or storing salt, pickled food, oil and flour. In the towns and cities, the breweries each had a cooperage making barrels that started with a 4.5 gallon polypin and then doubled in capacity through firkin, kilderkin, barrel, hogshead and butt to the mighty 216 gallon tun. With commercial whisky distilling, after the Excise Act of 1823, every highland distillery had its own cooperage and a Master Cooper who oversaw the manufacture of barrels which would remain watertight for the whisky maturing process – often for over twenty-five years. In the mid-twentieth century, stainless steel and aluminium barrels became prevalent in beer making, but some specialist real ale breweries do continue to make beer in wooden barrels. Wadworth of Devizes in Wiltshire, who employ the last remaining Master Cooper in England, is an example. In Scotland, whisky is still matured in oak barrels where the tannins in the wood play an essential role in maturation, by enabling oxidation and the creation of delicate fragrance in spirits. In the village of Craigellachie, near Aberlour, in Scotland, the Speyside Cooperage produces and repairs nearly 150,000 oak casks used by the surrounding Speyside Whisky distilleries, as well as distilleries elsewhere throughout Scotland.
It is generally accepted that the Celtish tribes of the wooded Alpine region of Germany were the first people to make barrels, in around 300 BC, and the basic structure has remained more or less unchanged. Sections of oak trunks, from trees ideally aged 100 to 150 years old, are split along the grain into staves, bent and stacked in the open for between 18 and 36 months to enable the wood to dry evenly in the air. The manufacturing process requires the use of a number of well-seasoned oak staves enclosing a circular head at either end of the cask, and then bound together with steel or copper hoops. The skill of the cooper lies in making each stave, precisely shaped and bevelled, to form the tight-fitting circle of the belly of the cask.
The staves are trimmed into oblong lengths with a double taper, traditionally called ‘dressing’, then joined on a jointer known as a ‘colombe’ and given their final shape before being fitted onto a frame and arranged around an iron ‘raising up’ hoop. The shaping requires heat to modify the wood’s physical and chemical composition, which is provided by natural gas, steam or boiling water, or flames from burning wood chips, or a combination of these. If fire is used the barrel is assembled over a metal pot called a ‘chaufferette’. The cooper hammers home temporary iron hoops whilst pressing the wood with a damp cloth. The barrel heads, comprising five or six straight staves pinned together, are shaped to fit into a groove known as the ‘croze’, which is cut in the inside ends of the side staves. To finish, the outside is planed smooth and the barrel is filled with steam or water: if it is watertight the bunghole is drilled and the iron hoops are replaced with steel or copper ones.
ALDER
Alder, often seen lining the banks of streams and rivers or forming small alder woods known as ‘carrs’ on damp ground, was an immensely useful, fast-growing, multi-purpose tree. The tightly grained wood has the quality of long endurance under both fresh and sea water, and was invaluable for pumps, troughs, sluices and water pipes. The medieval conduits bringing fresh water into London were made using alder and it was still used for piping in the eighteenth century. In fact, examples of alder water pipes from the reign of Charles II, excavated from Oxford Street in 1899, can be seen at the Powerhouse Museum in London’s Chinatown.
Alder was extensively used as piling in the construction of docks, quays and landing stages – Venice was built on alder piles, and during the great era of canal building in the eighteenth century all lock gates were made of alder. It was much sought-after for lightweight, durable clogs worn by workers in the mill towns of Lancashire and the south of Scotland, and was used for cart and spinning wheels, bowls, spoons, wooden heels for shoes, herring-barrel staves and furniture.
Alder wood burns with an intense heat and so made the best charcoal for gunpowder manufacturing. Gunpowder factories were usually sited where there was a natural supply of alder trees; the Royal Gunpowder Mill, established in 1560 at Waltham Abbey in Essex, is an example of this, or the 1694 Chart Gunpowder Mill at Faversham in Kent. The bark was used for tanning, waterproofing fishermen’s nets, curing sore throats and to make a reddish dye. Alder shoots, which appear in early spring, produce a brown dye, the catkins a green one, and in some rural areas the leaves, which have a clammy, glutinous surface, were strewn on the floor in rooms to catch fleas, from Neolithic times until well into the eighteenth century.
ELM
Wood from the common elm has many of the same qualities as alder; it is close-grained, free from knots, tough, flexible, and not prone to splitting. Elm does not crack once seasoned and is remarkably durable underwater, being specially adapted for any purpose which requires exposure to wet. Allowed to grow, it becomes a much more impressive tree than an alder, and can develop into a magnificent specimen, towering to a height of around 36 metres. These beautiful trees, with their haloes of reddish spring flowers and billowing summer foliage, were favourite subjects of the early landscape artists. Constable’s pencil drawing of the elms at Old Hall Park in 1817 captures all the romance, vigour and majesty of a tree that was once a familiar sight silhouetted across England’s skylines.
Tragically, elms are susceptible to a deadly beetle or wind-borne fungus, Graphium ulmus, and no one who was alive in the 1970s could possibly forget the devastation as Dutch Elm Disease ravaged elms across Britain, or the destruction of 20 million trees in an attempt to contain the epidemic. I well remember the year when miles of dead or dying hedgerows, park and city elms stood stark and haggard against the brightening colours of the growing season, giving an impression of both summer and autumn occurring simultaneously.
Elm wood had an enormous number of practical uses; its peculiar toughness and durability underwater made it ideal for keel pieces, bilge planks, jetty piles, groyne and harbour construction, the blocks and dead eyes of ships’ rigging, the bobbins of fish nets, and, since the wood shatters when struck rather than splintering, gun carriages were always made of elm. Because of the extreme toughness and weather-resistant properties, elm boards were largely used for making coffins, lining the interior of carts, wagons or wheelbarrows, and as cladding on houses and farm buildings. The inner bark is very tough and fibrous and was woven into rope or mats and, as with alder, elm wood was used in making water pipes prior to cast iron.
The dense grain of elm has one drawback which made old woodsmen wary of the tree: when the tree is in full leaf, a branch will suddenly, with no warning, snap and come crashing to the ground. This led to the superstition that, “The elm hateth man, and waiteth? Wych elm, or Scotch elm, which grows in northern England, Scotland and Wales and is the only species of elm native to Ireland, is a beautiful tree, smaller, broader and hardier than its southern cousin. It flourishes on hillsides or near the sea and the tree’s ability to establish itself in remote places has enabled pockets of Wych elm to survive Dutch Elm Disease.
The word ‘wych’ came from the Saxon word meaning pliable and refers to the twigs, which can be twisted and knotted without breaking, and the elasticity of the smaller branches – some of the best longbows were made of Wych elm. The wood, though more porous than that of the common elm, is tough, hardy and weather-resistant when properly seasoned, and in the north was used for similar water-based construction as common elm was in the south. The wood becomes very flexible when steamed and was much used in making small clinker-built boats. Wych elm wood is renowned for its great strength and resistance to splitting, due to the interweaving of the wood fibres which creates a cross-grained timber. The ability to resist splitting under great stress made it ideal for wheel-making, the strength of the hub being so critical that wheelwrights sourced elm from particular regions renowned for good wood. Wych elm blocks were used for pulleys, early gunstocks and the headstocks of church bells, stair treads, floorboards, table tops and the seats of chairs.
