 My last year at the London College of Furniture was without many of the buddies of the previous two years. My days at the Tatty Bogle drinking club waned, although I still found myself driving all over the place to find weird and wonderful timber. I was long past my term as Student Union President and as I now had a workshop, I used the College for its large machinery which could plane and trim wood in a fraction of the time that I could. Frank, the technician who ran the machine shop, a die hard Communist who would not accept any cash for doing small jobs (a five pack of cigars was his preferred tip) used to say that I should remember, as a budding capitalist, just where I got my help. (Duly noted, Frank!) At one point we brought him enough timber to make about sixty chopping blocks, which we sold to kitchen shops. (We gave Frank about five of these so he could gift them during Christmas--a holiday he purported not to believe in.) How we acquired this timber was entirely a function of the river Thames. (The exotics I searched out were too expensive to use.) We weren't far from the Isle of Dogs where a number of timber driers (kilners) were located--that is close to the docks where timber shipments arrived. They always had to test the moisture content on a piece of timber and these test pieces were usually discarded. We offered to purchase this wood but, like Frank, cigars or Christmas puddings were all they would accept. These were always short planks which made excellent chopping boards. We also retrieved timber from the river. My brother bought a grappling hook and would fish out boards from the river, most of it unusable, but occasionally retrieved a plank that was quite dramatic in grain. While I was in London, I might add, an entrepreneur decided to dig up old pilings from the river which had been in Thames mud for anywhere from one hundred to a thousand years. The wood sold like hotcakes.
The East End of London was, in the 1970's, not an easy place to make a living. The large open air markets at places like Bermondsey or Brick Lane, where you could buy for far less than in retail stores, were a necessity for making ends meet. If you kept your eyes open, you could always find people selling something for less. For example, when we were shipping stained glass to North Carolina, we found a fellow re-conditioning tea chests who sold us his containers for far less than any other shipping container we could have found. I was driving by an open yard one day when I saw a sign saying, "Teak for Sale". I went in and purchased enough timber for my final project at the London College of Furniture. Two days later, the sign was gone and the yard was empty.
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