cane & rush history
A history of cane and rush in High wycombe & it's surrounding area's chair industry.
Rushes were a very old and widespread seating alternative to solid wooden furniture. Dr Bill Cotton’s book The English Regional Chair shows an example of a chair with a rush seat from Newhaven, Connecticut, dated to about 1700, and chairs of this sort were made all across England in the 18th century. As far as the High Wycombe chair industry is concerned, although rush-seated chairs were made quite early (they are shown in Edwin Skull’s hand-drawn design book of 1849) they were far outnumbered by cane-seated chairs. In 1851, for instance, the Newland district of High Wycombe housed 96 cane workers and only four rush matters, and West Wycombe had only one. It was only towards the later 1800s that rush-seating became more important.
At first, caning was a job typically done by the young. The average age of a chair caner in Newland in 1851 was 15, with 7 being the youngest. Very few adults carried on the trade. Most girls became wives and mothers, and most boys changed trades - John Timberlake and George Milner, for example, both listed as chair caners in the census of that year, became a chair polisher and a varnish manufacturer respectively. In contrast, the few rush matters were all adults. At that time, caning was not as completely a women’s trade as it later became: 39 of the Newland caners, or 41%, were men and boys. The craft was very heavily concentrated in High Wycombe, unlike chairmaking generally which was more widespread in the area. High Wycombe housed 228 chair caners, followed by West Wycombe with 53 (22 of them in Downley) and just 9 in Lane End and 5 in Stokenchurch.
Before 1900, it was very rare for a chair manufacturer to maintain a caning shop: most caning was done as out-work, with children walking to the factories in the morning to collect empty seat frames for their mothers to make up during the day. Mrs Rolph described how before World War One ‘it was common to see women sitting at the front door of houses caning chairs’, and Olive Pearce (in A Family Story) recalled that ‘when [the children] were all asleep my mother started work once more, caning chairs to help bring in some more money. Many women worked in this cottage industry to earn the few pence that would make life a little easier’.
Rush seating began to increase from around the 1870s. Several of the Wycombe chair makers became noted for the manufacture of cheap chairs for churches and public halls, and these were typically rush-seated. The famous huge orders which are often quoted - such as the 19,200 chairs supplied for a Moody & Sankey revival meeting in 1873 - indicate how important this class of manufacture was becoming for certain firms. Rush matting was a notoriously dirty job, in contrast to the relatively clean caning, and could hardly be done in the home; this seems to have led to the development of matting and caning shops within the larger chair factories. It was said that ‘you could smell a matter a mile off’ and the combination of working seated on the floor or on low stools, the damp (the rushes had to be dampened to make them flexible) and the dust given off by the dried rushes was very hazardous to health, not considering the offensive smell. In the 1920s John Gibson’s set up regular medical checks for its matters to ensure they were clear of lung problems, but the caners were not checked. Even so, when Mrs Butterfield’s prospective daughter-in-law asked to be taught how to do cane work in 1924, she was told ‘That’s no job for a girl. If my son can’t keep you without you doing a dirty job like that, he’s not worth you marrying!’ By the end of the 19th century, most of the work was done by women, but some tasks were reserved for men, particularly shaving and splitting the canes which was the job of workers known as ‘makers-off’.
Proportions varied between the two crafts: Glenister’s had equal numbers of matters and caners in the 1920s, about 15 each, while Birch’s had far more caners. They were also paid differently. Matting was perceived as more skilled as well as more hazardous and matters earned more accordingly. In the 1920s, a skilled matter could expect to receive 3d for a child’s chair, 5d for a dining chair, 7d for a low rocker and 10d for an arm chair, and a standard dining chair could take 1 ½ to 2 hours to complete; Mr Hathaway’s wife, a particularly fast and skilled caner, could finish a bedroom chair in ¾ of an hour but only received 2d for it. However, caning styles varied from the very simple to ‘open, close, spider, secret and double’ patterns, and the very best caners at that time could earn £4-5 a week - more than many of their male colleagues. A specialism which brought greater income with it was straw matting, which improved the appearance of a rush-seated chair by twisting long strips of straw, often brightly coloured, around the rushes as they were worked into the seat. An employer might pay three times as much for a straw-matted chair as for a plain rush one. Wages slumped in the Depression of the early ‘30s when G Holt & Sons paid their caners and matters about 1 ¾ d per chair, although they recovered to an average of 6d by 1939.
The tools used were very simple. Caners needed just a few braddles for clearing holes, a knife to cut the cane and a small mallet to drive in the wedges which held the cane in place. The matter used an iron peg, a wooden rubber, a knife and a stuffing stick to press odd bits of rush into the gap between the two outer ‘skins’, and so fill out the seat. The straw workers simply used their thumbnails to split the fibres. Usually these tools, like those of the chairmakers, had to be provided by the workers themselves. At Birch’s factory in the 1920s, Mrs Woodley even had to supply her own little deal wedges for the canes.
At first the rushes were grown around the Oxfordshire - Buckinghamshire border - Shabbington is a village sometimes mentioned. They were then stored ready to be carted by the chair manufacturers to their factories; a well-known photograph survives of Harry Towerton’s horse and cart carrying rushes towards Stokenchurch where the firm was based. For finer work the rushes grown in the Dutch salt marshes were preferred and by the 1920s Glenister’s was bringing all its rushes from there. Canes were imported at first from Germany; by the 1930s the chief local supplier was Boggins’s Canestore in Desborough Road, whose supplies came from Malaya.
Above Harry Towerton transporting rushes to his Stokenchurch factory.
As the 1930s drew on, cane and rush seated furniture was less and less in demand. The history of G Holt & Sons, a High Wycombe chair manufacturer founded in 1907 and which made rush and cane seated items, exemplifies what was happening to the trade. By the early 1930s the firm’s big orders had dried up, but Mr Holt realised there would continue to be a demand for the repair of the millions of rush and cane chairs that were already in existence. Consequently he recruited 6 outworkers, whose numbers had risen to 11 by 1939; after the War the firm’s only work was in repair and restoration, and more was being done by outworkers than in the Victoria Street factory itself. Holt’s found itself with virtually a local monopoly. By 1949 a rush-matter at Holt’s could expect to get through 15 to 22 chairs a week and was earning on average between £1 5s and £2 5d. The orders kept coming in, but throughout the 1960s it became more and more difficult to find workers willing to learn the craft. In 1969 the Holts sold what remained of the business to Major Henry Gibbs, who renamed it the Wycombe Cane and Rush Works and carried on restoration work with his wife, having taken up the craft as a retirement hobby.
Rush matters in a workshop in High wycombe
A group of caners working on new armchairs in a sunburst cane pattern possibly at the Glenisters factory.
A scetch by Cassidy of caners at work at Holt & Son High Wycombe in 1968.
