Peter Tree discovering a front leg made from birch on a Lincolnshire rush-seated side chair

WS 60

The pair of chairs which appear in WS 59 had some wood in the front legs that I didn't recognise - one of the hall marks of a Lincolnshire rush seated chair is that they are invariably made out of ash. So the only thing to do was to pay a visit to my good friend Peter Tree: after some discussion in which we ruled out most woods we could think of Peter found his eyeglass and on closer inspection of the grain he established that the wood in question was in fact birch. It's not at all common in vernacular chairmaking to use birch in the UK but chairs that were imported from Scandinavian countries often were.

In July 2014 I was able to get Adam Bowett to look closely at this chair and he confirmed that it was in fact birch wood in the front legs.

© William Sergeant 2012

Update: further research has revealed that a number of Caistor chairs have birch components, including birch seats.  Since birch does not grow to seat-size dimensions in the UK we did a little more hunting and discovered that there were importations of American birch, which grows to a greater diameter, during the 19th century and quite possibly before that. Instances of birch cargos coming into the port of Hull have been found in advertisements in UK newspapers.

© William Sergeant and Julian Parker 2020