POSTING #138

Looking for a Welsh Dresser 

It was a Saturday morning in 1962.

 I was working at the  time in the Canadian Immigration office in Leeds, Yorkshire, and Pat and I were living in a small but delicious Georgian cottage on the Stray in Harrogate.

Pat was pregnant and I was just in the process of bringing her breakfast in bed (a real English breakfast with rashers of bacon, eggs, grilled tomato and fried bread---thick slices of bread fried in the fat from the bacon, cholesterol hadn't been discovered yet!) and marmalade, when the phone rang.

A man said, "We have your dresser, when can we deliver it."

"Who are you, and what dresser?"

"We're removers (British for 'moving company'), and the dresser is the one you saw in Ripon. Mr. Bell wants you to have it. We're in Harrogate and we can be at your house in half an hour."

We were confused, and since you are also likely to be confused, I'd better go back a bit.

000

Our rented Harrogate house was furnished but we thought it might be good to start acquiring a few, small antiques for the home we eventually wanted to have in Ottawa.

Pat had been going to antique auctions in Harrogate and thought that perhaps an18th century Welsh dresser might be something to look for. Here is a Welsh dresser currently available in England (for about 3000 British pounds) that is the type of piece we were looking for---a small dresser, with a rack above for displaying plates.

 We placed an advertisement in a chain of Yorkshire weekly newspapers, asking for an antique Welsh dresser. The initial response was disappointing, mainly crude, heavy dining room furniture from the 1930s.

Then a letter came from a Mr. Bell in Ripon. He said that he was moving to London and had a dresser to sell. It wasn't really a Welsh dresser, he said, but it did have some carved dragons, and he reminded us the dragon had been a symbol of Wales for centuries. He invited us to view it.

Intrigued, we drove across the moors to Ripon---to be precise we drove on a road that cuts through the moors.

Mr. Bell's house turned out to be a huge, stone country house with a circular drive and a portico under which we parked our tiny, navy Anglia.

Mr. Bell was an affable Yorkshire country gentleman, tweeds and all, somewhere in his 60s. It was obvious that he was in the process of moving, there was little furniture in the large foyer. He guided us to a door off the hall and told us to look into the room. The room was empty except  for an elaborate piece of furniture against the far wall. That was the dresser he had mentioned.

Our mouths dropped open, and we stared at it. It wasn't the simple, restrained Georgian dresser we were looking for. It was a large, boisterous, confident Victorian piece that proclaimed that 'Britain Rules the Waves' and you better not forget it.

We went in and studied the dresser. Every surface had a design. The top of the dresser was made of pollarded oak with an amazing grain that shone through carefully applied layers of French polish. Everywhere else, there were elaborate hand carved images, including lots of dragons. 

We stepped back and looked at each other. It certainly wasn't a small, restrained, elegant Welsh dresser. It was huge (6' 9" high and  6' 6" wide) and enthusiastic.

We had never seen anything like it. The design and workmanship were unbelievably good.

Here is the sideboard in our house in Virgil, as seen from just inside the front door. The sideboard is the first thing guests see. 

But it was so very Victorian, and our hearts at that time were more in tune with Georgian furniture, silver and china.

Mr. Bell said that the dresser was worth a lot of money but because he was moving he would be prepared to let it go for a reasonable price. He quoted a figure of several hundred pounds.

We thanked him for showing us his dresser and promised to get back to him.

Our first inclination was to say 'no'. It was just too large, too Victorian.

But it was an amazing piece of furniture.

We finally decided to make what we would call today a 'low ball offer', far less that he had asked. We were sure he would reject the offer out of hand, but if we could get it for that price we were offering, well then...

We wrote with our offer, but didn't hear from him.

Weeks went by and we decided that he had torn up our letter in disgust.

And then came the Saturday morning phone call!

000

We got dressed quickly and went downstairs, just as the moving van was pulling up.

I went out to the truck to talk to the boss and his two helpers. They showed me the two parts of the dresser (we hadn't known that the top came off!), carefully covered with heavy blankets. The boss asked us where we would like them to put the dresser. Pat and I had a hurried caucus. The living and dining rooms were too small and already too crowded with furniture to take the dresser. We finally decided that it should be 'stored' in the hallway until we returned to Canada.

The boss nodded but said the bottom would be a problem. It was too wide to go through the narrow front door. (You can just see the door to the right of the bow window in the photo below.)

Our bedroom was on the second floor, the room with the upper bow windows. It was the lower bow windows that had to be removed to get the sideboard in. Note the plumbing 'waste' pipes placed on the outside of the house, "So it is easier to get at them when they freeze."

The only answer, he said, was to remove the bow windows.

We were horrified. These windows with their old glass had been in place since the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759, and since the American War of Independence in 1775!

And what would the landlord, an elderly maiden lady who lived up the street, say if she should come by when the windows were out?

The boss said that windows like ours were removed all the time. It was the only way to get large items into (or out of) old houses.

I reluctantly agreed.

We held our breath as the windows came out, the dresser went in, and the windows were replaced.

And the landlord didn't come by.

The movers had obviously done this before.

We gave them a cheque for Mr. Bell, and the movers took off.

000

In 1963 we moved to London, with the dresser, which we were now calling 'the sideboard'.

Friends in London---who loved antiques from the Georgian period---sometimes made fun of our ebullient sideboard.

One asked, "If you plug it in, will it play pretty music?"

Another joked, "How will you get it back to Canada? Sail it?"

When it came time to return to Canada, the moving company built a special plywood crate for it, and it arrived safely in Ottawa.

Over the years we have moved it 10 or so times. One of the first questions whenever we have been house-hunting was: 'Where will the sideboard go?'

000

As the children left home and life slowed down a bit, Pat started to do some research into the sideboard. In this she was helped by the details stamped into the top of the drawer

Lamb, Manchester, and the number 22631

 In correspondence with the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Pat found that James Lamb (born 1816, died 1903) had taken over his family's small furniture business and by the 1860s (when our sideboard was built) had turned it into a major firm renowned for its elaborate furniture. Lamb exhibited and won prizes at several World Expositions.

The Victoria and Albert had two of Lamb's sideboards, and now has photos and a description of ours, provided by Pat. The Museum said that we should consider ourselves fortunate to have a fine example of Lamb's work. "You are in good company."

Here are some images that show close-ups of some of the carved panels and other decoration.

Mr. Bell called these figures 'dragons'.  Let's just say they are figures from mythology---which ones we are not sure.

Note how deeply carved this is, out of one piece of English oak !

Another figure from mythology. Some kind of animal with wings? 

An interesting feature of the sideboard is the zinc-lined champagne cooler shown below.

In the 19th century, wealthy English (the 1% of the time!) imported ice from North America that was cut from the winter ice in the Ottawa and St. Lawrence Rivers and from rivers in Massachusetts and shipped to the UK in sawdust. The ice was kept in 'ice houses' and used to chill champagne and to make desserts.

To the right of the drawer is a hollow box, along which the drawer slides as it is withdrawn. It has been suggested that the hollow box may have been used to store family documents and treasures. So far we have resisted the impulse to open it and see what, if any, secrets it contains---more honestly, because we can't figure out how to open it. 

000

When Pat started her research on the sideboard, the information was sketchy. In the last few years there has been an explosion of scholarly research on both the Lamb company and on the different styles it used for its furniture.

It is now clear that James Lamb was in the top rank of 19th century British furniture makers, recognized both in Britain and on the continent. He followed prevailing styles but because he was in Manchester, not London, it seems as though it took him a few years to adopt the latest fashions.

We know that Lamb contracted with French artists to design panels for his cabinets and then found superb carvers to execute them.

000

Some people have asked what the sideboard would be worth if we were to sell it.

The first point to make is that we are NOT going to sell it.

But with that out of the way, it is hard to know what its market value would be today.

It is clearly worth a great deal more than we paid for it, but it is hard to say whether it is worth more than that purchase price plus the amounts we have paid to cart it around from place to place!

Large pieces of ornate antique furniture are not in great demand. Interior decorators and homeowners seem to want furniture that is minimalist---something that the sideboard is definitely not!

Perhaps the best answer is to paraphrase the commercials used by MasterCard, in which people are seen buying items with their credit card. Then the scene shifts to some joyful experience and the announcer intones, "There are some things money can't buy."

To us, the sideboard is one of those things---it is priceless.

0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

See you on March 11, 2012 for Posting #139 with more stories from our family’s universe! If you have comments or suggestions, please leave a comment at the bottom of this posting,  or email me at johnpathunter@gmail.com.

Note:

Posting # 7 of The Icewine Guru blog is now up. The Guru offer his views on the birth control furor in the US and whether it was 'an epic blunder' by Obama, or a clever trap set by him for the Republicans. Click on  http://theicewineguru.blogspot.com/

POSTING #111

Loading

Follow-up to Posting #110, "Getting Sick in the South"

In last week's Posting I ended with a story about powerful but inefficient steam locomotives as a not very subtle way of suggesting that there might be things that could be done to increase the efficiency of the delivery of health care.

Click here for a recent article in the Washington Post on attempts being made by the State of Massachusetts to rein in health costs. One of the key methods being tried is to move away from the fee-for-service model.

I am sure that politicians, health insurance companies and health care providers across the US will be watching the State's efforts with enormous interest.

I am also sure that Canadian politicians and persons involved in health care will be watching just as avidly.

Good for Massachusetts!!

Stories from Yorkshire

The great majority of immigrants we selected at the Leeds, Yorkshire, Canadian Immigration office where I worked in the early 1960s became successfully established in Canada.

To be sure, they often had to overcome difficult problems: trouble in getting British credentials and experience accepted by Canadian employers; difficulties in finding affordable accommodation; and, problems in coping with the inevitable culture shock that moving to a new country involves.

But there were a few who didn't make it.

They stayed for a time in Canada and then returned to Britain.

I had to interview one such immigrant, a man who had received an Assisted Passage Loan from the Canadian Government to pay his air fare to Hamilton, Ontario, but had returned after only three weeks.

As I looked through the notes of the interviewing officer before meeting with the unsuccessful immigrant I couldn't figure out what had gone wrong. According to the notes he was an intelligent, well motivated person, and a highly qualified machinist---an occupation in good demand in the Hamilton area. He and his wife were in their early 30s with two young children. His wife seemed to be very supportive of the move. The officer had commented that it was a close family---he had liked them.

Cases like that upset us. Had our screening failed to identify a problem? Had our counselling been inadequate?

When I asked the man to describe what had happened, he told me he had flown to Canada in March. His plan was to find a job and an apartment, and then have his family join him.

He had no friends or relatives in Canada to meet him but he had found a room in a private house in a pleasant residential area with tree-lined streets.  The  companies he visited were positive and it seemed that it wouldn't take him long to  find a good job.

But three weeks after he had arrived something happened, and he decided he would have to return to Britain.

"What was it?, I asked.

"I was walking down a street in Hamilton with all those trees, those maples that you have in Canada. Suddenly, the smell of the juice that comes out of them hit me."

"The maple sap?"

"I guess so, but it's a sweet smell and it almost made me sick. And the footpath was sticky with the juice.  I just decided that I couldn't stand this."

I thought about his comments. He had arrived in March when the sap would start flowing in the maples. I remembered as a lad walking to public school in the spring and sometimes finding an icicle hanging from a broken maple twig (a sapcicle?), and how I had enjoyed the sweet taste as it melted in my mouth.

I had never noticed the smell of maple sap but perhaps that was because I had grown up with it.

In any event, he couldn't stand the smell and he had caught a plane and returned to Britain.

It would take a psychiatrist to figure out what had really happened but my theory is that he had one of those 'oh-my-god-what-have-I-done' moments that we all have experienced.

There were no friends or relatives in Hamilton that he could talk to. Long distance calls to the UK were hard to make and expensive, and his family may not have been 'on the phone', as they said in Britain at the time.

He panicked.

Whatever happened, it is ironic that it was Canada's national tree and national emblem that took the blame for his failed immigration.

000

The Leeds Immigration Office received newspapers from across Canada that were used by potential immigrants to check the wants ads---to see what jobs were available and what accommodation would cost.

There was a slim, elderly man with sparse white hair who came in regularly and asked for the latest Toronto Star. He would spread the paper out on one of our tables and spend an hour or so browsing through it.

We didn't pay much attention to him, as we got on with our work of interviewing immigrants. I suppose we assumed he had some connection with Toronto, perhaps family or relatives there.

A new Canadian secretary arrived in the office---at that time Canadian secretaries handled the confidential correspondence while locally-engaged typists looked after the bulk of the application processing---a young woman from Ottawa with a gentle manner and a warm smile. She was at the reception counter one day when the man came in for his newspaper, and she began to chat with him.

It turned out that he and his wife had migrated to Toronto in the 1920s from Leeds. He had found a good job, they had moved into a comfortable apartment, and  he was thinking about buying a car. Things  were going very well for them.

Then his wife became homesick.

As a digression, in the 1960s immigrants to Canada often talked about 'the thousand dollar cure'. If a wife became homesick and wanted the family to return to England, the husband would buy an airline ticket for her.

Usually after a month or so in England she would find that the  'old country' wasn't quite what she had remembered and that Canada was better than she had thought.

In the 1920s, there was no easy equivalent of 'the thousand dollar cure', so the couple decided to move back to Leeds.

As he talked to our secretary, the elderly man became agitated.

"That damn woman forced me to come back. We would have had a better life in Canada."

He carried on for some time, berating his wife.

From then on he always looked around for the Canadian secretary. If she were available, he would start in again about his 'damn wife'.

And then he stopped coming in. We joked with the secretary, asking her what she had done to turn off 'her boyfriend'.

A month or so later, the secretary found an article in the Leeds newspaper with an accompanying photo of the elderly man. The article was reporting on a coroner's inquest into the death of the elderly man's wife.

According to the article, the husband had testified that he had come home from some shopping to find his wife lying in the dark at the bottom of the cellar stairs. He had immediately called an ambulance, but the attendants had found that she was dead.

He told the inquest that his wife always refused to turn on the cellar light before going down the stairs because she was concerned about the cost of the electricity. He said that he had often spoken to her about the dangers of going down the stairs in the dark, that the small cost of electricity was not worth the risk of falling.

The coroner ruled that the death was caused by misadventure.

Several of us in the office read the article and then looked  at each other.

Had the death happened as the coroner had determined or had the husband pushed his 'damn wife' down the stairs? Should we go to the police and tell them about his rants about his wife?

We finally decided that we didn't really have the kind of concrete evidence that would have persuaded the police, or the coroner, to re-open the case.

The man never came back to the office.

I still wonder sometimes, what really happened.

0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

See you on April 24th for Posting #112 with more stories from our family’s universe! If you have comments or suggestions, please leave a comment at the bottom of this posting,  or email me at johnpathunter@gmail.com.

POSTING #80

A Miscellany of Stories---from Far and Wide

It has been a strange (and very hot) week with no discernable pattern---it has been a little bit of this, with a dash of that.

This posting reflects that lack of a single theme with several unrelated stories, stories that come from Yorkshire, Novosibirsk and Amman.

Now how's that for 'far and wide'?

I hope you enjoy them!

000

This week as I was driving along the Welland Canal on a road with a posted speed of 50 kph, a car coming toward me blinked its lights. I travel that road often and know that it is a favourite place for Niagara Region's finest to hang out. Sure enough, just around the next curve was a policeman with a radar gun.

Having learned to set the cruise control at a safe speed, I was OK but the warning blink reminded me of Yorkshire in the early 1960s.

We bought a car and immediately joined the Automobile Association (AA), a venerable organization that provided roadside assistance, as well as maps and authoritative guides to hotels, inns and restaurants.

As part of our membership package, we received a good-sized, yellow and  black metal AA badge to attach to the grill of the car.

In that pre-cell phone era, the AA had a fleet of uniformed employees who cruised the roads on motorcycles with sidecars, ready to help members who were in trouble.

One of the first things I noticed, after affixing the plaque to the grill, was that when we met an AA motorcycle employee, he saluted us.

A nice, crisp salute.

I must say that it felt good to be saluted. It seemed to say, 'Don't worry about car problems, we are here to help'.

It's silly, but it also felt good to be recognized as someone of importance---similar I suppose to the rush that newly-minted army officers must feel when they receive their first salutes. 

When I told an English friend about the AA greetings, he interrupted and asked whether I knew the background to the salutes.

 I didn't.

He explained that in the early days of British motoring, the police started to position officers with stop watches behind trees and posts to catch speeders.

The AA decided to warn its members of these speed traps by having their motorcycle employees salute when there was a policeman ahead. A salute meant a speed trap.

The police took the AA to court for interfering with the course of justice, or some such offense. And the court agreed with the police, that warning motorists was illegal ---it just wasn't cricket.

The AA debated what to do.  Assisted I suspect by some clever lawyer-members they decided on a response.

In future, the AA motorcycle staff would salute all members, EXCEPT when there was a speed trap ahead.

No salute, meant a trap.

The beauty of it was that the police could not charge a motorcycle employee for NOT doing something.

The clever British!

A postscript.

As our time in England came to a close,  the AA decided that the increasing volumes of traffic made it dangerous for their motorcycle staff to watch for the AA badge and then lift a hand off the handlebars to salute.

The salutes stopped and we were on our own, at least as far as speed traps were concerned.

000

Talking about police reminds me of a 1996 run-in with a traffic officer in Novosibirsk, the third largest city in Russia (after Moscow and St. Petersburg) and the largest city in Siberia.

My office manager/interpreter, Yuri (not his real name), and I were in Siberia checking on an office that our hosts---the Russian Federal Employment Service---wanted  our Canadian consultants to overhaul and change into a model employment office.

As we were walking to a meeting, we came to  a busy and wide boulevard with 6 lanes of traffic. There was a pedestrian underpass nearly a block away but being a little late we decided to jaywalk across the boulevard, dodging speeding Ladas and the larger Volgas and Zims.

It was an exhilarating bit of broken field running, crossing all those lanes of traffic.

We were feeling good as  we arrived safely at the other side---until we saw a policeman waiting to talk to us.

My first thought was, 'Oh-oh what have we done now' The second thought was, ' Well, they can't send us to Siberia, we are already here'.

And then I thought, 'They could just leave us here.'

The policeman, a somewhat over-weight man in his 50s, wanted to know who we were and what we thought we were doing. Yuri explained and then the policeman launched into a stern lecture aimed primarily at Yuri---I suppose he felt that as a Westerner I couldn't be expected to know any better.  

After what seemed like a severe dressing-down, the policeman's demeanour relaxed a bit, and he motioned for us to move on.

Relieved that we weren't going to get a fine or worse, I asked, " What did he say?".

Yuri replied, "He kept repeating that what we had done was very dangerous and that we should have used the pedestrian underpass.

"And then at the end, he said that on our way back we should use the underpass because he was feeling tired and his back hurt. He didn't want to have to lug our bodies off the road."

And who said Russians don't have a sense of humour?

000

There were a number of references in the media this week to the clothing worn by some Muslim women. There is a debate in Turkey and Quebec about the wearing of the hijab, a head scarf, and in France and Syria about the wearing of the burqa (sometimes called the niqab) that veils the face, with just a slit for the wearer to see through.

It is clear from the media items that the debate is going on not just between Muslims and Westerners but also between different groups within the Muslim community---as Muslims try to agree on what the Koran means when it talks about 'modest dress' for women.

The articles reminded me of two stories from  my consulting assignments in the Kingdom of Jordan, during the period from 2001 to 2006.

One evening in Amman, a couple of Canadian colleagues and I were window shopping in Swafia, an upscale area with fancy and expensive shops selling jewellery, clothing, perfume, shoes and so on. As we passed a Victoria-Secrets-type lingerie shop, we saw three women wearing brown burqas---the women were obviously from Saudi Arabia or one of the Gulf states because although the headscarf (hijab) was fairly common among Amman women, the burqa was not.

One of the women was holding a skimpy, lacy bra across the front of her burqa. Although we couldn't hear what they were saying and couldn't see their faces, we could tell from the shaking of their shoulders that the woman were laughing and having fun imaging what effect the bra would have in the boudoir, back home.

I am sure that a video of those burqa-clad women and the bra would have been a great hit on U-tube---if it had existed at that time.

000

The other story is one told by the taxi driver---I'll call him Fadi---who usually drove me from the hotel to my office. At the end of a particular week he told me that he would not be able to drive me the following week but would arrange for one of his taxi driver friends to take me.

I said that was fine.

He said he had been hired for the whole week to take a newly-wed couple from one of the Gulf states on a honeymoon tour of Jordan. Fadi was excited by the challenge of fitting into just one week all the attractions Jordan offered.

In the middle of the next week, he suddenly showed up at the hotel, looking unhappy.

"What happened, I thought you were tied up for the week with the honeymoon couple", I asked as I got into his taxi.

He shook his head and the story poured forth.

He had met the couple at the Amman airport and driven them to the hotel. He said the husband was in his early 20s and although expensively dressed seemed a little unsure of himself. The tall, slender wife was wearing a white burqa made of some fine material, probably silk, with just a slit for her eyes.

After they had checked in, Fadi took them on a driving tour of Amman.

The next morning after the couple got into the taxi, the husband, who seemed upset about something, asked Fadi to turn the rear-view mirror up toward the roof of the car. He said he didn't want Fadi looking at his wife in the mirror.

Fadi protested that he needed to see what was behind him, but the husband told him he could use the side mirrors.

Fadi reluctantly agreed and twisted the mirror upwards.

At lunch-time, Fadi stopped at a restaurant and selected a good table. The husband made a point of asking Fadi to sit at a different table.

When Fadi called at the hotel the next morning to pick up the couple, the doorman told him that they had returned to the Gulf. It appeared that  the stress of men looking at his new wife was too much for the young man.

Fadi said he understood about modesty and veils over the face. In fact, he hadn't seen his future wife's face until the two families had nearly completed their marriage negotiations (his mother had seen the girl's face and told him that she was pretty). It was only then that the young people were allowed to go into a room by themselves. Once there, the girl removed her veil.

But, in Fadi's opinion, the young husband's concern about men looking at his burqa-clad wife was excessive.

He shook his head and said that it was a shame that a young man with obvious wealth and a new wife couldn't let himself be happier.

Fadi didn't say it, but I like to think that he was concerned as well about the happiness of the wife. 

After all, Fadi had refused to insist on the customary (in the Middle East) and substantial  (US$3000 was common) 'dowry' paid by a man---in gold--- to the father of the woman he wanted to marry.

Fadi wanted his daughters to marry men who would make them happy, even if the men didn't have a lot of money. All Fadi asked was that a man who wanted to marry one of his daughters should give the daughter a small piece of gold jewellery on the wedding day.

From photos that Fadi loved to show me of his daughters with their husbands and children it seemed pretty obvious that the marriages had worked out well.

0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

See you on August 8th for Posting #81 with more stories from our family’s universe! If you have comments or suggestions, please leave a comment at the bottom of this posting,  or email me at johnpathunter@gmail.com.