Britain at Work
A Pictorial Description of Our National Industries

A CHAIR-MAKING TOWN. 155 To-day the great majority of the men are engaged in factories, some of which employ as many as 300 hands, while others are quite small ; the women are occupied in domestic duties in the trim little red brick cottages, from which, as a rule, all signs of the owners’ occupation are banished ; and the children are being looked after by the School Board. The well-to-do manufacturers live in pleasant villas on the hills surrounding the town, and to meet the needs of the large industrial population there is, of course, a considerable trading community. The town, therefore, now presents at first sight much the same appearance as any other country town of similar size. Yet even to-day the observant visitor cannot fail to detect signs of the exceptional and distinctive character of the place. In the station yard are great stacks of “ dimen- sioned wood,” just delivered from Canada— that is to say, parts of chairs cut to standard sizes, and needing only to be jointed together and stained or varnished ; loads of chairs are being despatched by rail, and waggons, on which the chairs are piled up to a great height, are leaving the town by road for London • chair frames are being taken from the factories to the cottages, for the cottage industry is not wholly extinct, or the com- pleted chairs are being delivered at the factories. Here and there at a cottage in a beautiful valley, flanked by beech-clad hills ; clown the valley flows a shallow stream, which wanders through the streets of the town, adding to its picturesqueness, and affording fine opportunities for sport to juvenile anglers. If we pass through the town and continue along the Oxford road for a couple of miles we come to West Wycombe, a charming old village, which contains one old-established factory, a single street of delightfully quaint houses, and a church, which is quite a curiosity owing to its extraordinary mixture of architectural styles. It has been estimated that the output of chairs from Wycombe amounts to seven or eight for every minute of the clay and night ; in other words, Wycombe supplies in the course of a year the equivalent of a chair apiece for every man, woman, and child in London. When occasion requires, some of the Wycombe firms can turn out chairs with astonishing rapidity ; 5,000 chairs were macle for the Alexandra Palace in six days, and 19,000 were made and delivered in London in a few weeks for use at Messrs. Moody and Sankey’s revival meetings. Scarcely less striking than the quantity of the chairs produced is the variety of their patterns. These are numbered by thousands, and are constantly being added to. It is door a woman or girl is sitting, interweaving with cleft fingers the split cane to form a chair seat ; and, if it is market day, the visitor may see in the market- place a little crowd of buyers, jp or merely curious gathered round a o voluble gentle- man, who, with the aid of a loud voice, a facetious manner, and a notebook, is ‘ selling small quantities of tim- ber by auction. Few manufac- turing towns are so pleasantly onlookers, r**- .Jr*’ -~ t 7 situated as High Wycombe. It lies SPLITTING LOGS FOR CHAIR LEGS.