The Way We Worked

A couple of years into his career, Wayne Tanswell told his father he was in a dying trade. Having left school in 1980 to train in sign-painting, he then watched as high streets moved to plastic shop-front lettering. 'But my dad said: "Wait and stick at it, these things will come back. The more technology kills it off, the more you’ll be seen as a specialist."' He had a lot of foresight.' Technology has helped Tanswell. Now that his trade has become such a rare one, he is summoned far from his home, with work ranging from period numerals by the doors of London houses to shop fronts in villages with strict planning restrictions. Sam Roberts curates an online archive, blog and burgeoning fans of hand painted wall ads. These signs, painted onto brickwork, once kept sign-painters in demand. Their work remains, faded but unmistakable, in many cities. 'Mention them to people and they’ll look quizzical,' Roberts says,'but next time they see you, they’ll have started to spot them.'

Though a few thousand new electric models are still sold in Britain each year, the typewriter is not what it once was. Search online for a once-indispensable brand of correction fluid and the first page of hits will be for something completely different. Search your high street for a 'typewriter repairman' and your chances of a result at all are ribbon-thin. There are still a handful of typewriter repair businesses operating in Britain, mostly on the South Coast. They not only serve septuagenarian retirees who find typing easier than touch screens on iPads; but are also approached by people weaned on digital keyboards who see typewriters as relics of a distant past. In 1986, George Blackman set up an equipment and typewriter repair shop. He trained on the old manual machines and Blackman’s employees still find themselves working on these beautiful, formidable and newly old machines. 'It amazes us the price that old machines sell for on the internet,' one explains, and their new buyers want them spruced up when they’ve splashed out. They get the old machines gleaming and operational by raiding the vast collection of spare parts they’ve accumulated over the years (and you can’t buy them any more).

There’s a light that never goes out, even if it burns less brightly than it once did. Female match-makers have long been a celebrated part of British labour history. In 1888, thousands of matchgirls at the Bryant and May factory in London famously went on strike to protest over conditions. Over subsequent decades, the long hours, tiny pay packets and exposure to toxic chemicals were addressed before the industry largely relocated its production to other countries where labour was cheaper. Today, there are still female match-makers in Britain – in Bristol, at the country’s last match factory, Octavius Hunt. The company long ago diversified into other products but still makes matches. Its commercial director, Kerry Healey, says that the majority of staff are still female. 'Matches are a small part of our business, but an important one. Depending on the size of orders, we have between two and 12 people working in the department, of which two are men – so it’s still mainly female.'

Since the first pieces of Oriental lacquer work arrived on the Continent in the seventeenth century, European craftsmen have attempted to replicate the incredible effects of this time-consuming process. But by the 1920s, chemical shortcuts had been developed to replace the Japanese approach of applying, sanding and polishing numerous layers of paint. Today, there are only a handful of traditional lacquerers. Pedro Da Costa Felgueiras, who runs the London Lacquer Studios, has been the capital’s go-to guy for authentic lacquer work and period pigments for over a decade. In a world where 'most paints are just plastic and dry,' he’s called in to provide historically accurate colours for walls and furniture from the Seventeenth century and to lacquer new things the old way, with 30 or 40 coats of paint, each being left to dry and then being polished before the next. 'I remember a friend once telling me to be careful with my recipes as someone might steal and use them,' he recalls. 'My answer was: even if I show them how to do it, no one wants to.'