HEIRS OF STONE AGE

Dominion, Volume 14, Issue 61, 6 December 1920, Page 5

HEIRS OF STONE AGE

WORK IN A GUN-FLINT FACTORY'

ONE OF THE OLDEST TRADES

Here is a village, now for sale to the highest bidder, wlibsa name was a household word many yearg ago, whose work , was of chief importance to tho Army dur- ■ ing a century and a half (writes a special correspondent of tho London "Observer"). '. Its fame .has passed, and most of the Jew. of us who know tho place, know it only as the centre of some wonderful shooting country. And yet here in Brandon is still carried on. the trade which made it famous long ago, a trade which is one of the oldest in the world.- I have been spending an afternoon watching flint-khappers at work. • .There were, two of them,' and they sat ' in a little shed in a pleasant garden. One, whoso left thigh was thickly padded with leather, took great lumps of flint and, resting them upon his thigh, beat upon them cunningly with little hammers, so that the stone, fell apart, in little slips and slivers. Those pieces which were properly shaped for the business he dropped itno a pall, to be passed in time to his companion, Tho other sat at.a table whereon was 'fixed a tiny anvil. His tool was a kind of hammer-shaped chisel, and before him lay a pile of the "slips of ; stone? These he took one by ono and' chipped and trimmed them deftly till they became oblong, rectangular, and were fined down ■to an edge at each of the narrow ends. It sounds like a long business, but indeed it is not. <The little, tapping chisel was never still, and tho flints flew through his fingers, shaped l)j" the swift, unerring touches.

In such fashion as this, men have worked in Brandon for centuries; in very similar fashion they worked long before the dawn of history when man, having need of a knife and a spear and an arrow, found that the fine, black stone could bo fashioned to give a• cutting edue. Because of the Bpecial quality of its flint, Brandon became the home and' centre of the industry, very long ago, and Brandon flints were known, and used for winning fire in homes nil over the land. Awl while the Army carried tho flintlock it was Brandon that served the need.

The Flint-Lock Unless we happen to have special knowledge, most of us cherish the delusion that all the flintlocks in the world have gqno.'.to live in museums. 'I came hero with some siich-idea in my mind, but I know a. sreat deal better now. There are tens of thousands of them ■ at work in many distant lands. The, West Coast 'of Africa and the Hudson Bn,y territory, for instance, are steady markets for the,m, and where l they go the Erandon flints must follow. My friend, Mr. Snare, whose work I was watching, told me that he had orders on hand for over a hundred kegs—and each keg contains.sooo flints! He showed'me some of the orders.-One has been accustomed for so long to regard flint as obsolete in this connection,,yet here were twentieth-century business letters written about it. In a room at the back of his house stood a number of little • kegs, packed and ready to start to far corners of the earth, nnd in the shed the hamfhers were working with unrestirfg skill. • . There are in Brandon to-day four If.inu ilies of flint. workers carrying on the

'business. The war, of course, ninde a Weak in < f . Quite a lot was done, in the way of fitting tip tinder boxes with flint and steel-for the use of the soldiers, but , most of the workers had other business to attend to. Mr. Snare himself is over Wlj but he joined up and served for. over three years, but .now, he .and his nephew who works with him, are back at the very ancient trade which thov have inherited from tho centuries.The flint worker' becomes, it would seem, an enthusiast over his material. . "There's nothing like flint," he assured " me. "I should think it is the perfect material.'There is no grain, and you. can break it any way you like." Turning the stono on which hiß busy hammr-r was at work,' he showed how the thin strips of it could'bo cut away, in any direction. "And you dan, do anything with it," he added.

Flint Arrow-heads. The words suggested a Those spear-heads and arrow-heads, which collectors cherish, could surely be made,today ? By way of answer he_sought for a suitable splinter of stone and.began to labour before my eyes as men laboured in that dim past, about which we know so little and are compelled to guess so much.

• Outside of tli© shed and the garden, lay all this pleasant village,-.. and the Bilreets were busy, with cars taking mon heme from their day's .shooting. We were set about with the circumstance of the twentieth century—and here was being performed a task of one of the centuries which has no number iio distinguish it. The hammer was laid aside now, and he worked with.stone on stone, fashioning the head with its points and !>arb3. After that he. made me a little flint saw, thoroughly capable of tearing its way through wood, and later on lie showed me pictures of copies of all sorts of implements of the Stone Age which he has made from time to time for the furnishing of museums. "If I found myself on a desert island •without! so much .as-a knife, I don't supposo I, should "ever starve while there was anv il'infc about," he said. "Ton can make anything you want out of it." (That statement appears to be a slight exaggeration. Having seen him at work I am entirely confident that if he wantedl to make 'n 'flint railway truck, he could do it, but it is another matter for the resij of us who have neglected for so long this trade of our ancestors. I have ■been trying to coax some bits of flint into useful shapes. The adventure was painful, and tho results lacked beauty and value.) .

Craftsmen of the Stone Age, _ The chief business of the flint workers is, of course, tho manufacture of gunflints. They make them in six sizes,, the largest to fit the Dane gun, an effective kind of blnnderbuss, made largely in Birmingham for the use of tjhe Arabs, and tho smallest for rifles. In addition to this they very often make copies'' of those-ancient tools and. weapons for the museums, and mosaic work; is yet another side-lino. Tho Brandon quai-rice were exhausted some iSme ago, and. now their raw materinl comes to thorn in truck'loads from Norwich, and they get through an amazing quantity of it. But in the very best sense of She word they are craftsmen rather than manufacturers. Their trade lends them inevitably to a deal of knowledge oT geology and archaeology. And I fancy that they, as ilhey sit in 'their little sheds and set' tho splinters" flying, know, far moro' of tho life and heart of the men of the Stone Age than any of the rest of us can ever know. Their hands reach out\across the thousands of forgotten years.