by Roger Deakin
Down in the village, Brian White and Brian Lock are among the last of the willow growers on the Levels. Bundles of osier rods stand in a shed ready to be sent away, bound with willow bark, knotted in the traditional rose pattern. In a big open-fronted hangar, the year’s crop is stacked criss-cross, twenty feet high. Brian White meets me in the yard with his black-and-white dog and we head out towards the withy beds on West Moor. Brian says the moor was once planted like this from end to end. Everybody in the village worked with willow, one way or another. Ten years ago there were still ten serious growers on the moor. Now the industry is dying out: there are only four big growers left in the Levels, and a lot of small ones with beds of a few acres each. This year another of the local willow men, Mr Male, reached seventy-five and retired. There is no one to take his place.
The two Brians work twenty-six acres of withies segregated into lesser beds of three or four acres. The willows grow in rows two feet apart, planted every fourteen inches in the rows: about five or six hundred to the acre. The wind makes a chaos of their red-brown stems, dishevelling them as if to test their pliability, in spite of a protective hedge around each bed, of dogwood, maple, elm or ash. We walk out along a cart track raised above deep rhynes: the drainage ditches connecting with the larger dykes. They keep the water level just high enough to moisten the willow roots. Rhyne rhymes with ‘seen’ and comes from the same old Germanic stem as the River Rhine. Meadowsweet, comfrey and reeds line the banks.
Brian points out the different varieties of willow. Black maul and Flanders red were always the most popular on West Moor, he says, and they still grow plenty of both. Next best for baskets after the pliable black maul is Holton’s black, and they also grow the French noir de Verlaine and orange-stemmed golden willow. In the next bed, a swaying jungle of the exceptionally vigorous bow’s hybrid is already well on the way to the eight or nine feet it will grow in a single season. The other withies are little more than half as tall. Brian says there are 1,200 varieties of willow at the agricultural research station at Long Ashton, and some sixty hybrids and cultivars of Salix viminalis, the osier principally grown for basket-making.
The willow men begin cutting in mid November once the leaves have dropped and the sap is sunk. Everyone used to harvest with billhooks. ‘We used sickle hooks, and they glided through the stems. You had to stick at it all day,’ says Brian. ‘It took a week or two to cut an acre by hand. That’s four or five hundred stools, and it ripped your wellingtons to bits. But hand cutting is best. Years ago we had beds seventy or eighty years old. Stools only last twenty years with machine cutting, but with the machine and the tractor we harvest three acres a day, and it gathers the rods and ties them in bundles for us.’
Replanting the beds is hard winter work, with the foot-long butts of stout rods as cuttings. Brian says you wear a kind of mitten made of an old boot on your planting hand, using the sole to shove down the sticks into the earth. A bed takes three years to establish, cutting back the new growth each winter to stimulate more, weeding the rows, and controlling fungal and insect pests. The willow’s natural habit of spontaneous self-setting from cuttings is embodied in its name, Salix, which stems from the Latin verb salire, to leap. It literally springs into life. The verb to sally, meaning to go forth boldly, comes from the same root. It is all too easy to plant willow inadvertently by, for instance, driving in a willow fence post or just leaving a green log of willow lying on damp ground. All willows abound in life and vigour, and their pliable wands give them grace.
‘Willow takes a lot of handling,’ says Brian, back in the yard. The cut rods must be laid out all summer to dry. They need a year for seasoning, though eighteen months or even two years will improve them. Some are stood up in baths and kept alive from Christmas until April, then stripped of their bark to make white willow. Others are boiled continuously for eight hours in a sixteen-foot-long tank like a cattle trough, heated by a brick coal-fired boiler beneath it. Tannin dissolves out of the bark and stains the wood golden-brown. The tank is black with it. The rods are fed into a bark-stripping machine – a revolving brake like a threshing drum – and they emerge as the buffs that make fishing creels or bicycle baskets. Ten years ago, says Brian, buffs were most in demand, but now people want brown willow: the more rustic-looking rods with the bark left on. They even buy bolts of them to stand in the church aisle at weddings, but the growers now sell more to individual women making basketwork as a hobby than to wholesalers or manufacturers. They also supply the makers of hot-air balloon baskets, for which willow’s resilience and strength is ideal, or the weavers of willow coffins.
Plastic carrier bags and supermarkets have put an end to most of the basket industry, although a few of the old trades survive. A man in Norfolk still makes the wicker frames of guardsmen’s bearskins, and down in Hampshire on the River Test someone is still making eel-traps. At Longstock, a mile upstream from Stockbridge, you turn down a little street called ‘The Bunny’ to the river, where a dozen eel-traps of willow basketwork, looking like beehives, are strung across the river from a wooden plank bridge beside the river-keeper’s thatched, conical-roofed bothy.
Not very long ago working with willow could support a modest living. Writing in 1938, H. J. Massingham describes his visit to an ordinary English village basket-maker. ‘If business is good,’ says Massingham, ‘the basket-maker will use as many as 8,000 bundles a year.’ For nearly forty years this man had been making coal and flint baskets, fruit hampers, five-bushel chaff baskets, feeding baskets, ‘and those in common use by butchers’ boys and greengrocers’. Earlier in his career he had regularly made eel, lobster and ‘hoddie pots’: wicker pots baited with snails to trap sparrows. He also made a speciality of the ‘butter plat’: ‘a basket with a lid designed to hold either three dozen pounds of butter, three pecks of fruit or from eight to twelve Aylesbury ducks’. The diversity of uses for willow was enormous, and the dexterity of the craftspeople naturally inherited down the generations. ‘In two hours – we took half the time talking – I watched a bundle of rods wave and bend and twist until they had reached a final end in which the art and use were one, an architectural experience I am not likely to forget,’ writes Massingham. At the height of his powers, this man could make a dozen baskets in a day. The spidery beginnings of various baskets hang up in odd corners of my own workshop. My stumbling beginner’s attempts have taught me how much strength and skill the craft demands. Basketwork is often described as ‘slow’ or ‘contemplative’. So it may be for some, but when you see a professional at work, it is all speed and fluency.
According to Brian White, the Environment Agency has shown little enthusiasm for the continuance of the withy-growing tradition on the Levels. They have even bought cheap willow from Poland to maintain the river banks, undercutting and ignoring the local growers. Several summers back, when the West Moor withy beds were flooded with stagnant river water full of sewage and dead fish after heavy rains, not a single person from the Environment Agency would come out to inspect the ailing willows. The stagnant, poisonous water ruined the entire crop that year, causing Mr Lock and Mr White to incur losses of £30,000. They were never compensated. A good many naturalists and walkers come to West Moor and appreciate the culture as well as the nature of the withy beds, yet Brian says the Environment Agency has plans to flood the place permanently. It would mean the end of the local willow and basket industry.
The following week I set off for Essex, to one of the holy places of the cricketing world, in search of the cricket bat willow. In the wood yard of J. S. Wright & Sons, Willow Merchants, at Great Leighs near Chelmsford, I find willow clefts, roughly sawn to the size and shape of cricket bat blades, stacked high on pallets, drying naturally in the air and looking like pale, creamy loaves fresh from the oven. More cricket bats begin life at J. S. Wright’s than anywhere else in the world, and forty or fifty examples of the craft, all by different makers, are ranged around the office walls of the man I have come to see, Chris Price, the only directo
r of the firm who isn’t a member of the Wright family. Any remaining wall space not festooned with bats displays photographic archives of the hundred-year history of the firm: famous cricketers, or men in waistcoats and shirtsleeves standing on ditch banks beside felled willows.
One of the many curious things about our national game is that you can make a decent bat only from the wood of the cricket bat willow, and the trees will grow really well only in England, preferably in Essex or Suffolk. People manage to grow them with moderate success in Kashmir and Australia, somewhere to the north of Melbourne, but the poor willows aren’t really happy so far from home. The climate isn’t quite right. As a result, the Kashmir willow is too heavy for anything other than beginners’ bats, and the Australian is often strangely coloured, because it must be artificially watered. Naturally, it remains a source of deep frustration to Australian cricketers that to obtain a top-quality bat, they must still import the willow from England.
Of all the hundreds of different species and varieties of willow, it is a particular variety of the white willow, Salix alba coerulea, that yields the ideal material for a cricket bat. It seems to have appeared first about 1780 in Suffolk and is fond of water. Durham is about as far north as it will grow, and Devon as far west. It is best grown along banks beside the waters of lazy streams and dykes in rich, dark, damp soil. The essential for the even growth of the very best willow is consistent rainfall over most of the year. The cricket bat willow grows at a prodigious rate. During June, July and August a tree can put on four inches in girth. It is capable of reaching sixty feet, and a circumference of four-foot eight inches, in fifteen or twenty years. This is the moment to fell it. Traditionally, J. S. Wright & Sons would have sent out a team of four men with a big cross-cut saw that was almost as fast as a chainsaw with two men on each handle. They cut the felled bole into twenty-eight-inch rolls and carried them off the field on their shoulders to load into a lorry. You never put in a throat, or notch, when you fell one of these willows. Instead, you drive in a wedge behind the saw. Today, J. S. Wright & Sons use chainsaws, travelling about the country, felling twenty-five or thirty trees a day and bringing them back to the yard in Essex. A standing tree may be worth £150, according to quality, and they are spaced about thirty-five feet apart along a ditch bank, or planted out at thirty to the acre. Chris Price says the company always aims to plant three times as many trees as it fells. Some farmers, like the Goodwin family in the Blackwater Valley, have a tradition of growing cricket bat willows, and may now be on their fourth or fifth crop. It can be profitable, but the trees must be highly manicured as they grow.
Just after the war, the Stationery Office published a book entitled The Cultivation of the Cricket Bat Willow. It is one of those titles you think is going to be about something else altogether, like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but, unless I’ve missed something, this seems to be the story it tells. Each sapling begins life in the nursery as a set, a cutting from a tod, a four-foot pollard mother tree cultivated from stock of the noblest pedigree. When your young willow has achieved twelve and a half feet of straight, unbranched stem, you plant it out in the field to a depth of at least thirty inches. This leaves nine or ten feet, the height of three or four cricket bats, to grow into a tree-trunk. For the next five or six years, you must, like King Herod, cut off any infant lateral shoots almost the moment they appear. This means two or three annual prunings until the tree is more mature, when you can relax and shave it only once or twice a year. The pruning knife is set on the end of a pole, so you can reach up and push it against the buds or shoots to amputate them, always working upwards with the grain. Such meticulous care ensures that the wood will be free of knots, with a straight and even grain.
These days the felled boles are transported in one piece to the yard, where they are sawn into traditional twenty-eight-inch lengths: the rolls. The next job is to cleave each one along the grain into eight, using wedges and the back of an axe. The sawyer then studies the clefts, decides which side will look best as the face of the bat and saws them to the rough shape of a blade. They are dipped in wax at both ends to prevent them splitting as they dry out naturally in the air for three to twelve months.
Each cleft at J. S. Wright’s is inspected and graded on a scale of one to four. Only the top grade will make a bat for a Test cricketer. Chris picks one of the clefts off a stack in the yard and thumps the face with a ball hammer. It dents easily. ‘At this stage, the willow is a soft wood, but once the face and edges of the bat have been compressed in a roller, it becomes a hardwood. Balls come down the pitch at 90 mph. The bat would soon pulp if it weren’t compressed, and it wouldn’t drive back the ball.’ Chris says they once experimented with poplar, but it wouldn’t retain its compression.
What is it about this particular willow that suits it so uniquely to making bats? It is light, strong, fibrous wood that won’t snap. It is also very consistent in its density, and, counter-intuitively, the wider the grain, the longer the bat is likely to last. A good bat should last a thousand runs, but it may have as few as three or four grains in its face. A closer-grained bat with up to ten or more grains in the face may be a hard hitter, but might last only two hundred runs. The bat Don Bradman used for his record score of 334 against England in the third Test at Leeds in 1930 had ten grains, but might not have lasted much longer than the innings. This is because the wider-grained wood is younger and more resilient. In fact, Bradman was known for his nonchalant attitude towards bats, sometimes even borrowing one on the spot for a match. W. G. Grace, on the other hand, was so particular that he used to employ several junior batsmen to play in a selection of bats for him.
There are strict rules about the dimensions of bats, but individual bat-makers are free to exercise their own preferences as to shape, balance and ‘feel’. Rules have evolved pragmatically. Ever since 23 September 1741, when Mr Shock White of the Ryegate First XI advanced to the crease with a bat as wide as the wicket itself in a match against Hambledon, there has been a rule, proposed by the miffed Hambledon team, that the bat ‘shall not exceed four-and-a-quarter inches in width’. And, in the wake of Dennis Lillee’s attempt to introduce an aluminium bat in 1979, there came the commandment: ‘The bat shall be made solely of wood.’
A certain mystique has always surrounded cricket bats: the smell of raw linseed oil rubbed in ritually with the fingers, and the supposed extra potency of a blade signed by a famous cricketer. Persuading one of the big names to dedicate his signature to a maker will cost at least £40,000 a year. ‘Knocking in’ a new bat is still an essential rite of passage: tapping and toughening its oiled face with a rounded wooden mallet for ten or fifteen spells of ten minutes. Selecting the right bat requires skill and experience on the part of the cricketer. Every one is unique, its qualities dependent on the original character of timber, tree, soil and weather.
Bat-making is still a craft industry, and you don’t need much in the way of machinery or tools to get started. Blades are shaped with draw-knives, spokeshaves and wooden block planes, their shoulders blended into the rubber-sprung Sarawak split cane handles with a thin blade. The best makers still polish their bats with a horse’s shinbone to render a really smooth finish, and that most characteristic of English music: the sound of leather on willow.
I grow common or garden willows myself and hold them in great affection. A giant pollard crack willow stands close to the farm gate at the edge of the common. Some of its over-long boughs split off during the October gale of 1987 and barricaded me in, and the postman out, for a day or so until I could saw my way out. The old tree soon sprang back into life and contains in its crown a thriving miniature wood of elder, bramble, ivy, ash, nettles and goosegrass, as well as a whole city of woodlice, earwigs and beetles. Before its shipwreck, it even sported a tree house, admittedly low on maintenance, its former inhabitants having departed into adolescence. I like the goat willows in the hedges for their yellow duster of pollen, droning with early bees in spring. Flowering as early
as March, willows are a valuable source of food for hungry bumblebee queens emerging from hibernation. Sometimes they will grow along the sides of a green lane, weaving their roots into a living raft beneath the track, reinforcing it and helping to drain it. Willow makes good firewood too, provided it is thoroughly seasoned. I saw it into logs and stack them end out against the woodshed wall to face the sun all summer. A pollard willow grows at one end of the moat, sending up green-barked new poles so fast in spring you can almost hear the cells dividing. It is a fountain of sap, evaporating hundreds of gallons into the summer air.
Shelter
My friends the Randall-Pages have lent me their oak cabin in an old oak wood in the valley of the Teign near Drewsteignton. With a rucksack full of food I hike in past a pair of hedgerow wych elms, down a plunging field, into the flickering oak woods that line the river gorge along a charcoal-burners’ path cut into the hillside. Every now and again there’s one of their wide, level platforms beside the path, an area of blackened stones, often dark purple at closer inspection, many of them shattered by the slow heat. Until about eighty years ago the whole oakwood had always been coppiced for the charcoal the tin smelters needed on Dartmoor. Some of the charcoal was also exported off the moor by wagon to the south coast, where it was loaded on to sailing barges at places like Devonport and shipped to London for sale. Now the oaks have grown up from shoots on the coppice stools into an open wood of tall, slender, relatively straight-trunked oaks. The Dartmoor National Park Authority have been at work among the trees singling the oaks: reducing the number of limbs growing from any rootstock to one, which will eventually grow into a bigger, stronger standard tree. They are also engaged in something of a purge, cutting out any other species than oak, ash or hazel. Trunks of oak and sycamore lie about on the wood’s floor. Birch logs are stacked to dry beside the path.