FARMERS’ CUTLASSES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 10 August 1940, Page 9

FARMERS’ CUTLASSES

ROMANCE OF TOOL TRADE. A curious type of agricultural “armament” which has never been seen on an English farm has been made in a British steel factory for well over 100 years. The implements are matchets. Used for harvesting, pruning and land clearing in tropical and sub-tropical lands, they have a warlike ancestry which provides one of the romances of the. too] trade. Some matchets are broad and flat, some narrow with curved tips, others shaped exactly like swords. Some of the blades have “blood lines,” or thin furrows, running down them. These lines are relics of the matchet’s origin as cutlasses wedded by piratical boarding pirates, and even today are sometimes used for settling disputes. Workers are very conservative about design. They will not tolerate the slightest change from the type they habitually use, and each country has its own peculiarities. The British factory makes only one “blood line” on the matchets it sends to Venezuela, but the Jamaican insists on having three lines, while the Trinidad workers will not have any lines. Handles vary from beechwood and leather to fibre and Indian buffalo horn, and brass wire bindings arc essential when selling to Brazilians, Venezuelans. Colombians. Ecuadorians and Peruvians.

Africa. Malaya, Papua. Sarawak. New Guinea, Fiji and Samoa are also big buyers of matchets from Britain, whose chief rival before the war was Germany. The two countries between them shared almost equally 75 per cent of the world market, although there were only two British factories making them. These two firms are busier than ever now that the Allied blockade prevents Germany's seaborne trade.