The Wheelwright's Shop is an account of those crafts, the business and the men who worked them. First published in 1923 it is a detailed discussion of the work, and the craft, but it is also an elegy to a vanishing world. Sturt was an educated young man when he took over the shop, and an admirer of Ruskin. His book bemoans the loss of skills and knowledge that was happening as mass production of components was replacing handmade work. Metal tyres from America, chains made by the
women chainmakers in Cradley Heath and axles and other metal goods from Birmingham. Sturt bemoans the loss of work, and the sharpening class divisions in the workplace, but he also understands that some of these improvements were, indeed, better. Mass production made for lighter parts, and stronger, but easier to move waggons.
At the heart of the book though is the labour and craft of the craftsmen in the shop. This is described in great detail. I fancy that readers who are familiar with carpentry or metalwork, or built vehicles and wheels in particular, will understand more of this than I. As a non-expert I was not disintrested, but I was frequently unable to follow the detail. That said I learnt much about how waggons, and in particular, the wheels were built. Particularly fascinating though is how Sturt shows that this knowledge was the product of decades, generations, of experience, knowledge and training. Sturt calls it the "skill of England, the experience of ages". There's a fascinating, and telling, account of a farmer who wanted a cheaper waggon and requested it had none of the fancy decoration on the wood. Of course this was possible, and the saved labour reduced costs, but it also meant the waggon was too heavy to be pulled and put too much strain on the horses. The decoration was less to improve the look of the vehicle, but a clever way of reducing weight while retaining strength.
My own lack of knowledge in these fields is mirrored by Sturt's position. As the owner and employer he had a basic grasp of most processes and assisted in them. But the deeper knowledge eluded him. As he says "how simple is coal-hewing, fiddling, dishing, digging, to the student of books!"
Perhaps for most readers today what will strike them is how clearly Sturt sees the transformation of work taking place in his own time. He writes that "Old England was passing away; villas were coming, the day of farm-waggons was done" and as the waggons were "done", so were the skills in making them. But crucially the transformation of labour was transforming workers and their communities. As he writes about his friend and employee, George Cook, an expert woodworker, he notes the differences:
Yet for all this, we were no longer on the old terms. I was not in touch, through him, with the quiet dignified country life of England and I was more of a capitalist. Each of us had slipped a little nearer to the ignominious class division of these presnt times - I to the employer's side, he to the disregarded workman's... From being one of a community of rustics, [Cook] was becoming more and more a mechanic - a cog in an industrial machine.
This said, Sturt does not over glorify the situation. His opening session discussions the discomfort, long hours, and cold of working in an unheated shop, getting up before dawn and braving the elements. More importantly however he understands that the transformations taking place as industrial capitalism sinks its teeth into the countryside are transforming the very nature of work. In Marxist terms, alienation is increasing. Workers were losing control of their product and the world that it was to be used in. Mass production has removed skills and separated workers' from the wider social and economic countryside. If the peasantry were driven, forcefully, from the land, their compatriots in small, local workshops, were being destroyed by market forces.
In modern conditions work is nothing like so tolerable as it was say thirty years ago; partly because there is more hurry in it, but largely because machinery has separated employers from employed and has robbed the latter of the sustaining delights which materials used to afford them. Work is less and less pleasant to do - unless, perhaps, for the engineer or the electrician.
Later he continues, "there ought to be a little fun in work, for the workman's sake".
This is all true, though readers must remind themselves that Sturt was the owner and empoloyer. The long hours and pay that his craftsmen received may not have been adequate at times. While Sturt was closer to his workers' than the bosses in Cradley Heath, he was still addressed as Mister and treated with respect purely for his position. Several of his workers, by his own admission, appear to have died in poverty.
What Sturt's book reminds us of, apart from the great transformation of agricultural production in the late 19th century and early 20th, is that work can be skillful, enjoyable and rewarding. Industrial capitalism has robbed us of the final dignities of that. But early capitalism was only slightly better. Until class society is finished with we will continue to suffer the indignities and frustrations of capitalist labour. A future socialist society will not return to the structures of labour recorded in Sturt's The Wheelwright's Shop. But it will restore workers to a place where they can labour with pride, and be properly compensated. Reading Sturt today is to remind ourselves of the past, but also to understand exactly what capitalism has taken from us.
Related Reviews
Evans - Ask the Fellows who Cut the Hay
Horn - Labouring Life in the Victorian Countryside
Mingay - Rural Life in Victorian England
Barnsley - Breaking Their Chains, Mary Macarthur and the Chainmakers' Strike of 1910
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