well writing this down with hindsight and retrospect and all the other tools available after the event – indulging in a bit of the third person to suggest a distance between now and then, the school and me, the technician and me – but it’s important to say that I didn’t help my cause.
I don’t like confrontation. Hate it. I felt plywood wasn’t the way to go and should have stood my ground, but it was much easier to smile along and nod and agree we should order a load of it and then run away; it was the hiding for the next two years which proved tricky, especially since the wood workshop stood at the entrance to one of the main buildings at the school and I knew I’d upset a man with a large collection of hammers.*
• • • • •
In early 2007 I travelled down to Henley-on-Thames to ask a pair of boat builders how best to construct an airship.
En route to London, the previous week, I’d spoken to my father at length about the project and he’d suggested that to question received wisdom, to experiment, fail and learn, was the point of a degree. Better to fail on your own terms than be led astray and compromise:
‘You know, you’ll spend ages building it out of the wrong stuff to please someone else, it’ll go wrong and you’ll end up smashing it up with an axe, or something …’ he pronounced near Heston Services, adding, ‘You’ve made your bed now anyway.’ *
• • • • •
Colin Henwood and Richard Way know about wood and their knowledge is deep. At our first meeting we sat in the shed at the heart of their yard and talked around the airship – unpacking each possible solution, weighing the ways it could be done. This took quite some time since it turned out I had many options – different woods, fixings, joints, glues; each with their own character and peculiarities.
Their enthusiasm for the project, my doodled sketches and the mooted materials spilled out along tangents and into stories about craft.
At that first meeting, Richard spoke of his work with wood and boats, his tools and concerns, with a love and mesmeric intensity that affected me deeply and has subsequently shaped this book. He put the idea in motion that people who love what they do, are immersed and consumed by their work, are wont to speak about it with an engaging and infectious generosity. There was no cynicism when he spoke, just a simple clarity of thought, of process and labour, and this was to set a pattern for many subsequent exchanges I was to have; in fact it’s largely due to Richard’s enthusiasm and lucidity that I went out and sought those exchanges at all. I’d taken along a rudimentary Dictaphone to record our chat – and it was to be a chat, a casual meeting for which I’d made no notes other than rough drawings and annotations in my journal. I suppose I imagined I’d be there an hour or two. But two hours turned into four, and lunch, and as dusk fell we three were still talking. I didn’t want it to end, it was such a pleasure. When I got home I transcribed the tape and happily listened to the day over again.* Below is a little of our conversation, beginning with Richard describing his daily routine:
‘I start at half past seven during the week and finish at six o’clock. I used to work much longer. My first experience of boat building was working at a time when there was much too much work and not enough people so we used to work through till ten o’clock at night or one o’clock in the morning and that went on month after month so I got very used to terribly long hours. You can’t do that when you get to my age, it just becomes too exhausting.’
What age were you when you started?
‘I was twenty-one. It was tiring but at that age you can do enormous amounts of work and still get up the following morning and do it again. Young people are always half out of control anyway, aren’t they? (Laughs)
I discovered shortly after I started that I much preferred using tools that had been used before. It wasn’t a conscious decision to begin with but … I can feel a lot through my hands. I’ve got a very delicate sense of feeling and just felt that new tools were very sharp, all their edges were very sharp, and I much preferred buying old tools that were quite worn but still very usable.
You always buy some things new because you want the full length of a long paring chisel, for example, but gradually I’ve swapped over all the ones I bought new for older ones I’ve found. It didn’t become an obsession, thankfully, but I decided that I liked knowing about tools, so I read a lot of books and I used to buy tools when job-lots came up at local auctions, and sometimes I’d get them from people I knew, so that meant I’d tools that reminded me of the man who owned them before. I’ll pick a tool up and think, “Ah, that’s Pat Wheeler’s – the old boy who lived in the village.” It brings a picture up in my mind which is rather fine and it’s nice to know that your tools have done other work, you know; generations of work.
At home in my workshop, I’ve tools that are centuries old – Georgian chisels, things like that, and they’re absolutely magnificent. I’ve got Georgian wooden planes, braces, and drills, extraordinary things …’
At this point Colin pointed ruefully to Richard’s toolbox – a blanket box on caster wheels – a hefty laden chest:
‘As you can see, Dicky hasn’t brought very many tools with him today …’
And as we laughed I became aware that the scope of my project was opening out, alive in the room, after so many months of being closed down. I was engaged with people who knew what they were doing. The spectral airship flew here too – more than that – buoyed by enthusiasm, it lived.
For the next few months, every chance I got, I travelled home to Bristol to build the ship of my imagination – 200 miles from the art school bar as the crow flew.
The body of an airship is a collection of variously sized hoops fixed together with cross braces – dirigibles generally have a keel like a boat, their skeleton frame distinguishing them from blimps, which are essentially bags that use gas pressure to maintain their shape.
To start with I set about making twenty hoops of various sizes – each as thin and strong as possible, each formed of three or four layers of beechwood. Beech has a fine grain which lends it a strength and flexibility suited for shaping and moulding – for this reason it is used a great deal in furniture making. I built up a laminate sandwich of wood/glue/wood/glue/wood around circular template formers, each a slightly different diameter – clamping each complaining lath length tight until it set, before adding the next.* My first efforts were fairly awful but gradually I learnt what I was doing and the hoops began to take a more uniform, circular shape.
Successful rings were laid out on the floor like ripples; pear-shaped failures were taken outside and burnt.
While laminates dried in their jigs, I moved on to the nose and tail. Again, this was trial and error and the thought that it was all going to fall apart or bow (and then fall apart) was never far from my mind; but I was fathoming the beech and coming to respect its toughness. Once layered up and glued into shape it was steadfast. The material didn’t lie. When I botched I couldn’t blame the beech, which often called my bluff; refusing to be undone – wood and glue having become a sturdy third thing – hoop or half-uncoiled mess.
Four tailplanes were measured and marked on board, sawn up, sanded and slotted together – aerofoil ribs fixed at regular intervals looking beaky and svelte.
The dust was flying from the bandsaw blade, sketched revisions and tea stains filled my notebooks, and solvents daubed my boiler suit and stunk out my hair. At the end of each day, on the train journey home, I’d peel PVA from my hands.
The nose cone went together fairly quickly with a similarly slot-oriented approach to the fins – the profile of the front dome built up in segments to form a pointy jelly mould, a hollow cupola built around the smallest of my beech hoops; a card skinned nib.
An