Table and Chairs
Uncle Stanley, my mother’s sister Evelyn’s husband, was an amateur furniture maker. At least, that is what I was told, although he never made any furniture in the time that I knew him. He made this oak table for my parents as a wedding present. When I was little, Stanley’s table was in the ‘garden room’, by the French windows that my mother had installed as part of the war damage repair and which opened onto the garden. We used this room for Sunday lunch and special occasions, eating family meals at a metal table in the ‘breakfast room’ next to the kitchen (it was a very big house).
When my grandmother died, the family inherited her mahogany table and faux Chippendale chairs The oak table was demoted to the breakfast room and the metal tables to the garden. My father kept the table when he moved to live near us after my mother died, always religiously setting a formal place for himself for meals. When he died, we put in our basement room where Elizabeth uses it as a sewing table. There was a matching sideboard, but that is long gone: I thought it ugly and inefficient, and so broke it up and used the old oak wood in other projects. But the table survives.
The chairs – in the Art Deco style my parents favoured – were not made by Stanley (too many joints for an amateur) but were bought to go with the table. We now use them every day to go with our modern oak table. Our son Ben, for his final art school project, made a meticulous reproduction of one of them as part of a response to Joseph Kosuth’s conceptual art piece ‘One and Three Chairs’. That chair looked the part, but was too wobbly to sit on.
My sister Ann remembers Stanley from her childhood; she told me that he was the kindest and funniest uncle, but was never wholeheartedly taken into the wider family. She knew him much better than me, for he died while I was still a small boy. But his woodworking clearly inspired my brother John with the possibility of fine woodworking as a skill to reach; and John passed that on to me. The table and chairs weave a complex path through family life.