Felicity Irons, 54, rush weaver and merchant
Back in my early 20s I had a car accident and needed lots of treatment, which made it hard for me to hold down a job or pursue the career that I’d intended – I had a degree in drama. Between treatments, I started teaching myself how to work with rush, using a book I’d found. With the help of a business loan, I set up the Rush Matters workshop and spent the next couple of years repairing rush seating.
I bought my materials from a chap called Tom Arnold. His family had been cutting rush along the River Ouse since the early 1700s. Tom had no children to pass the business on to and when he died, his brother Jack, who had no interest in continuing it himself, suggested I take over.
The blade I use to cut rush is 3ft long on a 6ft wooden handle. I did all the harvesting on my own for the first few years. Now I have a team – my brother who comes down from Scotland every summer and my husband, Ivor. We do most of our cutting towards the end of June and throughout July; the aim is to catch the rushes while they’re at their full height and in flower. The stems can grow up to 10ft high.
I absolutely love being out on the river, even though it is really hard work. We aim to cut about a couple of tons each day we are out. The landowners are happy for us to cut along their banks – we also remove rubbish from the river as we go.
We cut on the Great Ouse in both Cambridgeshire and Bedfordshire and then along the Nene in Northamptonshire. When I’m gathering, I’ll sometimes think, “Oh, that’s going to be beautiful to work with,” and then later on I’ll recognise that particular bolt in the workshop and remember exactly where I was when I cut it.
We’ve made rush flooring for heritage houses and we did a lot of work for Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London. I’ve made props for films, too. When I talk to people who have to work from home and look at a screen all day I just think, “Crikey, I couldn’t do that.”
Jost Haas, 85, glass-eye maker
Is my job unique? You could say that. I used to be one of three glass-eye makers in the UK, now I’m the only one.
The world’s earliest glass eyes were developed in Germany in the 1830s and one of the first companies devoted to their production was established in Wiesbaden near Frankfurt, and that’s where I come from. My father did some administrative business for the company and I became fascinated by the work they did there. I completed a four-year apprenticeship in my teens, sitting opposite an experienced ocularist who taught me how to handle the glass, how to blow it, how to paint on the irises and so on.
In 1968, I moved with my wife, Ulla, to north London to take over from another German practitioner who had died. I’m still here working in the same room in my house where I started out more than half a century ago. My clients sit and watch while I work – and I watch them so I can reproduce their iris, mixing colours like blue, green and grey, painting from life, so I can match the existing eye as closely as possible. I heat and separate off a section of glass tubing using a Bunsen burner, creating a “bubble”, then I gently inflate it to the required size by blowing into the tube.
Artificial eye technology is still moving on. Last November, an ocularist at Moorfields Eye Hospital fitted a patient with a 3D-printed prosthetic eye for the first time, which I gather was a great success. But I think there will always be a demand for glass – some people are allergic to plastic and others just prefer the way glass looks or feels.
The whole process takes two or three hours, though sometimes I’ll have to make a couple of eyes if the first one doesn’t turn out as well as it should. Some of my clients have been coming for decades – I consider them friends and look forward to them visiting so we can catch up.
The first time they come, people can be a little uneasy, but I talk to them and they see what I’m doing and often seem to find the process quite soothing. Maybe it’s the sound of the burner – sometimes they even fall asleep.
Steve Overthrow, 35, sievewright
I used to restore classic cars, but when the business relocated to Oxfordshire in 2017, I had a young family and didn’t want to move with it. I was a member of the Heritage Crafts Association and about a week before my redundancy I was reading through the red list of endangered crafts in their newsletter, which listed sieve and riddle-making as “extinct”. I thought, “I could do with a good sieve.” I’d left my metal one out in the garden over winter and ruined it. I wondered if I could find out how to make my own.
The most useful source I found was a three-minute slideshow online, which showed Mike Turnock at work. Mike had been a sievewright for more than 30 years when he retired in 2010 and had learned the craft from his father. I watched it over and over, trying to work out the process and what tools were being used. I even tried to track Mike down, without success.
I made my first sieve in 2018 and posted a photo of it on Facebook. As a result, Mike Turnock’s sister contacted me and put us in touch. It turned out that when he’d retired, he’d moved to Bridport, which is only an hour’s drive from me. He gave me all the information I needed – stuff it would have taken years to learn the hard way.
I experimented with beech, oak and sycamore before finally settling on ash – I love its willingness to bend and have overcome its tendency to split by oiling it carefully.
In the olden days, the finest riddles had a mesh of an eighth of an inch. I haven’t quite managed that yet, but I am down to a quarter of an inch. It’s incredibly fiddly work. Apparently, Mike could make a riddle in 23 minutes – I’ve still no idea how he did it.
People buy my sieves and riddles for all sorts of reasons. I’ve had bakers, shrimpers, cocklers and mussel-pickers, potters and ceramicists and some foundries have ordered them, too. I had a couple of textile workers buy one for straining and drying out their fabric, fruit-pressers, pasta-makers and coffee-roasters…
Bringing a traditional craft back from extinction does feel like a bit of a responsibility – I’m the only sievewright working this way in the UK now, and maybe the world. But when the time comes, I do plan to pass the business on. My boys are still only five and three, so it’s far too early to know if they might be interested – if not, I’ll just have to find someone else.
Matt Robinson, 25, sailmaker
I grew up in London, right next to the Thames, and was about seven when my family moved to the Isle of Wight. I’d been working for a few years as a watersports instructor when I saw a job advertised at Ratsey & Lapthorn, a sailmaking company in Cowes. I knew my way around a boat and a bit about fixing them up, but had no experience at all of making sails. Happily, my enthusiasm was enough to gain me an apprenticeship under master sailmaker Gary Pragnell.
The loft we work in is an unusual space – we work either at a bench or standing in a pit sunk into the floor, so we can pull our work towards us. My first week was a big eye-opener. At that time I’d never even used a sewing machine. But from day one I had new jargon and concepts flying at me all the time, which I had to learn and understand. I started on the smallest machine and learned all the different types of stitching I’d need to know, gradually working my way up to the heavy-duty industrial ones that work using compressed air. That took up the first couple of months, before I started learning traditional hand-sewing, which I’m still mastering now.
Ratsey is the world’s oldest sailmaker and has been operating on the Isle of Wight since 1790, handing the craft down generation by generation from master to apprentice. At one time it was the island’s single biggest employer and also had lofts in Gosport and New York.
While I’m sewing, I find myself imagining my finished sails out on the water. During events, such as Cowes Classics Week, I get to see them in action. I’ll spot Ratsey sails everywhere and be able to identify which are my work and which are Gary’s. I’ve worked on sails for everything from a child’s dinghy the size of a bathtub to a 100ft schooner, so the variety also helps keep me on my toes.
One of my favourite parts of the job is hand-stitching the leather around the corners of the sail. It’s great to just sit at my bench and see all the hard work I’ve done on that sail finally coming together – the last job of all is always sewing on the Ratsey logo, so I get a great sense of satisfaction doing that, too.
Zoe Collis, 24, papermaker
Papermaking is deceptively complicated – at every stage in the process something can go wrong. I joined as an apprentice at 19 and I’ve been learning the craft ever since, everything from preparing the paper recipe to mixing the pulp and forming sheets.
When I first joined Two Rivers Paper as an apprentice it was based in an ancient watermill on Exmoor. For a while it was my job to open the sluicegate every morning to start the waterwheel running – a really charming way to begin the day.
Our paper is made from cotton and linen rag using water power. Materials such as hemp, esparto grass and flower seeds can be added to the mix to provide paper with a range of characteristics. Seed and petal paper has been popular recently. After it’s been used – often for RSVPs or tags for bouquets – this can be planted, allowing the seeds to germinate and give the paper a second life.
Until a few years ago, this ancient craft wasn’t remotely on my radar. After school, I did a foundation diploma in arts, media and design and I knew I wanted a hands-on, unconventional job, but I wasn’t sure what – until someone put me in touch with Two Rivers.
At the start of my apprenticeship, I helped develop a type of paper for a customer who was going to the Galápagos Islands to swim with turtles and she wanted to paint underwater. It was quite a challenge, but I came up with something that worked well for her – essentially a type of waterproof paper. Although how she managed to paint in scuba gear I’ll never know.
