Forging ahead (From Wilts and Gloucestershire Standard)

Forging ahead

Diarist and sketch artist Jacqueline Govier meets a Cotswold personality (in the old sense of the word). This time, she visits Cherington Lane Forge.

It was freezing as I drove into Cherington Lane Forge, mud puddles glistened with ice and a rabble of dogs, led by a dishevelled old collie barked excitedly as men loaded the carelessly parked lorries littering the yard.

I'd come to meet Graham Williams, the blacksmith. I'd visited the forge many times as a customer and now looked forward to seeing what really went on behind the scenes and to meet the man in charge.

I heard Graham long before I saw him - his large, infectious laugh burst out of a very small office. "You're in time for coffee!" he beamed under the wide-brimmed hat, his trademark.

In the kitchen a scarlet 'Stanley' pumped heat into the room and the William's family sat around a table laden with steaming cups of coffee. A vase of brilliant yellow daffodils fought for space amongst pots of jam and plates piled with toast. It was a happy, homely scene.

"It's our tradition to have breakfast together in the morning at ten ...toast?"

During breakfast I asked Graham if he'd always been a blacksmith. He shook his head. "Oh no, I started working life on the family farm at Edgeworth, but it wasn't long before I realised I wanted to become a blacksmith.

"I was very lucky to be apprenticed to Mr Baldwin at Rodmarton. Not only was he clever and capable but he was only too willing to share his knowledge. He was about to retire and he desperately wanted someone to continue his craft, and that's just what I did."

The rest is history. Graham now employs thirteen staff including sons, Richard and Alistair and since suffering a small stroke he takes things a little easier.

His wife, Rosemary grinned. "Since the stroke he occasionally gets the odd word muddled. He came back from riding one day and meant to say, 'That old mare had a bucking fit...' only it didn't come out like that. He's had a job to live that one down!"

Graham roared.

"Times have changed," he said. "The farming industry's collapsed. Once we worked seven days a week. A combine might be brought in for repair at eleven at night and we'd work through to get it ready for harvesting the following morning. No job is, or ever was, too large or too small. I've repaired saucepan lids and even a cannon! It all keeps the bread and butter on the table.

"These days we've moved more into manufacture. Our gates and stable doors are all over the country, across to Sussex and Kent, up in Scotland, even abroad, and of course the Royal Estates. We have no need to advertise - our logos on the gates and stable doors do it all.

"Some assume that because our name is on a gate that we own the land it's on. We had a letter from the Department of the Environment: Did we know that we could get a grant for the derelict castle on the land? One small girl even requested to buy the pony where another of our gates hung!

Our conversation strayed to holidays. "We have a camper van but we don't need to go away." Graham gestured to the sun-bright window and the garden beyond. "It's so lovely here."

"Though we have been to Germany," he added like an afterthought.

"Germany?"

"Yes... During the war father had a P.O.W working on the farm. Werner was only a lad of seventeen. My father treated him like a son - he had the bedroom next to next to mine and he became the brother I never had. We're still in touch.

"Hitler was a very evil man," Werner once said, "But he's done one very good thing - he caused us to meet."

"Tell Jacquie about your Father!" Rosemary laughed knowingly.

"Oh yes...The English Werner learnt was of my father's 'Cotswold' variety. Father swore a lot, and he called my mother, 'My bloody missus.' Years later when Werner got married he sent us a photo of his wife, on the back he'd written, 'Here's a photo of 'my bloody missus'."

After breakfast Graham took me to see the forge. Our voices were soon lost in the big cavernous space of the barn.

Monoliths of machinery stood like relics of a bygone age; ranks of gates stacked like cards leant against uneven walls and blackened tools hung regimentally as if coordinated for a glossy life-style photo-shoot. Pools of darkness contrasted with a startling shower of orange sparks where one of Graham's men was welding an enormous pergola.

There was a pungent smell of oil and metal and the fragrance of newly sawn wood. Eddies of warmth wafted from two enormous, black, cast-iron boilers and a dog dozed nearby in a bed of sawdust curls. It was an evocative scene that seemed timeless and I wondered how much life had really changed over the years.

"I could have the latest in technology, but what's the point? We use our skills instead. It gives me the greatest of pleasure to use my hands and create a machine that becomes the tool to make something new." As we walked he patted machines like old familiars running his hand along their sleek metal smoothness with affection.

"Now look at this Edward's Bender here," he enthused passionately. "It's so beautifully simple!" He demonstrated and without effort bent a thick steel rod to make the first link of a substantial chain.

"And look over there." Outside, beyond the open barn door, Richard, his son was operating what appeared to be a medieval torture device. "I made that!" Powered by a tractor engine a hydraulic bender was forcing metal strips into curved ribs for tree guards.

I stopped to admire a gate and ran my fingers along the wood sanded to perfection: the smoothness of skin. "It's larch." Graham said recognising my ignorance and he paused for a moment to admire the gate."

Just look at the rich colour of that heart wood." The creamy-coloured timber was shocked with salmon-pink painterly streaks and its peppery-sweet smell was quite unlike anything else I knew.

"This gate design is a diamond brace," Graham continued, "Larch will last about twenty years, even untreated - now pine won't last anything like that but when we pressure treat it it'll last just as long."

We wandered through a warren of store rooms towards the shop in the centre of the tithe barn. Customers sauntered around in boots and work gear, looking intent, poking and prodding and investigating.

It's that kind of place; an Aladdin's cave of rope and chains, stacks of tools, piles of implements and pigeon holes crammed with black and galvanised iron treasures. We stopped here and there to admire the intricacies of design concepts.

"Now this here is a hinge for opening gates that go uphill, I designed it and we now manufacture them."

Here was another world of bolts and springs, hinges and pulleys and of course a wealth of twisted, convoluted and hammered wrought iron.

Outside stark in the bright light, a city of timber was stacked. Steel girders, pipes, and machines glinted in the sun. A tractor grumbled, a fork-lift shifted stock and men selected posts, checked rails and loaded trailers.

I suspect that smithy's are and always have been a playground for men. Didn't someone once say the difference between a man and a boy is the size of his toys?

I came away with the feeling that here is a man who is happy with his life working at an occupation that has changed little over the years. In this day and age of fragmented families here is a family who work hard, happy together in their comparatively simple life. They are very rich indeed.