Going Round The Bend

John Wright rediscovers the unexpected pleasure of steambending wood into all sorts of shapes and sizes

I’M sure that we all concur with Jerome K. Jerome’s assessment of work: it fascinates us and we could watch it for hours. However, there can be more to gain from watching the labourer than mere self-satisfaction; sometimes, we can be amazed.

Back in the 1970s, on the disreputable scrap of beach next to the entrance to Portsmouth Dockyard, I watched a fisherman repair the gunwale on his small boat. It involved a bonfire, one dry and one very wet rag, some prepared timber and a drainpipe. He would slide one of the pieces of timber into the pipe, insert the rags at either end and prop the ensemble (wet rag down) in the bonfire. Steam would appear from the top and, after 20 minutes of occasional re-wetting of the rag and a certain amount of necessary fiddling about, he slid out the length of timber.

It was immediately obvious that, contrary to the normal nature of wood, it was rather flexible and it was effortlessly bent into position on the gunwale and fixed with cramps.

This, and similarly casual methods of steambending, have been practised for centuries in the making of such things as oak barrels (in which a ‘bonfire’ is made inside the half-made and wetted barrel) and walkingstick crooks (which are buried in hot, wet sand).