Britain at Work
A Pictorial Description of Our National Industries

A CHAIR-MAKING TOWN. 157 From the economic point of view it is hardly disputable that the machinery, which rs now so generally adopted, has proved a boon to the worker as well as to his employer. The trade of the town has so enormously increased that, notwithstanding the numerous labour-saving devices, the number of men employed is far greater than in the days when everything was clone by hand. The population of the town, which MACHINE ROOM. is now a little over 20,000, has doubled within the last thirty years—a sure sign of the growth of the town’s staple industry. Under the old system piece-work was universal, and employment was very irregular, but in the modern factories payment is almost in- variably by the hour, and the great majority of the workers are assured of regular and continuous employment. Then, again, wages are much higher than they were a genera- tion ago. It must not be supposed that up-to-date methods have entirely superseded the old cottage industry. It still survives in the outlying districts, but is confined to one or two branches of the trade—namely, the caning and rushing of chair seats and the turning of legs and spindles. Our illustra- tion shows one of these cottages in which the last-named work is being carried on. The cottage is fitted with the old-fashioned pole lathe, and its present occupant carries on the work under much the same conditions as his father and grandfather did before him. Most of these small traders keep a pony and cart, and when they have a good stock of parts turned up to certain standard sizes they take them into town and sell them to the large manufacturers. There is one delightful form of the industry which belongs, unfortunately, to the past. Some of the men, in order to save the labour of carting the timber to their workshops used to go out to the woods and improvise with a screen of boughs a truly Arcadian workshop. Here, just where the trees were felled, they would cut them up into billets of various sizes, which they would shape on the spot into chair legs and backs. But though the wanderer in the neighbour- hood of High Wycombe to-day is not likely to stumble upon one of these sylvan work-, shops, he may well regard the lot of the worker in his thatched cottage, amidst tho beautiful surroundings of the Buckingham- shire hills and woods, as in many respects an enviable one. And even in the factories in town the conditions under which the work is carried on are many degrees better and