are few traditional exponents around to pass on these skills.
However, it is not as long as many of us might think since the last of the traditional woodsmen were plying their trade. One such was Jack Whalley who was still active in Tile Wood as recently as 1964 and I am indebted to Mike Astor of Rochford who worked with Jack in the late fifties and early sixties for his reminiscences of this interesting character.
Jack was a woodsman well before the first world war, and during that terrible conflict he carried on working at home because, as a woodsman, his job was regarded officially as a reserved occupation. It is interesting to remind ourselves of the continued importance of wood in the war effort when men were still relying on horses for heavy transport duties. So Jack spent his whole life earning his living among the woodlands of S.E. Essex. He was a remarkable man in many ways and regarded by Mike Astor as the last of the traditional woodsmen. Working in the local woods — including Belfairs Nature reserve, Pound and Tile Woods, Jack, then in his eighties, was still coppicing in 1964. Little wood was wasted as Jack and his employees made split and round chestnut stakes, rustic furniture, rustic trellis work, beanpoles, peasticks and, of course, logs for firewood.
The method of business was also traditional. Jack paid the owner or lesee of a wood a sum of money giving him the right to cut an agreed acreage of underwood. He then had to turn the cut wood into a profit in order to make a living. On the occasions when Jack had difficulty paying the Council for his rights in Belfairs Nature Reserve, the shortfall would be made up by providing stakes for the Council’s use.
Thus in the middle of the twentieth century Jack Walley was plying a trade that did not differ enormously from that of his medieval forbears. But the day of chainsaws and plastic was already beginning to have a devastating effect on woodsmen. As Mike Astor puts it, “The bottom fell out of the market” just as Jack was nearing the end of his working life.
Jack Walley was an independent man who learned his craft and stuck to it throughout his life. He was an outdoors man who had little time for the niceties of personal hygiene. He always wore old army shirts with no collars which he seemed to wear until they fell off exhausted. If he had been working in the pouring rain he would invariably light a fire and steam himself dry. None of this appeared to weaken his constitution but after retirement he was eventually admitted to Nazareth House and tradition has it that when forced to take a bath poor Jack died within a week.