Algy and George Lillywhite, Timber Throwers
There is no doubt that tree-felling, or timber throwing, is among the most dangerous of rural occupations, and after a lifetime in the business, brothers Algy and George Lillywhite have the scars to prove it. As soon as you shake hands with Algy you are aware of his missing thumb. ‘I was taking. the top out a big ash tree in a farmyard and because of a misunderstanding with the man on the ground a wire slipped and sliced my thumb right off; it could easily have been my arm. That bloody hurt and I thought I was going to faint, so as I climbed down the tree I tried to count all the moths on the bark to take my mind off it. Funny thing is it never really bled.’
On another occasion Algy nearly lost a foot. ‘It was first thing in the morning and I took a big swing with the axe, which went straight through the wood – must have been a bit of tension in it – and my boot. All my toes and the front of my foot was hangin’ down, but they managed to stitch it all back together again. We was strong in those days, but you ‘ad to be to swing an axe all day.
‘Chainsaws was really dangerous when they first came in – German Kirchners just before the war. We was about the first to have them. We had the first Danarm Tornadoe in the country, both one- and two-man, with a butterfly chain. One day we were felling an ash when the wind blew the tree back and it whipped round again in a second. The chainsaw took the lace off my left boot and went into my right leg. I had to have 36 stitches, but that night I managed to get down to Goodwood Club.’
George remembers the time they were working on the Goodwood estate when a branch fell out of a tree and hit another man on the back of the neck. ‘It must have been stuck up there after being broken off in a storm. Anyway, it part paralysed him. That was the worst accident we ever saw.
‘Yes, it’s a rough and tumble job all right. I broke my ankle only three years ago, when a tree rolled on it. And Algy has broken three ribs on one occasion and four on another.’ Then there was the time when Algy was using a power saw and was thrown 10ft up in the air by a branch which came up between his legs when a tree rolled round. ‘It all happened in slow motion really, but fortunately I had the presence of mind to throw the saw away when I was goin’ up; no way I wanted to come down again with that in my hand.
‘You’ve really got to be on the look-out all the time. And in the old days back in the sawmill it was common for a man to lose a finger. How there weren’t more people killed after the Great Storm of 1987 I don’t know. There was yobbos all over the place cuttin’ up – and spoilin’ timber through splittin’ it – without any experience at all.’
Christened Algernon, Algy was born on 12 November 1926, and George was born on 26 October 1928, in a remote cottage in the woods, at Red Copse, near Boxgrove in the parish of East Dean, Sussex. Their father was a gamekeeper on the Goodwood estate. ‘But ‘e was also very good with his hands and became the village carpenter – makin’ threshin’ drums, even gunstocks – as well as a gravedigger and welldigger at East Dean. That was after he was made redundant, but they was good to him and sold him a rood [¼ acre] of land on which he built a house. He was one of the men made redundant because there were a lot of death duties to pay when the Duke of Richmond died.
‘Grandad had also worked around East Dean, on farms, mainly thatching. We had three sisters and a third brother who was older, but he was killed when he was 21. He came down the hill just up the road when it was dark and wet and you couldn’t see much and ran straight into the back of a horse and cart on his motorbike.’
The boys went to the local school at East Dean and never had any illusions about their future employment. ‘With no transport to get out the villages there was no option. It was either Green’s sawmill or the farms. But they were enjoyable times and we never went hungry. One thing we do remember, though, is having to go to the isolation hospital at Chichester by horse-drawn ambulance when we had scarlet fever. One boy in the village died of it.
‘After father left the duke, he ‘ad the rabbit catchin’ in return for lookin’ after the wild game. In those days there were thousands and thousands of rabbits. Father got 9s a dozen for the largest, 6s for the next size down and 4s 6d for the smallest. In those days you usually bought the right to catch rabbits; you bid off the farmer or he would say a price. It was commonly known that rabbits would pay half the tenant farmer’s rent.’
So at the age of 14 George became a full-time rabbit catcher and in his first winter he alone had caught 3,800 rabbits. ‘Most were caught in snares but a few were ferreted. In the winter I run about three gross of wires plus gin-traps, but it was always wires in the autumn.
‘We made our own entertainment then and we all had guns. There were very few deer but lots of foxes, and we used to catch them as well as badgers and stoats. We used to get penny a pair for starlings’ or blackbirds’ or any songbird’s wings. They were dyed different colours to go on the sides of ladies’ hats. But we used to get 6d for a pair of jay’s wings, as they’re blue and colourful. A weasel fetched 1s 6d, a stoat 2s and a mole 4d or 6d, dependin’ on whether it was low or high grade.
‘Best of all was badgers, which fetched at least £1 each. To get ‘em we used to make our own cartridges up with big lead balls and hide up a tree at night with a shotgun.’
Once George sent off two badger skins to Horace Friend, the dealer, and had a postal order for 30s each back, which was a lot of money then. So Algy thought, ‘I’ll have some of this and I went up next night to wait for ‘em. But I lay on the ground, thinkin’ it was all right as long as I got the right way of the wind. Anyway, after a while I heard the badgers come out, rustlin’ the leaves in the holes. Then I heard them all around me and I was frightened because I remembered the story of the drain man who put his rods up a den and got attacked. So I jumped up, fired two shots in the air and ran off with nothin’.
‘Another thing father and us always used to do’, said George, ‘was put people’s animals down when they wanted it. We used to get 5s or 7s 6d for this, but I always used to make ‘em dig their own holes.
‘The life seems hard now but we never once thought trappin’ was cruel; it was a way of earning a living – survival. And as the war went on everyone was after rabbits and you got as much as 2s 3d for one, but the farmers soon put the price of the ground up. It was only seasonal work – the breeding was more to a set time then and all the rabbits lived in holes whereas so many live up top now. So come March we had to find other work.’
When Algy left school, also at the age of 14, he went timber throwing with his father for £1 a week. ‘He did all the hard work and I started off with a 4½lb boy’s axe, the heavier ones beinc 6lb and 71b. We’d trim the bottom of a tree down straight and then cut a sink, which gave the direction to throw the tree. It was all piece-work for Green’s sawmill at Chalton, near Singleton. The gang was paid three ha’pence a cube [cubic foot]. Later I went into the mill itself to help father build big sheds.
‘After that I joined the gang of hauliers bringing timber into the mill. We ‘ad this French lorry which ran off charcoal. It had this big furnace on one side with pipes all over it. You’d start it in the morning with a small amount of petrol and then run for the rest of the day on the gas given off by the charcoal.
‘In our youth they still used horses at Goodwood. All the fields was ploughed with horses. The only mechanical thing you saw was a thrashin’ machine.
‘In the early days we used to bring in trees 80–100ft long. When the two dukes died within seven years there was a lot of death duties and the estate had to sell the whole of Chalton Forest and all the woods to the north. It was estimated over a million cube and at the time was the largest sale of timber ever recorded. Green’s bought the lot and it worked out a real bargain – something like a farthing a cube. That was in the early Twenties and how Green’s got established in the South. We came in on the throwing side towards the end of the thirty years or so it took to cut the lot down. A great deal of it was sold for Lee-Enfield rifle butts.
ICE IN WARM CHAMBERS
There were some circumstances attending the remarkable frost in January 1776 so singular and striking, that a short detail of them may not be unacceptable.
January 7th – snow driving all the day, which was followed by frost, sleet, and some snow, till the 12th, when a prodigious mass overwhelmed all the works of men, drifting over the tops of the gates and filling the hollow lanes.
On the 14th the writer was obliged to be much abroad; and thinks he never before or since has encountered such rugged Siberian weather. From the 14th the snow continued to increase, and began to stop the road waggons and coaches, which could no longer keep on their regular stages; and especially on the western roads, where the fall appears to have been deeper than in the south.
On the 27th much snow fell all day, and in the evening the frost became very intense. At South Lambeth, for the four following nights, the thermometer fell to 11, 7, 6, 6; and at Selborne to 7, 6, 10; and on the 31st of January, just before sunrise, with rime on the trees and on the tube of the glass, the quicksilver sunk exactly to zero, being 32 degrees below the freezing point. During these four nights the cold was so penetrating that it occasioned ice in warm chambers and under beds; and in the day the wind was so keen that persons of robust constitutions could scarcely endure to face it. The Thames was at once so frozen over both above and below bridge that crowds ran about on the ice.
WILLIAM HOWITT
Book of the Seasons, 1830
‘When the war came father was too old to join up and I was “grade 3” – ‘ad a weak stomach, but I did go in the Home Guard. And I did see some action. One day I was at the sawmill talking to a manager who was blind and partly deaf. Suddenly Gerry appeared, coming down the valley from nowhere, and the bullets was ‘ittin’ the ground just 2–3ft behind this manager. Well, I turned and run in the workshop and dived under the bench. Then I thought, “This is no good, he’s going to come round again”, so I slid under a lorry being repaired there and in my panic fell into the inspection pit. After a while I realised that the plane had gone and went back out. To my amazement the manager was still there talkin’ away, not realisin’ that I’d gone. He didn’t even know what happened, till I shook him by the shoulder. He was a lucky man.
‘The plane didn’t do much damage, though one shell smashed all the works of a steam crane on rails, used for lifting timber, and the operator was so frightened he never worked again. A neighbour picked up a shell and burnt her hand on it. Later her husband made a lighter out of it. After, we discovered that the German plane was shot down.
‘Sometimes, when we was out rabbit shootin’ we used to have a go at the doodlebugs with our .22 rifles.
‘After the war a lot of German beech came in and we went to do piece-work on the bandsaws in the sawmill. But after a year we were like caged animals so we went on our own loggin’ firewood. A farmer gave us a wide rood of hedge, but it was full of shrapnel as it had been part of a firing range in the war. It was an awful job to sell firewood in those days. We sold most of ours to a Major Mould from London. Once he gave us a lorry because he said it was unlucky and he couldn’t do any business with it. He just left the keys and took the train back to London. But we did all right with it.’
After that the brothers went loading timber for Green’s, and left in 1951 to fell timber on the Goodwood estate. In one wood alone, in Singleton Forest, they worked for eight years, under contract to the Duke of Richmond. Most of thetrees felled were beech up to about 180 years old and were planted by the second duke. ‘Elm was almost a weed in those days, but now it is relatively rare and expensive.’
The Lillywhites have worked in all weathers, even in the great freeze-up of early 1963, ‘when the felled trees dropped out of sight in the snow. But there was always some seasonal work to do, such as rinding (taking the bark off), which had to be done just before the buds break and the sap rises. We’d chop a piece off the standin’ tree and if it came away clean it was all right. After chopping around the bottom, we’d get the rinding iron in and take a ring off as high as we could comfortably reach. Then the tree would be felled and the rest taken off.
‘The bark was put in stacks to dry, then bundled and sent on to the yards for tanning hides. We worked in pairs as part of a gang of eight or ten. Rinding was for about six weeks – all on oak. The bark has to be fresh for tanning to get the acid.
‘Summers was spent trimming and taking the cordwood out. A cord is 4ft lengths stacked 2ft high and 16ft long. You need an oppis [Hoppus] book and a special tape for measuring the volume of the trees, but I can more or less do it in me head’, says George. ‘In winter we’d cut the beech.’
UNCONTROLLED FIRES
Though ‘to burn on any waste, between Candlemas and Midsummer, any grig, ling, heath and furze, goss or fern, is punishable with whipping and confinement in the house of correction’; yet in this forest, about March and April, according to the dryness of the season, such vast heath-fires are lighted up, that they often get to a masterless head, and, catching the hedges, have sometimes been communicated to the underwoods, woods, and coppices, where great damage has ensued. The plea for these burnings is, that, when the old coat of heath, etc., is consumed, young will sprout up, and afford much tender browse for cattle; but, where there is large old furze, the fire, following the roots, consumes the very ground; so that for hundreds of acres nothing is to be seen but smother and desolation, the whole circuit round looking like the cinders of a volcano; and the soil being quite exhausted, no traces of vegetation are to be found for years. These conflagrations, as they take place usually with a north-east or east wind, much annoy the village with their smoke, and often alarm the country.
GILBERT WHITE
Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, 1789
Nowadays the Lillywhites do very little timber throwing, the battle-scarred brothers admitting ‘it’s a young man’s game’. Instead, they concentrate on the sawmill, which they took over about fifteen years ago and stands on part of Green’s old site, which itself was on an earlier mill. Here they have the capacity to cut anything up to 32ft long. The biggest piece of wood they ever had to supply was oak measuring 29in square by 17ft long for a windmill, and it had to be very carefully chosen so that it would not crack under stress. Other monsters they’ve handled include a cedar of Lebanon measuring 8ft across and weighing 23 tons, which had to be felled when its top blew out in a storm. It was sold to Germans for veneer.
The brothers employ two other men at the mill, including one of Algy’s sons. Now he, in turn, hears the stories which have been passed down from generation to generation. A favourite goes back many years and was told to Algy by his father, who claimed that it was the most reliable account.
‘In the woods above East Dean – almost at the highest point in Sussex – is a large beech called the Sergeant’s Tree, which was witness to a sorry tale. In the days of the press-gangs there was a lad called Alan from Heyshott who delivered meat, and his last stop was at the bottom of Bury Hill, where he called in the pub. Inside, two soldiers asked him if he’d like a drink, so he took a pint with them. But as he drained his tankard a coin dropped in his mouth and he put it in his pocket. So the soldiers grabbed him, saying he had taken the King’s shilling and had to go in the Army.
‘Later the lad deserted and went into hiding. He lived in a boundary bank, which became known as Alan’s Bank. His mother and sister used to leave food for him in the crook of a tree and he’d collect it at night. Then he became a highwayman with a musket and was captured on Bury Hill. When he was being chased he shot an Army officer called Sergeant, who fell by a tree. The Duke of Richmond said that tree was never to be cut down and it remains there today.
‘The lad ran on to his native Graffham, where he grabbed ‘andful of straw from a rick, jumped into the stream and lay in the water under a bank, breathin’ through a straw. But eventually the soldiers saw him and shot him in the water. This was way before my father’s time, but it’s the story as ‘e told me.
‘One story which was from father’s youth concerned some Mormons, who were great con men and baptised some local girls in a dewpond before taking ‘em away to America. The local lads was so angry they harnessed the horses to the Mormons’ carts the wrong way round – facing the carts – and thrashed ‘em. ‘Course, a horse will only go forward so they went in the pond and got stuck!’
Tree Felling Today
To help protect Britain’s forests is now obligatory to obtain a felling licence from the Forestry Commission before a tree can be cut down. Indeed it is an offence to fell trees without a licence, although there are many exemptions which – unless trees are protected by a local preservation order – can include gardens, orchards, churchyards and open spaces. The Forestry Commission (www.forestry.gov.uk) supplies detailed information on the legality of felling, but you may also need to consult your local authority or tree warden before cutting down, or even severely lopping any tree.
Safety is, as always, a prime consideration in tree felling or large-scale lopping and for this reason it is wisest to call in a professional. But should you be interested in tree surgery as a money earner, log onto www.hotcourses.com to discover the possibilities. Remember, however, that modern tree surgeons work at great heights using specialist climbing equipment such as hoists and harnesses and need to be strong enough to handle heavy equipment such as chainsaws to fell trees and prune them to remove diseased or weak branches.
The brothers were themselves great practical jokers in their younger days. For example, there was the time when they were 11 and, with a pal, rolled a big lorry tyre down the hill. ‘It crossed the road, scared a man half to death, buckled the postmaster’s bike and ploughed into an old, disused shepherd’s hut.’
It is not surprising that these two ‘chips-off-the-old-block’ are part of a close-knit family for they married two sisters. Their stories of earlier domestic life are legion.
’In the war we used to keep pigs and each year a family was allowed to keep one pig for each bacon ration given up. The biggest porker we had weighed 40 stone and took four men to carry. We used to cure our own bacon, which was normal then. The hams was rubbed with salt every other day for three weeks and then smoked for three weeks. It ‘ad to be a sawdust fire of oak and beech, never softwood. One ham we had for seven years.
‘But that was nothin’ compared to a chunk of venison we kept. Father had this deer which was shot in the front leg and very bloody, so he decided to smoke and cook the leg for the dogs later on. But it obviously got overlooked and was still hangin’ up when father died. We saw this thing in the corner all covered in dust and realised what it was. So Mum soaked it in water – it puffed right up again – and cooked it. We all had a little taste and it was perfect, but we decided to give it to the dogs, which is what it was intended for. Only difference was it was 25 years later and not the same dogs! And the meat had only been smoked.
‘In the war we used to keep a lot of bees, but not just for the honey. You was given an extra allowance of sugar which you was supposed to feed to the bees, so we never went short of sugar. We used to make our own hives, too.’
Those days of austerity have long passed and the Lillywhites now deservedly live in comfort, in a village which has seen remarkable changes in a relatively short time. Nowadays no one needs to let rooms to visitors to Goodwood races in order to supplement their meagre income, and ham comes from the nearest hypermarket rather than from a pig. kept in the backyard. And where Algy once lived next door in a thatched cottage, he now lives in a modern bungalow on a piece of land sold to him by the duke. Yet the memories remain and the countryside surrounding Charlton is as inviting as ever.
George Lillywhite died in 2000, aged 72, and Algy died in September 2007, aged 81.