APPRENTICES’ MUSEUM

Wairarapa Times-Age, 8 July 1938, Page 9

APPRENTICES’ MUSEUM

UNUSUAL FRENCH INSTITUTION. Tours possesses a unique museum, the Musee Compagnonique, devoted entirely to apprentices and their traditions. Every stonemason or carpenter or locksmith, until twenty or thirty years ago, was expected at the end of his time to produce a “masterpiece” and then set out on a “tour de France,” or journey round France. The masterpiece was to show that he had become a fully qualified workman in his trade, and the journey round France from town to, town, staying a few months in each, was to enable him to complete his technical knowledge. One often meets craftsmen well advanced in years who in their youth have made their “tour de France.” There were many ceremonies and rites connected with completion of apprenticeship, and souvenirs of these celebrations form the main part of the collection to be seen in the Apprentices’ Museum at Tours. Here are gathered together a large number of specimens of “Chefs-d’Oeuvre” or masterpieces. One of these among many is the reproduction on a small scale of a wrought-iron gate of Louis XIV style. It contains no fewer than 2,325 pieces of wrought-iron, and for its execution its maker had to make special tools which are also shown. A woodworker on completing his apprenticeship left a four-foot-high model of a Louis XVI chateau, complete in every detail, using 17,700 pieces' of wood in its making. Souvenirs of the apprentices’ “tour de France” include menus, programmes, and songs sung when the young apprentice set off on his great adventure. Almost each trade had its own songs as well as its secrets, signs by which the young apprentice could know a “true companion” when he met one. After a copious meal, the young man rose and bid everyone good-bye, except companions, whose task was to conduct him a mile or so on his journey. There they would embrace him and wave farewell as he shouldered his stick and bundle and turned his back on home to seek completer knowledge of his trade. The two who accompanied him were generally the master to whom he had been apprenticed and the head of the apprentice’s association. On the Pont du Gard, the bridge in three tiers left by the Romans, near Avignon, one can see many names and images of tools of their trade carved by stonemasons making their way round France. When the apprentice arrived in a town, he made for the home of the “apprentices’ mother," who gave him lodging, and then to the “roulcur,” or rounds-man, whose duty it was to go round the town looking for work for the new arrival.

These customs are not quite dead, for even today Tours has its “apprentices’ mother” and its “rouleur.”