My family has had carpenters in it for at least four generations and I can not go back any farther than that. My father’s father came from Anglesey, an island off north Wales called Ynys Mon in Welsh. I visited his birthplace once. We were directed by a local old-timer to a meadow, but we could not see a dwelling or any ruins. I scrambled up unto a mound of earth to get a better view and then we realized that I was standing on his old home.
He had lived in a hole in the ground covered over with earth! A door was still on it, overgrown after 70 years or so of neglect and there was a kind of stone chimney in the long grass on the top. I was 10 years old and my Dad was 33 and it was the only time either of us went the length of Wales to look up our family history. It is more than probable that my great-grandfather was a shepherd.
My grandfather ran away from home at– years of age to Liverpool and became an apprentice ship’s carpenter. That would have been in’14. What a time to choose to go out into the big world – the start of the First World War in Europe. He could not speak English at the time, but must have taught himself as he learned his apprenticeship.
He passed out as the best in his year and was given a set of the finest woodworking tools of the age. Each tool had a small brass plate in the handle with his name etched onto it. My father still treasured them when I was growing up.
I never met my granndfather; he died a month before I was born, but I was named after him and, knowing that I was due and that he was going, he left me a teething ring, which I still have. More to the point of this article though, there was not a single power tool in his tool bag when he died in’54.
My father was the youngest son and when he was old enough, he had to leave school to be apprentice to his father who had stopped his roaming by then. Growing up with my father in the’50′s and’60′s, I do not remember him using power tools either. He used a brace-and-bit for drilling, several assorted hand-sharpened saws for cutting and his only acquiescence to modern technology, a Yankee, which was a pump-action screwdriver. Everything he needed to hang a door or cut a roof was in one bag or later on a box, which he made himself.
I went away to study and travel and when I returned for good 12 years later, my brother had finished his carpenter’s apprenticeship and was working for my Dad. That would have been in about’80 and my brother still vows to ths day that Dad only bought power tools then because he, my brother, had learned how use them in technical college. Something which my father always denied, although it did seem a bit of a coincidence to me. My brother, now in his Fifties, still uses hand tools where he can, but also has the full range of power tools in a near-by van.
His son, now nearly 30 is also a carpenter and he has a power tool for every job and throw-away saws. How times have changed.
Owen Jones, the author of this article writes on several subjects, but is currently involved with Black and Decker Power Tools. If you would like to know more or check out some great offers, please go to our website at Woodworking Power Tools