H.E. Bates Companion

Bates reports on rural visits in the autumn of 1936: "hand-weavers as far apart as Devon and Northumberland, with a wood-turner in Northamptonshire, a potter in Kent, a bell-maker in Oxford, a smith in Rutland, with lace-makers from Bedfordshire, a quilter from Westmorland, with thatchers and wheel-wrights and smiths and lace-makers and saddlers." Bates records interviews with both thriving and struggling craftsmen, explores the successes of the Rural Industries Bureau ("that...almost unbelievable thing, a government department working for love"), and anticipates the day when some of the crafts will disappear: "we shall lose something precious of our national inheritance. Because these arts are something more than mere occupations of the human hand. They are part of the very accent of the history of the island." With sixteen photographs. In John O'London's Weekly (Special illustrated supplement, i-viii, bound between pp. 426-7, December 4, 1936).