Gimson's partnerships

Sidney Barnsley’s furniture, designed and made by him in the shared Pinbury workshop, attracted considerable attention following the 1896 Arts and Crafts Exhibition in London. Gimson and Ernest Barnsley wanted to develop their own designs and went into formal partnership in 1900. They decided to employ trained cabinet makers – probably because they didn’t have the stamina or inclination to spend days at the bench making their own designs – and to open an additional workshop in Cirencester producing furniture to their designs. They moved the workshop closer to home in 1902 to the outbuildings at Daneway House – another part of the Bathurst estate – in the valley below Sapperton. Gimson and Ernest Barnsley were also able to use the main reception rooms of the house as showrooms for their work.

 

The two men began designing furniture. There are five drawings – all in Gimson’s hand –signed ‘B &G’ and dated 1902 in Cheltenham Art Gallery & Museum. A small oak chest of drawers in oak with chamfered decoration round the carcase and drawer fronts designed by Ernest Barnsley dates from this period as does the store cabinet in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

 

By February 1903 the partnership between the two men had been dissolved. The reasons for the break are not clear but were reputedly a mixture of personal and professional issues.

Peter van der Waals – often abbreviated to Peter Waals and known to his craftsmen as ‘Duchy’ – was employed as foreman to run the workshop on a day-to-day basis. He was born in 1870 in The Hague, Holland. His uncle was Johannes Diderik van der Waals, the famous physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics for his work on thermodynamics in 1910. Waals trained as a cabinet maker in The Hague then spent about three years working in Brussels, Berlin and Vienna. He went to London in 1900 intending to gain another year’s experience before returning to the Netherlands. He was introduced to Gimson in London in 1901 and offered the position of foreman/manager of the new workshop in the Cotswolds. He accepted the offer and spent the rest of his life in the Cotswolds.