In his unpublished manuscript ‘As I Remember It’ the Rev Leslie Brame  described Meakings yard as a ‘complex of building activities. It was a large yard, at one end a sawpit fitted for sawing trees into boards. In those days the carpenters’ work started with the tree, generally oak, elm or ash. Pine wood was called deal and imported entirely from Canada. Special mahogany came from Africa, teak from Malaya or Burma.’ After the logs had been stacked in the yard to season for a few years ‘the log would be laid on a horizontal rack …. held fast by a system of chains and levers while the huge eight-foot saws were worked, by one man standing above the tree or on it , and another in the pit. The man on top had to guide the saw to make a straight cut while the one underneath had to stop himself choking to death with the sawdust.’

On the same site, they also ‘did a lot of wagon building and wheelwrighting. Making a wagon wheel was a very complex task involving carpentry skills and metal working and experience… mathematics could not work all that out’. Because the ‘smith’s main work was shoeing horses’ a forge was at the front of the yard but ‘just inside the yard were two circular trenches for the two sizes of wagon wheels. There was a charcoal fire to heat the steel rim, and when it was red hot, it was lifted off the fire, two or three men were needed to place the wheel carefully in the rim. The wooden fellies would be seared by the red-hot steel, and the whole rim would then be doused in cold water, sending up clouds of steam.’

Then the wagon wheels had to be painted in the correct traditional colours. There were no ready-made paints, William had to make the paints from scratch from the ingredients which were kept in the paint shop – ‘linseed oil, turpentine, driers, spirits, pigments, lead base and zinc oxide”.’

This is only a small taster of what Leslie remembered about his Dad’s craft skills, but he concluded that his ‘Dad could master any job if it was capable of being processed with a handsaw, plane, chisel, spokeshave, and hammer or mallet. Of course, the tools had to be cared for. Dad would sharpen and set his own saws, from the finest tenon saw to the giant two-handed saws used in cutting planks. He had a grindstone dipping in water for grinding chisels and planes, and kept an oil-stone on his bench for honing them, and a leather strop hanging from a post to get them razor sharp. As he was fond of saying, “a good workman never blames his tools, because he keeps them in good order!”’