Talking to the wheelwrights
About ten years ago I went to East Devon to meet the Rowland family and talk to them about their wheelwright business. It was fascinating stuff and from my old hard discs I’ve managed to find and edit the interviews I did at the time and put them into this podcast. Also below is the article I wrote for the Western Morning News after the visit.
No one knows which genius originally invented the wheel but the masterpiece of design has travelled countless billions of miles in the service of mankind and most definitely does not need reinventing. It does, however, need making – and here in the West Country we have just the men to do that tricky job.
Creating the kind of old fashioned wheels which served us so faithfully for so long is a kind of alchemy that not only marries carpentry and metalwork of an extremely precise nature, but which also requires a profound knowledge of the way materials behave when they’re hot and when they’re cold.
For example, if metal didn’t expand when hot and contract when cold, it would have been difficult for our forefathers to have transported things around quite so effectively for so many hundreds of years. The contraction of a metal “tyre” onto a circular wooden wheel lies at the very heart of the wheelwright’s art.
It bonds the various wooden components tightly together while at the same attaching the metal rim to the circumference more strongly than any glue, staple, screw or nail could manage.
And it’s the big moment, the grand-finale, of the wheelwright’s work - and as such it was very kind indeed of Mike Rowland and his son Greg to reserve two gun-carriage wheels for my visit so that I could see how it was done.
The pair work alongside ever-watchful wife and mum, Doreen, on the outskirts of historic Colyton. You know you have reached the Rowland’s place because of two things – there will probably be a bonfire and also you will see a posh looking Royal Crest on the old farm buildings and on their pick-up truck.
Mike and Greg are wheelwrights by Royal Command, and very proud of this they are too. In fact, only last week Mike became a Yeoman of the Worshipful Company of Wheelwrights at a grand ceremony in London. Greg is a liveryman in that august organisation and also chairman of its all important crafts committee.
Not that royal crests or ancient titles should give you the wrong idea about these people – when I heard about all this before I’d met the family, I had a hunch I’d be meeting some haughty equestrian types. I was wrong – the Rowlands are as down-to-earth as you could ever hope any group of artisans to be. No pomp and ceremony here, just a lot of flames and smoke… at least, the day we visited.
Old wooden pallets and latticework fences are the new bonfire friends of the modern wheelwright – just about everything else is as old fashioned and genuine as it would have been 100 years ago. The flatness of these burning items makes them an ideal level base on which to heat an iron tyre or hoop evenly.
Once hot the rim is then transferred to a huge steel disc where the wooden components of a wheel have been fastened - and the moment the tyre has been placed around the wheel, cold water is poured hurriedly from a couple of dozen watering cans.
Cue: much hissing and even more steam, plus the odd rogue flame. And that’s it – a new wagon or cartwheel is ready for the road.
The adding of the tyre is the final act in a multi-act play which sees the manufacture and marriage of hub, spokes and fellows - or fellies, as some call the outer wooden rim of a wheel.
Once I’d had a go and seen how the last trick in the alchemy was done, I sat down to ask 75 year old Mike Rowland all about his life coach-making and wheelwrighting.
“I started work in 1952 when I took an apprenticeship as a carpenter and joiner - the wages were so low I was getting 32 shillings and sixpence in old money. I had to do something to augment my wages so I used to repair the wheels for the gypsies – that’s how I started.
“They used little carts which they ran around in selling their clothes-pegs and whatever. My grandfather was a wheelwright – and I can just about remember him doing the job,” said Mike.
“But then everything went flat - there was a time when you could buy a wagon in a sale for half-a-crown. Farmers were getting tractors in from America and they were replacing their horses with these tractors – but what saved me was they’d boast to each other how much they could pull on their wagons. And they’d break their wheels by overloading them!
“There’s many a time when they’d turn up and expecting me to mend them overnight - and I’d have to spend the whole night doing it. We used to get a bit upset about it, really, because we’d work all night so they could get to work in the morning - but as soon as they got something to replace their wagons, they didn’t want to know us anymore.”
Mike began his own business shortly after marrying Doreen: “I used to make a lot of garden furniture and stuff, but I got so fed up with it because it was repetition all the time. Then I made a gypsy caravan and that got me going on the wheelwrighting again - which is what I wanted to do anyway.
“People from the equestrian world started coming to us - and for a period we were making show drays for all the big breweries. That went on for about 10 years then Margaret Thatcher made the breweries sell the tied houses and we lost two-and-a-half year’s worth of work in one night with cancellations...
“We’ve always been wheelwrights and coach-builders - but the wheels are the bits that go wrong,” said Mike. “We’ve tackled all manner of wheels - all different sizes from wheelbarrows upwards. The biggest one was the timber wagon - that was eight foot. We’ve even done waterwheels.”
When it comes to the craftsmanship involved, Mike gets rather Zen when he says: “The wheel is only a straight line around a given point. That’s all a wheel is - and the bigger the wheel, the easier it is for the animal.
“You have got to make the vehicle for that animal to pull, you see - otherwise you’ve got a horse-killer. There are several formulas and you carry them in your head. For instance, the wheelbase or the axles - ideally they should be one-and-a-quarter times the width of the wagon apart.
“I picked a lot of it up off the old wheelwrights. Greg is surprised when I don’t consider something important - but it’s just something you know, isn’t it?
“Apparently they're going to make me a yeoman - sounds important - but I don’t know what it is really,” laughed Mike. “But I shall enjoy myself. The serious side is about the training of apprentices - I really do think these things should be passed on. Just because we’re wheelwrights - really it means we can do anything in wood. And young people aren’t being taught that sort of thing, but they should be. It was great for me that Greg took it on - and in some ways he’s taking it all further than I’ve ever done.
“But if you look around here it’s all the same equipment I had as a youngster, except we didn’t have anything electrical. The only thing that’s different is we used three types of English wood… Elm for the hubs - it was regarded as a weed because there was so much of it. Oak for the spokes - because it will stand the compression strains. And ash for the fellie.
“You had the pit sawyers in once a year and they would cut your wood and stack it. In those days you stacked timber for your grandson,” sighed Mike. “You can’t do that now for taxation reasons. So we buy it ready to use.”
At this point Greg joined the conversation: “You’ve seen we’re by appointment to Her Majesty the Queen,” he smiled with great pride. “Now dad is about to become a Yeoman of the Worshipful Company of Wheelwrights in recognition of him making a living as a wheelwright and his contribution to wheelwrighting.
“There are about 50 wheelwrights but more than 60 percent don’t actually make their primary living making wheels. We are certainly one of the biggest wheelwright shops in the country. There are only about a dozen actually doing it as their sole business.”
It seems the Rowland family has been involved in the craft for a very long time…
“The owner of Beer Quarry caves was looking at their records and found that a family called Rowland was making the carts and wheels to take the stone for the building of Exeter Cathedral in 1340. The documented evidence goes through for a couple of hundred years - they even have the prices they paid this family. They were in Upottery. Our family picks up again there in about 1700.
“There was normally more than one wheelwright in every parish. Traditionally, on the entrance to every town or village you’d have a wheelwright where you dropped off your vehicle. Then you’d have a forge where you dropped off your horse. Then a hostelry where you dropped off yourself.
“Colyton was one of the last places with that - we were here, I used to run the forge just over the bridge, and then there was The Bear pub.
“If you’d gone back to those early days at Beer Quarry there wouldn’t have been much difference in what they did. But there are a couple - we put a continuous band on, which means you have to have the knowledge to work out the expansion and contraction of steel and measure it.
“That goes back to Egyptian times - they knew how to do it,” Greg told me. “Then we went through the Dark Ages and there was a thing called ‘straking’ which was a section of metal which covered just a joint on a wheel - it meant you didn’t have to measure it exactly. Eventually the wheelwrights realised the continuous band made a much better stronger wheel.
“I work it out with a traveller – it’s an age-old tool - like one of those things you see road surveyors using when they’re measuring with a little wheel. It’s three-turns-and-so-much… You transfer the measurement to the inside of the tyre and take off a bit - that’s the dark art of what we do.
“It’s never going to make you rich,” shrugged Greg. “And it’s got to be in you - you can have the finest joiner in the land who can’t make a wheel. Your brain has to work a different way - you need a feel for it.”
Seeing the perfect wheels coming off the Rowland assembly line you get the feeling the father and son have the art of wheelwrighting deep in their bones.
