What is a twybill? If you know the answer then you may well have been talking to John and David Paine, who have one. It’s a wooden handled tool with a metal cross-bar, one end of which is like a crochet hook and the other like a very narrow axe-head. Apparently it was used for making sheep fencing, although exactly how remains a mystery known only to The Twins (which they are). And they are also among the last practitioners of highly skilled manual woodland crafts, crafts that have evolved over millenia.
John and David Paine were 80 on 3 January. They still work at the woodyard on Peasmarsh Road, six days a week, where they have worked since 1958, first for their father William, then for themselves. They grew up in what was the Old Tollhouse on that site – no electricity until 1970, no mains water, just a well in the yard. “When it froze you froze,” says David. William had worked all his life making palings – those narrow triangular shaped pointed posts strung with twisted wire that form pale fencing. During WW2 he continued to make them since the fencing they formed part of was used as a bed to enable heavy military machines move across soft ground. Like sand on the Normandy landing beaches.
The Twins (as they are universally known, at least in Beckley) learned their early craft from age 12 manually stripping 18-foot lengths of chestnut for 2/6d each. “We could do 100 on a good day but you knew you’d done it!” says John. They then taught themselves an ever-expanding range of manual skills with the area’s most common woodland product, coppiced chestnut. They made (and still make) garden furniture, bridges, pale fencing, woven panels, post and rail, roofing shingles, lathes and a lot more. All by hand. All using tools most of us wouldn’t recognise.
Mechanisation eventually reached the woodyard in 1979 when they bought a ramshackle piece of metal equipment which turned the palings they cut into fully fledged fences. “Mechanisation” is perhaps an ambitious word for something which was basically a long plank of wood with two metal uprights fixed with handles and eyelets at two levels. Through some inexplicable dexterity two people can turn handles and weave twisted wire around palings at regular intervals and produce a fence.
This expanded into tractors. “We’re the world experts on Fordson tractors,” says David. And that is likely to be true, since they can take one (of their six and a half examples of this mighty machine) apart with what looks like one spanner and a 2.5 inch imperial spanner. Then rebuild it.
And while not identical twins, to watch them work on tractor or shingle is to understand twinhood. They have an uncanny rhythm, some unspoken way of knowing exactly what the other’s role is in whatever they are making. Watching them work is hypnotic.
“Anyone can rebuild things. They can’t cleave wood though,” says John. This is true. Try it. Get a froe and a maul, build yourself a cleaving brake (make sure it’s for left or right-handed people), stick the pole in the brake, bang the froe in with the maul, and split the pole evenly down its entire length. It is, surprisingly, almost impossible without twenty years’ practise.
They made the oak plaster laths for London’s Globe Theatre – by hand, starting with an entire oak tree! They made the oak shingles for the roof of Salehurst Church. They made the laths for the restoration of a medieval house in Hastings. Seven miles of them! Again, by hand. You’d think with skills like that they’d be national treasures by now, and feature on The Repair Shop.
It’s not that celebrity has eluded The Twins. It’s that they have eluded celebrity. They are among the most modest, kind and generous men imaginable.
If you’re passing, give a nod of appreciation to two men who embody what is likely to be the last repository of a true art. Or buy some logs. Or a woven panel. Or a garden bench.
Image Credits: Christopher Broadbent .