Wally Joyce, Chimney-sweep
The dense woods which cloak the hills around Haslemere conceal much more than a wealth of wildlife; here, too, is an exceptional richness of old buildings. And where the dwellings of past centuries persist, so too do open fires. So what better a place could a chimney-sweep hope for than this pot-pourri of Old England, where the corners of Surrey and Sussex curve gently around each other? Here, in this living museum of architecture, where black-beamed cottages jostle with tile-hung terraces, Georgian mansions and modem mayhem, are stacks and flues of every shape and size, and no one knows their inner secrets better than Walter Charles Joyce.
POOR WAYFARERS
Of all the vast class of human creatures who are doomed to diurnal weariness – to know the bitterness of the labour that is done under the sun – there are none that I can more feelingly sympathise with than the daily wayfarers; especially in the season of shortening days, frequent storms, and growing cold. I do not mean the wealthy, the lazy, and luxurious viatores that, in carriage, or on steed, traverse the king’s highways, in great bodily comfort, and, after a few hours’ career, alight in elegant homes or wellgarnished inns, and stretching themselves at their ease, with every requisite of viand, wine and feather-bed at command, but I mean all those who, being of the poor, are never to cease from the land; and whom, whether we be seated at our tables, circling our fires in social mirth, or quietly laid in our beds, we may be sure are scattered in a thousand places on our great roads, be it summer or winter, day or night, as plodding, as full of trouble, as weary, and as picturesque as ever.
WILLIAM HOWITT
Book of the Seasons, 1830
Now 65, Wally Joyce continues the business established by his father in 1934. Wally took it over in 1964, when his father died of lung cancer. Whether Joyce senior’s death was anything to do with his occupation we do not know, but he was a heavy smoker.
Wally was born on 24 April 1927, just outside Haslemere, at Hammer, where his grandfather worked in the brickworks. Ironically, one of the first jobs Wally’s father did was to help to take down the chimney stack at the brickworks.
Chimney Safety Today
Providing quality, safety and good service are the aims of Britain’s prime organisations for chimney sweeps, including the Institute of Chimney Sweeps (www.instituteofchimneysweeps.co.uk) and the Guild of Master Sweeps (www.guild-of-master-sweeps.co.uk). As well as being the source of soot and even potentially dangerous gases such as carbon monoxide, unswept chimneys are a common cause of household fires, which can be highly dangerous to both life and property. Courses for chimney sweep training are provided by both bodies, and qualified sweeps will become familiar with all types of fire, flue and chimney, from the historic home to the new-build and from the Aga to the gas burner. As well as the traditional brushes, most modern chimney sweeps use specially adapted vacuum cleaners to suck up flue debris and reduce the risk of soot fall and damage to a minimum. For the biggest chimneys, industrial vacuum cleaners adapted with filters to cope with the debris are used.
In those days Haslemere was a very sleepy country town, and with unspoilt countryside pressing down on all sides, especially around Hammer, the area provided the ideal environment for a lad to grow up in. But for the labouring classes there were few opportunities to break away, so few eyebrows were raised when Wally left school at 14 to become a garden boy earning 30s a week.
But Wally was disillusioned by his work for Mr Muir, at Rowallan in Haslemere. ‘They kept pigs, goats, ponies and rabbits, and I seemed to spend all my time looking after them rather than gardening. One of the other gardeners used to cut bracken for the animals’ bedding, and I helped him rick thatching, too. It was all done with scythes.
So young Joyce soon moved on to become a gardener at Great Stoatley, Haslemere, the home of the appropriately named Mr Greenacre.
By now World War II was well underway and rationing had a significant impact on most aspects of life. But the enterprising young Joyce soon found a way round the shortage of mowing petrol. ‘The trick was to start the old Dennis with only the carburettor full of petrol; when it was warm it would run for the rest of the day on paraffin.’
At 16 to 18 years old, Wally was in the Air Training Corp (ATC) and went on an air frames course, but there were no vacancies in the Fleet Air Arm so he was called up into the Army. He went to the Athens area with the East Surreys, but saw only twenty-eight days’ war service.
When Wally left the forces he thought that gardening would be a poor living, so he went to work for his father. ‘I joined two other men he employed then and did mostly window cleaning.’ At the time there were many more sweeps in the area. Nowadays, however, sweeps are ‘a scarce race’, as Wally puts it. ‘Although round here there is no smokeless zone and open fires remain popular, overall the “box” (TV) has become the focus of a room and many houses do not have a single fireplace.’
Working within about a 7-mile radius around Haslemere, Wally and his father began travelling around on a motorbike and sidecar. Their first van was a three-wheeler Reliant, and there followed a succession of plain vans. Wally has never been attracted by gimmicks such as having a chimney and brush protruding from the roof of his van, and he does not even have his name painted on the side. ‘Fortunately, I don’t need to advertise, and in any case a plain van is easier to sell.’
Sometimes he travels further afield when a good customer moves away and does not want to lose Wally’s very reliable service. He even managed to do his round on the morning after the Great Storm of 16 October 1987, when hundreds of mature trees blocked most of the roads in the area. ‘I had to drive under great branches arching over the lanes in many places and none of the customers expected to see me at all.’
COTTAGERS FARE
Cottagers now [March] gather the tender-springing tops of nettles to make pottage, considered by them a great purifier of the blood. They also boil them instead of spinage, as they do the tops of the wild hop, as a substitute for asparagus. But of all the vegetables that are cultivated, next to the potato, rhubarb has become, perhaps, the most valuable to the poor, and pleasant to all. Of late its growth has rapidly increased; and people who, some years ago, never saw such an article exposed in our markets, are now astonished at the quantities brought there, and disposed of with the greatest readiness. As a most wholesome and agreeable vegetable, coming in early and supplying a delightful acidulous material for pies and puddings, till gooseberries are ready, it is invaluable, and seems destined to acquire universal estimation.
WILLIAM HOWITT
Book of the Seasons, 1830
Not surprisingly, it was after the 1987 storm that Wally noticed how many more jackdaws began to nest in chimneys and flues. This engaging little member of the crow family has always been keen on chimney nest-sites, but tree holes have also been used extensively. Sadly, so many of the old trees which harboured suitable hollows were blown down in 1987, compounding extensive losses through Dutch elm disease.
‘Jackdaws have always been a big problem in the area. Once, at the Old Rectory, by the Black Fox at Milland, I took ten jackdaw nests out of 12 chimneys, and afterwards I had enough sticks for Bonfire Night. And on another occasion I dragged down a brood of young jays in a jackdaw nest.’
Squirrels, too, can be a problem. ‘Once, down tumbled four pink babies among the sticks blocking a chimney. Other times they can be the stinkiest thing going, when you pull one down which is decomposing and all maggoty. And get them in your roof and you can be in for a real mess. But the one I remember most was shriekin’ and squealin’ like a mad thing; I must have caught her in a soft bit with my nest hook and she shot out the chimney at 9Omph and dropped 20ft into a tree.
’Then you get the bees, and dragging them down is no joke.’ But Wally has not had any serious accident caused by wildlife. Human error has been much more significant: he attributes his exceptionally bushy eyebrows to frequent singeing. Once he was almost roasted alive in the boiler-house at a Guildford hospital. ‘The boiler man was getting impatient as his pressure was dropping, and he didn’t realise that I was still working on the flue. Fortunately I had stepped back when he opened up and the roar just missed me.’
There are many inglenooks and large stacks on his patch, but Wally has never actually been stuck in a chimney. However, on several occasions he has had to call for help when trying to reach a flue. For example, there was the time at the Manor Hotel, Hindhead, when he had to crawl under the floorboards to reach a soot door. His bulky overalls held him firmly so he had to wait for someone to come and pull him out.
Another time he was making a regular visit to Holly Ridge, the Surrey County Council children’s home. ‘I had to lay in an awkward position across the top of the boiler to empty the back flue. But they never told me that the plumber had just been in to fix extra pipes. Again, my overalls pinned me down and I had to shout for the gardener to pull me out by the legs.’
Apart from boiler flues and standard chimney-stacks, Wally also cleans some old kitchen ranges and many Agas, which have become increasingly popular as part of the nostalgic movement towards creating times past.
But there is not much romance in chimney-sweeping. Wally generally works at least a ten-hour day, from 8am to 6pm, or often much later in the winter darkness. ‘In the old days we always started at 6am, but nowadays we have the problem of catching people in, as so many wives go out to work.’
Some of the buildings which Wally visits belong to the rich or the famous, ranging from Lord Tennyson’s poetic pile high up on Blackdown to comedian Terry Scott’s modern bungalow. A few are exceptionally eerie, too, including the one-time base of Oliver Cromwell, where Wally had to stay very late cleaning no less than 26 chimneys; working alone, he was unnerved by the atmosphere.
Nowadays, few people are interested in the soot collected from the chimneys, but there was a time when Wally and his father would sell it all to keen gardeners. Indeed, when Wally himself used to work as a gardener he would take some soot in a hessian sack to his employer’s garden, where it was put in a water butt for feeding the tomatoes.
‘Soot was also put on onion beds, and we used to mix it with lime to make a paste for dipping cabbage or sprout plants in to combat club root. A ring of soot around a plant would keep the slugs off, and one old gardener I knew used to brush it on the lawn with a birch broom as it lay on the broad-bladed weeds and killed them but did not harm the narrow grass. Nowadays we give the soot to customers. And another thing, soot is really good for rose-beds; it must be, because in industrial areas you never used to get black spot.’
Wally has never used a vacuum – ‘You have to sweep the chimney anyway. Some of the older people still cover absolutely everything up when they know you are coming, but others are so unprepared you even have to take the hot ashes out the grate. But I am pleased to say that my reputation has been a clean sweep and there is no doubt that your reputation travels with you.’
Some customers are surprisingly unhelpful. ‘For example, at one house I struggled for over an hour before I discovered that the chimney. Then there are the DIY people who call you in without telling you what they have done. Many’s the brush I’ve dragged out of a chimney. With a difficult flue you musn’t keep bashing away hoping to find a way up, but patiently twist around with the brush.’ And you cannot carry too many 3ft rods – Wally needs no less than 26 for tackling the flue in one building converted to flats.
The Joyce household itself does have an open fireplace, but Wally admits that they rarely use it. ‘We have Calor gas in the living-room and I’ve got one of the dirtiest chimneys in Haslemere; my boiler chimney only gets swept when soot falls down and puts the fire out. No profit in it, is there?’ Today Wally charges about £14 to sweep an average chimney, whereas in 1964 it was 7s 6d. But there is no doubting that he provides value for money, because he is booked up weeks ahead and still has some of his father’s customers.
When Wally knocks on your door on a dark winter’s evening, after a long day grovelling in grime, all you can see is the whites of his eyes flickering beneath his cap, and you wonder if his tough skin will ever be clean again. Yet he is in constant demand for one of those ceremonies when everyone must be whiter than white, the wedding. ‘It’s usually the bride’s mother who invites me, because she believes that it is good luck if the sweep is the first person the bride sees when she comes out the church. So, I have to turn up in my overalls, complete with rod and brush, and get to peck the bride on the cheek as well as shake the groom by the hand. It’s one of the perks of the job.’
As you watch Wally at work, bent over the hearth staring into a black hole, you may feel that he needs many highlights to brighten his week. But remember, for every hour he spends surrounded by soot, he has another travelling around some of the most beautiful countryside in southern England.
Wally Joyce is now enjoying his retirement.