Cockmakers, eye-punchers and blubbermen: A deep dive into ancient British crafts

I’ve always loved handmade things. Whenever you encounter a hand-crafted object, whether it’s an antique watch or a stoneware mug, you are meeting something that is by definition unique. That’s because every such item is the product of a particular moment in time, when a human being put something into the world that can’t exist anywhere else. To hold it in your hands is to converse with its maker. 

A few hundred years ago, everything in Britain was made by hand. Before industrialisation, craft was an engine of social and economic life. The sound of wheelwrights’ mallets echoed around every high street while smoke from blacksmiths’ forges drifted over every village green. Even the smallest communities had their own network of masons, tailors, coopers, weavers and bootmakers – each using local materials to produce goods for their neighbours.

But over the last century or so the ‘workshop of the world’ has lost the majority of its workshops. As Britain transitioned from a producer society to a consumer society we shed thousands of manufacturing occupations, many of which had been practised on these shores for centuries.

Spare a thought for the ballers, benders, blubbermen, bogeymen, boners, bottom-stainers, cock-makers, devils, eye-punchers, pom-pom men, quarrel-pickers, whiff-makers and willy-men whose once essential livelihoods now sound like vulgar nicknames.

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As we hurtle into another industrial revolution, this time driven by tech and AI, more jobs will surely go. That’s why I chose to write my new book, Craftland, now. I couldn’t think of a better time to look back at older ways of working and making – partly to chronicle them before they potentially vanish, and partly to see what we might be able to learn from them.

I’ve spent the last three years travelling around the British Isles to seek out what remains of Britain’s traditional crafts. I’ve climbed up mountains and hacked through forests, punted down rivers and even sailed out to sea. But I’ve also found extraordinary crafts in ordinary places. Some of my most inspiring visits have been to retail parks and industrial estates, corner shops and cul-de-sacs, spare bedrooms and converted garages – places that have long been ignored but which are in fact great crucibles of creativity.

Read more:

• How traditional crafts like clog making and sign-writing are providing an alternative to the 9 to 5
• When did the word ‘tradesperson’ become taboo?
• This factory once made every single Rolo in the world. Its decline is a warning for UK’s leaders

In the course of my journey I’ve met a small army of overlooked and underappreciated craftspeople, from bell-founders and coopers to weavers and wheelwrights. I’ve stepped inside their workshops, studying their techniques, learning their languages, extracting their trade secrets. Some are continuing what their ancestors started centuries ago while others have found their craft by accident. But every one of them is a model of tenacity and dedication, each pursuing excellence for its own sake.

The human stories alone are extraordinary. Two siblings who toil through winter storms, hauling rocks across the Pennines so farmers won’t lose their sheep. A fisherwoman who battled breast cancer to weave more sustainable equipment. A lettercutter who carved her late husband’s gravestone through a blizzard of tears. A watchmaker who devoted five years of his life to a single timepiece simply to prove he could do it.

I’ve learned that craft isn’t a dusty hangover from the past, and nor is it just a pleasant pastime. It remains a living, vital tradition – and a crucial part of our present and our future. That remains true today, even in a world governed by automation and algorithms. Our traditional crafts may be economically marginalised, but they are still answering our needs and solving our problems. In some ways they have never been more relevant.

As we move into an increasingly virtual world, they can ground us in our physical bodies and material surroundings; they can teach us the unfashionable virtues of slowness and patience; and as we all transition to a greener economy, they can teach us more sustainable ways of doing things.

Potters and basket-weavers are already supplying alternatives to polluting plastics, while hedge-layers and coppice-workers are restoring small pockets of biodiversity to rural areas. In the right circumstances craft can redefine our relationship with the world, helping to end the doom loop of overconsumption and waste.

Humans are natural born craftspeople. From the moment our ancestors knapped their first axes from flint, we have been using our hands to make things. We have done so throughout our history, in every part of the globe. Those instincts remain unchanged. Just watch a child shaping plasticine or stacking blocks, mesmerised by their own powers of transformation.

They remind us of something we have largely forgotten: that making satisfies a deep and essential need, and so helps us feel truly human.

Craftland: A Journey Through Britain’s Lost Arts and Vanishing Trades by James Fox is out now (Vintage, £25).

You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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