The chairmaking workshop
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While the Pinbury workshop was in operation, Gimson continued making chairs himself. He seems to have put chair-making to one side in the early days of the partnership with Ernest Barnsley although there was a continual demand for this type of furniture. Having moved to Sapperton in the summer of 1903 he began thinking of ways to develop the chair-making side of the business. He sent his design for a ladderback chair to a manufacturer in High Wycombe, the centre for chair making in Britain, to be made up. The rush seats were excellent but the timber was coarse and porous and the turned work unsatisfactory. Looking for an alternative Gimson visited the sawmill at Daneway. It was run by Mr Gardiner who had previously farmed the land at Pinbury Park and beyond. It was he who suggested that his son Edward should do some turning for Gimson.
The young Edward Gardiner taught himself wood turning by reading manuals, talking to William Bucknell, wood worker and blacksmith at the nearby village of Water Lane, and watching others at work, particularly the wood-turners at Workman Brothers at Woodchester, near Stroud. Gimson was so impressed with the quality of Gardiner’s work that he took him on as a partner in the chairmaking business from 1904. Others, including Percy Watts, were taken on as apprentices. They made a range of Gimson designs including plain and bead turned chairs and settees. The architect Philip Webb must have commented favourably on the chairs exhibited at Debenham and Freebody’s in London at the end of 1907 because Gimson replied to him, saying that:
‘Yes, my young men are capital chair rushers now & get quite a lot of work to do. Each does the whole chair from start to finish & has about a dozen patterns at his finger ends. Here we are often content to be simply copyists. Some of the old patterns are so admirable – good country work with no thought of style – that the making of them is pleasure enough…’
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Gardiner left Gloucestershire in 1913 with the intention of setting up a workshop in Warwickshire. His plans were interrupted by the outbreak of World War I in 1914 and it wasn’t until 1920, when Sidney Barnsley wrote to ask him whether he would make 60 chairs for the Memorial Library at Bedales school, Hampshire, that he started work again. Once people knew he was back in business, more orders came. He took on Neville Neal as an apprentice in 1939. Neal continued chairmaking after Gardiner’s death in 1958 and the workshop is still carried on by his son, Lawrence Neal, at Stockton, near Rugby.