XXVII
No one would dream of describing Tunbridge Wells as a “manufacturing town,” but it has, and has had for considerably over two hundred years, a peculiar industry. Few are those who have not heard of “Tunbridge ware,” a species of delicate inlay work in coloured woods, which may be described as mosaic work, something in the nature of tesselated pavement reduced to terms of wood; the tesseræ in this case being very thin strips, fillets, and roundels applied in patterns to work-boxes, inkstands, backs of brushes, and a large variety of fancy articles.
Any attempt to describe the ware, or the process of its manufacture, seems at the first blush a rather hopeless enterprise. We may, however, give another analogy, and compare it with parquetry flooring in miniature and in many colours.
That it is no mushroom fashion may be discovered by the visitor to South Kensington, who in the Museum will discover a backgammon-board designed by the Comte de Grammont and made for him in 1664. He presented it to Mary Kirke, Maid of Honour to the Queen of Charles the Second, during a royal visit to “the Welles.” This interesting evidence of the antiquity of the ware is decorated with forget-me-nots, interlacing the Count’s initials and those of Mary Kirke, and shows that the art was even then fully developed.
Fashions change, and in all those years Tunbridge ware has had many vicissitudes. In the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign a very large trade was done in a cheap line of articles in light woods—commonly sycamore—printed upon from transfers, not inlaid in any way, and thus, strictly speaking, not the true ware at all. Examples of this period are still to be met with in curiosity shops, with views, not only of Tunbridge Wells, but of every other place then of popular resort, and the sight of them brings faint reminiscences of times when girls wore bonnets and book-muslin dresses and gentlemen still dared to appear in public in white duck trousers. The ware of that age was, in fact, as popular then as the little fancy china articles with local armorial bearings are now.
That fashion passed, and the true manufacture regained its vogue. The prominent makers for generations had been Fenner & Nye, established on Mount Ephraim in 1720, succeeded in turn by Edmund Nye, and finally by Thomas Barton, in 1863. Barton’s showrooms were in the Pantiles until recent years, but the business, conducted on the old time-honoured lines of making the best possible article and charging for it accordingly, could not survive the modern rage for cheapness at the sacrifice of excellence, and as Barton grew old the business declined with him and finally gave place to another, where you can still purchase Tunbridge ware in innumerable forms at popular prices, and be perfectly satisfied, until it is compared with that of sixty years ago. The public has no cause for complaint. It pays only for what it gets; but there is, and can only be, the most superficial resemblance between the costly work of a bygone age and that of the present era.
A partial knowledge of these things has led some writers to describe this manufacture as a “doomed industry”; but, like so many “doomed” people, institutions, and trades, it maintains an astonishing vitality, and there is probably more Tunbridge ware made now than in the times when an article cost twice as much.
TUNBRIDGE WARE.
The methods employed are of some interest. Radiating, star-like patterns are produced ingeniously by building up in long sticks glued together around a central core, afterwards to be sawn off in veneer-like strips: a hundred to a stick. These are then mounted on to the articles to be decorated. In the case of more ambitious and pictorial efforts, such as a view of the Pantiles (a favourite subject) in coloured woods, the craftsman works to a coloured sketch, divided up like a Berlin wool pattern. In such cases the little wooden cubes are of necessity extremely minute. Mounted on to the wooden surface of workbox or other article, the work has then to undergo many sandpaper scrubbings, with sandpaper of increasing fineness, and is at last polished to an exquisite finish.
To the true artistic eye these ingenious imitations of drawings or paintings scarcely commend themselves, and Tunbridge ware finds its best exposition in the boxes inlaid with squares of various woods, in which you can see the grain and colour natural to each.
Great expense and care were formerly taken to secure beautiful varieties of wood, and no fewer than eighty, English and foreign, were in constant use. It was found that no wood naturally gave green or silver-grey, and it was therefore necessary to procure those colours artificially. Green was obtained from “decayed oak,” the fallen boughs of oak-trees stained green by fungoid growths. To get grey, bird’s-eye maple and Hungarian ash were steeped in the chalybeate waters of “the wells”; and a beautiful white was produced by boiling holly.