The Club of Queer Crafts

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 50, 21 May 1927, Page 10

The Club of Queer Crafts

No 1. The Violin Maker

Tlie Club of Queer Crafts is *. open. Membership is limited nowadays. Bqt there are a few lonely toilers be found in this city—men who stair 1 alone in the fight of the craftsma; ! against mass production, and whoprefer the independence of their om tools and their own timetable to the imperious call of the factory whistle and the long corridor of the week lead' ing down to the cashier’s window. Consider the fiddle-maker. Hirt above the narrow street he sits bathee in sunbeams mellowed through his cobwebby window. He puffs at his pipe and scrapes fantastic shapes from his wood and anon pushing his skull-cap back from his brow, he ventilates his tolerant views on fiddles and folk. “Of course this is a hundred years behind its time —but let it remain so It’s not a trade —it’s an art and race you make it a trade it’s the end of it. I did have an apprentice once. He served his five years and then west taxi-driving. His mini wasn’t in i: S and I knew it. His life lay outside here and he would never have made violins. “You see it’s a trade that can’t be taught. If it could have been then Stradivarius’s sons would have been able to make violins. But they couldn’t approach the master. If he had had a secret he would have left it with them, but he had no secret. I hare often mystified folk by saying so. The fact was that he was an artist and just as poets and painters cannot be ' queath their art to their children, so violin makers have to learn their craft of putting personality into wood by decades of patient toil and humility o! spirit!" “It wasn’t till a few years ago that I realised that 1 knew nothing—and since then the rest has been quite clear. Stradivarius didn’t make good fiddles until he was C 5 and had nplaced the rules learned in his apprenticeship, with a striking after in- j dividuality. “I never served an apprenticeship, but I have pottered about with violins from boyhood, and now, after all these years, always learning a little more and making each fiddle a little better than the last, I suppose I am getting better prices than any maker in the world. I get £ 100 pounds for a fiddle and then I have no leisure when I <*-’ truly say, ‘Well, I’ve finished them all I can sit back.’ “No! This thing is a kind of madness. Sometimes I make fiddles all night. In my sleep time I see then. I see what lam striving for—njj * want to put as a quality in my fidd* —the end I am working for. Thau the hypnotic state that poets and artists all get. “Then I work while the spirit s on me until I get tired and my nan- 5 ache with the endless gouging, sometimes until the morning dawns agai • I have to work while I see wn» am working for. But, of course, lu among all this,” indicating the a* ll of fiddles and ’cellos, old Italianu bers mellowing in tbe sunrays, an bottles and phials and distilling on connected with the guarded secre the perfect fiddle varnish. n whole life.” . _;ii High above Swanson Street yoo find James Hewitt, maker of new® surely a welcome candidate tor Club of Queer Trades. As he sayasuits him. Up in his eerie <«. con the struggle on the street partially and tolerantly. He of it, but it is not a part oDu as he shapes and taps at hi old Italian maple 200 years apa the spring sap that once crept jt And though he knows not the gives forth he knows when me [. is there. . to “That James Hewitt be elected the club.” “All in favour . . ■ ”