Mervyn Walker: Profile of a 20th-century woodcutter
by Mike Batsch

Mervyn Walker is a woodcutter; always was, always will be. Seventy-five years into life’s journey and still felling trees for a living, Mervyn occupies a commanding vantage-point, from which to survey the landscape of British arboriculture across six decades.

His journey through the forests of Great Britain began in Ilkley, in the picturesque Wharfedale area of North Yorkshire, where you will still find him at home today. The local woods were Mervyn’s chosen playground from a very early age. Picture him in his element with his three young pals, a small tribe totally committed to the ideal of living in the wild “like red Indians”, as Mervyn puts it.

And so it was that trees were an ever-present feature of Mervyn’s early environment. On a certain level, these giants commanded respect but they also represented a formidable force, against which a fit young man could pit his wits and his strength. The young Walker quickly became the accomplished climber.

Not surprisingly, his first commercial enterprise was the procurement and sale of kindling for the home in return for ‘a tanner’ (six old pennies) a week. Then aged 12, he set off one Saturday afternoon armed with a billhook, a chopper and a Bushman saw. A likely looking silver birch was selected as the donor and, in the end, the whole tree was felled single-handedly, dragged home in six-foot2 lengths, logged, dried and split into kindling as required.

Thus began a lifelong dependency on trees as a means of earning a living and Mervyn was soon to be offered a job as an axe-man for Ilkley timber baron, Arthur Green. Something of a local celebrity, Green was then the biggest round-timber buyer in England and the cobbled streets of the town regularly resonated to the combined clatter of his horses’ hooves and his woodcutters’ clogs. This entrepreneur was a man, whose time had come; blessed with the natural ability to find the right timber at the right price, he further benefitted from the plight of the landed gentry forced to raise cash from their estates to pay crippling post-war death duties. Deals were sweetened with invitations to the great and the good to shoot on Green’s Denton estate - by common consent among the best stocked in the land. As Mervyn puts it in his typically spare Yorkshire way: “I think he was on a mission, old Arthur, all his life, and he sent me off on one”. The mission was to travel virtually every wooded mile of the British Isles - Green in his chauffeur-driven, yellow-and-black Bentley, Walker on public transport.

Efficiency was the watchword at Green’s and the new recruit had quickly to acquire the firm’s trade-mark skill of rounding-up trees at ground level to maximise the yield of usable timber. Green realised that, in order to perform this physically demanding task, good axe-men had to be started young, while their bodies were still supple enough to mould to the job. “I practiced until I could cut from both sides and prided myself on never wasting a shot or leaving an axe mark”, Walker recalls. Once the tree had been ‘rounded off’ with the seven-pound3 Elwell felling axe, it was the foreman and second man, who felled the tree with the cross-cut saw. The axe-man then did the ‘dressing out’, i.e. the removal of all remaining branches, on the ground and – for maximum effect – ‘polished’ unsightly knots so as to present an attractive product to the next buyer.

Working in this way, two men would typically fell 200 cubic feet a day. Mervyn’s life consisted of a seemingly endless round of long bus and train journeys, eight-hour working days spent swinging the heavy axe, evenings socialising in the nearest pub, and a few hours sleep grabbed in some anonymous lodging house or other.

Fortunately, Mr. Green knew that success depended upon the skills of his woodcutters, whom he treated well and rewarded accordingly. “If you worked for Arthur Green, you were somebody” - an opinion that Mervyn reinforces with the recollection that, in 1948, aged seventeen, he was earning £8'4 per week – as much as a top England football player. “I couldn’t spend it!

A pound bought 20 pints5 (of beer) and I couldn’t sup it!” says Mervyn, betraying the fact that the hard work was regularly offset by prodigious drinking sessions in the evening!

Mervyn’s accuracy with the axe was complemented by an unusual ability and willingness to climb trees - a bonus, which often saved his gang valuable time. The young axe-man’s skill and obvious pride in his work did not go un-rewarded and, in 1952, he was appointed the firm’s youngest – and, as it transpired, last – foreman. As such, he qualified for the additional, six-monthly cash bonuses handed out by Mr. Green himself from the ever-present roll of white, five-pound notes.

Of course, all this nostalgia over ‘the good old days’ conveniently ignores the fact that, back then, the elaborate safety measures rightly taken for granted nowadays hadn’t even been thought of. Euroarb readers will doubtless be shocked by the fact that Mervyn and his contemporaries plied their trade dressed in everyday clothing and wooden-soled leather clogs. (Mervyn, however, is characteristically dismissive of the dangers, commenting that the lack of safety tackle and procedures focussed the mind and made you extra careful.) Equipment-wise, the gang’s standard kit consisted of: the trusty Elwell purchased by each individual axe-man; a set of climbing irons; a pair of wedges; a seven-pound hammer; a six-foot (2m) cross-cut saw; a drag-saw for the biggest trees; and a hemp rope. The men carried these items around in canvas bags and took them from job to job on public transport!

In time, technology did make its mark and, of course, Mervyn experienced all the advances first hand: The Clydesdale timber horses and wagons were replaced by motor vehicles, the ‘three-legs’ hoist gave way to the Janker pole followed by the Matador, and the introduction of the first motorised saws revolutionised productivity. Momentous though this latter innovation was, it was not without its teething problems (pun intended): “Sharpening them was a real problem and you had to be mechanically minded to make the things run”, Mervyn recounts. The first batch purchased by Green’s after the war were unwieldy, two-man affairs issued to every foreman without any instructions or spare parts. It was to be 1959, when compact and reliable one-man chain saws were to come in from Scandinavia.

Terms and conditions were also to change, though initially not for the better: On taking over the business from his father in 1952, Jerry Green immediately increased the hitherto unchanged price the woodcutters paid for their axe-heads from 15 shillings6 to £1. Thankfully, 1955 marked the introduction of piece-work at Green’s, when the rate was set at ‘sixpence a cube’7. As luck would have it, Mervyn’s first job under the new regime was felling a stand of huge oaks in the grounds of Rose Castle near Carlisle in the north of England (he reckons these were planted in the 16th century by King Henry VIIIth!). When the foreman came to measure what had been felled at the end of the first day’s work, he was shocked to calculate that the lads had doubled their normal daily pay! Regrettably, as Mervyn bitterly recounts, this was deemed to be just too much good fortune for the hard-working gang to handle, and the lads were arbitrarily ‘docked’ a penny a cube.

When Mervyn Walker finally left Green’s in 1962 to start up on his own, his life changed dramatically. Most jobs were now within a 30-mile radius of Ilkley and the type of work - felling dangerous trees in municipal locations and clearing building sites - reflected the changing times. Still a healthy life-style, of course, but the thrill of roaming the wide, wild, open spaces and the pride of the skilled axe-man were gone for ever. As for Green’s… while the business survived in some shape or form until 1985, old Arthur was long gone by the time Mervyn began trading as Tree Fellas of Ilkley. Gone but certainly not forgotten by Mervyn and his contempories. The esteem, in which Mr. Green senior was held by his workers, is reflected in the shining silver salver they presented to him on his 80th birthday in 1954. And the last name inscribed on the chronological list of foremen is one Mervyn Walker.

If ever you should bump into Mervyn in the bar of the Riverside Hotel in Ilkley and you are able to tarry a while, you will quickly find that this is a man determined not to leave the unique story of his life and times untold.