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My first major commission, summer 1980: a Welsh dresser. This is the bottom section of the piece.
Every so often I find myself thinking about how much has changed in the 38 years since I got my first woodworking job. After a year of City & Guilds training in traditional furniture making I was hired by Roy Griffiths to work as a cabinetmaker at his business, the Crosskeys Joinery, in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire. Working for Roy was like jumping off a cliff into a world where efficient methods of work were absolutely critical to making a living when woodworking was a full-time occupation and the sole basis of my livelihood. That’s a world apart from the one inhabited by many of us in woodworking today, a point too easily glossed over in magazine articles about setting up a shop or Instagram posts about being self-employed and loving it.
It’s salutary to take the occasional look at where you are today from the perspective of how you lived before.
