{"id":151,"date":"2009-08-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2009-07-31T23:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodvale.co.uk\/peter-thomas-aug09-125\/"},"modified":"2009-08-01T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2009-07-31T23:00:00","slug":"peter-thomas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/peter-thomas\/","title":{"rendered":"Peter Thomas"},"content":{"rendered":"

Robin Mills went to Rampisham, in West Dorset, to meet Peter Thomas, wood-turner and stick-maker. This is Peter\u2019s story.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u2018I\u2019m a Wiltshire moonraker: born between Calne and Marlborough on the Wiltshire downs, and I grew up in a small village very much like Rampisham is today. Father was one of thirteen children: every one of his brothers and sisters farmed except him. So, sadly I was unable to inherit a farm, but there\u2019s no doubt farming is in my genes. From a very early age I spent all my time on my uncle\u2019s farm, and I can remember that all I ever wanted to do was farm.<\/p>\n

I think I soon realised that peer pressure and job competition meant that I should get as good an education as possible, so I finished up going to Wye College and got a degree in agriculture. I\u2019m not sure it did me a lot of good. I didn\u2019t have the capital to farm on my own account, so I went into farm management. The first couple of jobs I went for, I never even mentioned the degree as it would probably have been seen as a hindrance. In those days in farming, education meant you probably weren\u2019t much good at the practical stuff. I\u2019ve had the beard since then: people reckoned I was too young for the job, so I grew a beard, stuck ten years on my age and got the first job I went for. That was in about 1958.<\/p>\n

That farm was in Gloucestershire, near Stow on the Wold. We were there in 1963, all through the hard winter. We had our first child then, Wendy, and couldn\u2019t get off the farm for eight weeks, snowed in. The dairy had just gone over from churns to bulk milk then, and obviously you couldn\u2019t get milk out what with the 20ft snow drifts. So we got some churns dropped by helicopter, filled them from our new bulk tank and then I\u2019d dig my way to Stow on the Wold, 5 miles away, to unload the milk, and often have to dig my way home again. That took all day, on a Fordson Major, no cab: in those days you didn\u2019t know any different. The snow that year was still lying in the quarries up on the hills when we were haymaking in June.<\/p>\n

I worked in Warwickshire, and in Dorset, then it was back to Gloucestershire, where we were during the two drought years of 1975 and 1976. That farm went from 400 acres when I started, to 4000 acres during the next 18 months. They had land in Scotland, in Dumfries and Galloway, and I used to drive up there once a month to look after it. If the locals chose to lay on the Scots accent a bit thick, I couldn\u2019t make out a word of it. In\u201976 we finished combining in the middle of July: the crop had just died. We tried to make second cut silage, mowing grass in the morning then baling it as hay in the afternoon.<\/p>\n

My last job came about in 1985, when I saw it advertised in the Farmer\u2019s Weekly,<\/em> managing a farm back in Dorset, and we\u2019ve been here ever since. I\u2019ve had to change jobs in the past quite a lot: you have to, to make any progress up the farming ladder. The main attraction to the job here was the opportunity to run our own enterprise, in this case sheep. My son Simon left college to come and run the sheep flock, and a year later my daughter Wendy and her husband joined us, so we were running it as a family business. Simon later fell in love with Australia, backpacking there in 1991, and then emigrated there with an Australian girl he\u2019d met on our neighbour\u2019s farm. Wendy and her husband now have a National Trust farm down in Devon. That was all about the time when things in farming were starting to get a bit sticky. We went from lambing 1200 ewes, a dairy herd, and 400 acres of arable, to just me on my own buying in ewe lambs and selling them a year later as two-tooths, with the arable land put out to contract.<\/p>\n

By then we\u2019d fallen in love with the area, especially Rampisham. Here, nothing changes, and that\u2019s by virtue of the fact it\u2019s an estate owned village. What we all value and love remains the same. So, I retired early. I was 61, the children had left, my legs weren\u2019t too good and I needed a knee operation, and to be quite honest, I was disillusioned with farming. When I started, I never thought for one moment I\u2019d be saying that. But everything coming from government seemed anti-rural, and to me the fun had gone out of the farming life.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d always liked woodwork, and if a tree blew down on the farm we always kept the trunk rather than cut it up for fire wood. I started making little coffee tables and suchlike, but it never quite filled the gap. One day I saw a second-hand lathe advertised, so I bought it without seeing it. There was no point in going to look at it: never having seen a lathe working, I wouldn\u2019t have known what I was looking at. I got it home, set it up, and spent the next few weeks really just making a mess of pieces of wood and tools. But I became absolutely hooked. And that\u2019s how it all started: I never had any lessons, just learned by my mistakes I suppose. I built bigger lathes: the one I\u2019ve got now will take blanks up to about 7cwt, but I had to buy an engine hoist to lift them into place! When we moved up here, I built the shed, deliberately quite small. I thought it might stay tidier that way, but that didn\u2019t work. At first I was just making stuff to give to friends and family, and was really amazed when I took work to village shows to find people would buy it.<\/p>\n

At one stage we were doing about 30 shows a year. I insist on selling locally, though of course it goes all over the place afterwards. Nowadays I always do Dorset Art Weeks, and maybe 6 shows a year. I\u2019ve got a tiny gallery here at home, and people come to me. I\u2019ll probably spend 6 or 7 hours a day in here, turning wood, I just love it. All my wood is sourced locally, off the estate or farms nearby. There\u2019s no need to travel far or import exotic timber, it\u2019s all around us.<\/p>\n

When I started doing the shows, I was shocked at people\u2019s ignorance of the countryside. Then the Dorset Coppice Group was formed, and I joined because I thought I could help educate the public about our woodland heritage, and about the fact that of all the imported rainforest timbers, none was more attractive than our own indigenous wood.<\/p>\n

Most of what I use would normally finish up as firewood, or rot, and we have all this wonderful resource in our woods and hedgerows not appreciated. So, as much as anything now I\u2019m on a bit of a crusade, to try and make people aware of this. I\u2019d never dream of cutting down a healthy living tree. Last year I was given 5 walnut trees that blew down: that\u2019s a huge amount of timber. I\u2019ve been at shows where people looking at my work don\u2019t even know it\u2019s made of wood: or, that the oak, beech or whatever species it\u2019s made of, comes from here. I find that quite sad: also that nowadays it\u2019s so rare for people to make things with their hands. When they do, and I teach people occasionally, they love it, and it can be very therapeutic. All this mass-produced stuff, there\u2019s no life or soul to it: if what I do helps spread the word about the countryside a bit, I\u2019m happy.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Robin Mills went to Rampisham, in West Dorset, to meet Peter Thomas, wood-turner and stick-maker. This is Peter\u2019s story. \u2018I\u2019m a Wiltshire moonraker: born between Calne and Marlborough on the Wiltshire downs, and I grew up in a small village very much like Rampisham is today. Father was one of thirteen children: every one of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":460,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[11],"class_list":["post-151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-people","tag-robin-mills"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=151"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/460"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}