50
B+W
›He had a big workshop in his garage and
later, in another house, in his basement.
There was a large workbench, very oily, full
of grease from pipe fittings, because he did
a lot of his own plumbing and he did a lot
of threading of pipe. From the time I could
walk he let me play with the tools. He let
me play with hammers. He let me play with
pieces of galvanised pipe for plumbers.
I played with okum, which is jute that has
been treated with tar to pack sewer pipe. It’s
no longer used. That was when sewer pipes
were cast iron, and then lead was put on top
of the okum. He let me play with the lead
in solid form. I used to roll the pipe down
the stairs in the back of the house. He had
fabulous things on his workbench. He had
drills, he had saws, he had screwdrivers, and
one of the most mysterious things he had
was a big, big box like it had been a cookie
tin, and in it there was maybe 5,000 little
things like brads, nails, screws, nuts, bolts,
electric wire, plugs, washers and fuses.
Also on the workbench were paint cans.
He would touch up woodwork. He would
repaint a wall. Everything was oil-based
in those days. There was no latex paint in
our house and most of the oil-based paints
were old. He didn’t put the tops on very
tightly and it was always yellowed – a kind
of yellow-white goo from the oil mixing with
the lead. In those days paint was made with
lead. And it was very, very beautiful to me as
a child to see the white paint. I would play
with it by sticking one of his screwdrivers in
and breaking the skin and moving it around.
It was like white taffy. It had a fabulous smell
of linseed oil and turpentine.I
n those days, there was no odourless paint
thinner. Turpentine was the thinner unless
you used pure gasoline. The turps was
made from the sap of a pitch pine tree.
It smelled nothing like it does now. It was
so strong. Pops kept brushes in it to keep
them soft so you always had residue at the
bottom of the can of the paint and when you
pulled them up and he had left them there
for a couple of months, it was an object unto
itself, a kind of sculpture, of the paint brush
hardened with the white paint floating along
the bottom of the bristles like a plinth.
I realised as I got older that all these tools
were invented through use, through working,
by workers, not by industrial designers.
They evolved out of the need to put things
together or take them apart in a more
sophisticated way than using your hands,‘Through sheer force of
will he was determined to
prevail over the challenge
of craftsmanship.’