Death of a British woodworking institution

  

It was a very sad day when The Woodworker magazine closed in November 2024, after 123 years and surving two world wars. 

An early edition of The Woodworker magazine 1904

I wrote my first article for the Woodworker magazine in 1972 - a wheel cutting jig. Throughout my early teaching career in the mid 60s the schools would usually have copies of The Woodworker annuals in hardback edition. Fast forward to today I wonder how many schools even teach woodwork.

 

Wheel cutting jig featured in the Woodworker 1972. 

My illustration style was influenced by Charles Hayward. 

 

 It is particularly devastating  for the editor Tegan Foley who put her heart and soul into trying to rescue the magazine and its merger with Good Woodworking in 2018.  

Before I look at the history  of the leading woodwork magazine brand since 1901 its demise and where woodworking finds itself today, I wish to pay tribute to the editor:

A personal tribute to the editor

I met Tegan for the first time at the Axminster Tool Centre in Nuneaton to discuss an exhibition there for The Alan Peters award in 2021 (which she has enthusiastically supported).  She talked about a planned trip to Sweden to visit Tormek and learn all about surface grinders to later write an article. I imagine Tegan learned much about woodworking on the job but her professionalism as an editor has been outstanding  and I would go as far as to say she has been the best editor I have worked with over the years and I have worked with most of them since the 1980s.  Long gone were the days when editors would take the time to allow the writer to check proofs for articles, but Tegan always sent me one to check and approve. The presentation has always been really good transforming my text and images by the talented designer Nik Harber into something that made the magazine ‘look pretty’. I would say it has looked pretty good on Tegan’s watch and interestingly the recently merged magazine  was a game changer. She says ‘this was to take the best elements of both and produce a new and improved “super” magazine’.  While Good Working tended to appeal to a younger audience, The Woodworker was generally the older demographic, so the two complemented each other well.

Working to a very tight budget and needing to find new companies for vital advertising revenue at a time when magazines were in the doldrums and being increasingly replaced  by  online content , I believe Tegan did her very best to appeal to the interests of a wide range of woodworkers retaining the basic elements of a good read.  

I looked at how The Woodworker  had evolved from my own collection of magazines and annuals. Interestingly in a 1940 edition there is an advert titled “Woodwork in War Time” and advice on what books you need to make things ‘in the present difficult circumstances’.

We must not forget that the Covid pandemic made things much harder as budgets were cut and Tegan had to rely on more archive content from Good Woodworking magazine. ‘No one wanted the magazine to cease and thankfully we were able to navigate this difficult time’.

 

 

 

An advert from the 1940 January issuse

 

The making of a brand

 

Browsing through my own collection of Woodworker magazines and annuals I picked a few at random to see how the magazine has changed. 

 

February 1932  - Firstly, the magazine survived two world wars. The price is sixpence. It smells of old paper and ink but still holds together well, it is thin at about 60 pages and has 12 pages of adverts, a sale & exchange page and the rest of the content include a series called ‘Chips from the chisel’, and instructions, plans for useful projects, has an interesting page called ‘How I do it’ by readers and several pages devoted to ‘The Question Box (replies to readers queries).  

 For many decades the  magazine was black and white with a sepia cover

 

 ‘The Question Box’ -  the start of a traditional series

 

 

Dipping then into  the February 1940 issue, it is more or less the same but with more projects  and strikingly improved illustrations;  all in black & white and the emergence of photographs  (in the April issue)  and here enters the legendary Charles Hayward (editor and illustrator from 1939 to 1967) and the visual  transformation of the magazine . There is an exploded view line drawing of a plywood lantern that would look modern today and in this issue also a  crossword puzzle!

 

 

exploded illustration of a modern plywood design in 1940

 

 

Charles Hayward

 

‘Charles H. Hayward (1898-1998) was the most important workshop writer and editor of the 20th century. Unlike any person before (and perhaps after) him, Hayward was a trained cabinetmaker and extraordinary illustrator, not to mention an excellent designer, writer, editor and photographer’.  He also wrote a series of definitive woodworking books that still stand today including the famous Woodworkers’ Pocket Book. At the helm of the Woodworker he ‘tailored the magazine to match the specific tastes and interests of their readers;  exclusive interviews, behind-the-scenes looks, and content that aligned  with readers’ lifestyles and aspirations. This curated approach makes the magazine feel like it was made just for them, something that’s hard  to achieve with broad digital communications’.

 

A typical Charles Hayward line drawing

 

 

One of several hardback books written by Charles Hayward

  The Woodworkers Pocket book, updated numerous times

 

 

Fast forward to 1956 and the January edition is fractionally thicker at 66 pages, strangely just one page of advertising, lots of project pages, mostly quite advanced woodworking , I would say and more of a feeling of design with the splayed legged style on the 1950s (now in vogue amongst today’s makers. Some woodcarving, history of 18^th century furniture, and more or less the same elements (Question Box etc) of the early magazines. S H Glennister was a familiar mid-century writer/author having trained at Shoreditch College and holding the FCollH qualification. (After I trained at Shoreditch I gained the updated MCCED  qualification).  

 S H Glenister FCollH (the qualification of mid-century authors).

 

 

Moving swiftly to the present era (I am fast exceeding the allocated space for this  article) the magazines of the 1960s were generally more customised content with profiles of makers, features such as ‘Offcuts’, ‘Reviews and events’ and plenty of adverts, all in black and white and the health check of any magazine ‘ the ‘Letters’ page.  The 1980s probably was the golden era with interest in British furniture design at a zenith and features on the design maker revolution. Colour pages  began to appear around 1987.  Editors included Peter Collinette,  Aidan Walker and in the 1990s  Nick Gibbs.

 

Taking us to the present day  the magazine looks great, if a little lacking in fresh enticing  projects to make! So what happened?  Let’s first summarise the value (importance)  of a magazine:

 

The penultimate issue of The Woodworker showcasing some of the 

best furniture being designed and made in The British Isles today.

 

 

 

For the cost of a pint

 

The monthly outlay for magazine subscription is considerably less than a person’s  average consumption of beer. It is something to look forward to in the post, to feel and dip into at leisure. As Andy Lawton (co-judge of the Alan Peters Award says ‘

‘Wood is a tangible and tactile material and so is a printed magazine. Storing information electronically is all very well but a physical magazine is hard to beat and for me somehow more 'real' than something online. I have an archive of The Woodworker going back to the late nineteen eighties: an easily accessible invaluable resource’.  In my mind the greatest strength or raisin d’etre of a technical magazine apart from it being a one stop shop package is its curated content, previously mentioned:

 

 

Curated content

 

Magazine editors may not be woodworking experts but they rely on respected technical and creative input and are in overall control of the magazine content and messages it conveys. In old money this means censorship, especially about what is actually truth,  something that online content does not provide.  Already sophisticated You Tubers will convince thousands that end grain does not require re-inforcement for a strong  bond  but can rely just on glue (not endorsed by the likes of Titebond) . Misinformation and mistruth will increasingly make woodworking discrimination more  difficult for the beginner.

 

 

The new online influencers

 

YouTube has taken over as the major teacher of woodwork. The new gurus command massive audiences (sometimes 150,000 views on a new video in a day) increasingly using clickbait titles to maximise their online income.  Pushing  his ‘personal limits and providing entertainment’ is what a current young guru claims as his YouTube channel shows imagery of a chisel flying through the air. Another oldie major UK influencer wrote on his website in 2016  ‘I can’t recommend any of the magazines to learn from because generally they are advertisement companies…. we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that all they do is about making money…mostly they are always to promote machine woodworking and use real woodworking as a bolt on’. Well apart from the hypocrisy about profit motive and falsehood that magazine content creators have the same motivation as publishers ,  the inaccuracy of  these opinions are echo chambered on digital forums today . But as I hope I have demonstrated the magazines have relied on advertising from the start and it is no greater today.      

 

 

When the lights go outage

 

Putting all your eggs in one basket we should know is risky. A recent global internet  outage not to mention AI and CGI  is  a warning of the future. Brilliant though much of the online content is, especially on Instagram, woodworking is not generally a scroll or delete activity but requires patience and and focus.  

 

 

Farewell

 

I thought I would be the last person to defend tradition as for most of my furniture making career as a designer I challenged it, although history and heritage is important ‘tradition needs to move on’ as Alan Peters once said to me. Let’s hope the Woodworker makes a comeback!

 

 

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