Wallpaper

My father was a painter and decorator, as was his father, and, for a while my grandfather's younger brother Harry, my cousin David, and my nephew Ross. I too learned the trade. I must have started working with my father at the age of twelve or thirteen, and continued working in the summer holidays with him till I finished university. I have always appreciated the practical skills I gained confidence in through him, and his attention to detail. I shall never forget being taught how to sweep a floor properly. it took several tries and a demonstration before my floor was swept to a sufficient standard.
Decorating came into the family through desperation. It was in 1923, when my father was a year old, and my grandfather was out of work as a result of being made redundant by the Great Depression, and having spent all his savings in paying rent to his own father, that my grandfather started knocking on doors in Moss Side and Hulme asking the occupiers if he could whitewash their cellars. it was thus that his business started and it grew. He too paid attention to detail and cared for his customers as my father did, and like my father he loved his work. Unlike me both my grandfather and father lived to work, whereas I worked to live, and engage in the activities that were my passion.  After his retirement to Devon my grandfather's greatest pleasure was to return to Manchester to work with my father. my father continued working well into his eighties. He decorated my enormous staircase single-handed when 82 years old.
I grew up in a household where we learnt early about paint and wallpaper. There was a room in the attic complete filled from ceiling to floor to hold stocks of wallpaper - it was known as the Wallpaper Attic. It also had a supply of paintbrushes. In the Paint Cellar, excavated under the house by my grandfather in the 1940s, there were further racks at the far end filled with wallpapers, but also housing cans of pigment and linseed oil, and a crate of sawn volcanic pumice stone for rubbing down enamelled woodwork. At the near end of the Paint Cellar cans of paint were stood and brushes standing in water to prevent the paint drying. The door did have a lock but we didn't use a key: if one slipped one's hand over the top of the door one could reach the handle to open it. At a point facing the door behind the cans of paint it was possible to enter the main house through a secret opening in the floor where the floorboards were cut. This was our salvation when we had no front door key and had been locked out of the house.
A strange but memorable and exciting treat when children was provided when my father would bring home a new wallpaper pattern book from Painters' Supply, the wholesale supply of which my grandfather had been a shareholder. In those days my father would take these pattern books to a customer so that they could choose their wallpaper. I remember names such as Walpamur, Sandersons, Shand Kydd, and John Lines. We would turn the pages and look and feel the papers. Eventually many of these papers would be used for wrapping gifts, but especially for covering our school text books and exercise books. We rarely used brown paper for this purpose.
A special day came in about 1960 when my father brought home a new pattern book containing the newly reissued papers of William Morris, and I was captivated, even going to the showrooms in central Manchester and asking for samples that I treasured. Like a printed paper in an eighteenth-century book these papers had a texture, you could feel the slight thickness of the ink, appreciate the rich colours, and understand from the edge of the paper the process of printing successive colours to achieve the finished result.

My father did a job for a Mr Topping in Spring Bridge Road round the corner from our home which was the first time I saw whole rolls of these William Morris wallpapers. They had to be hand trimmed on both edges, and as this particular wallpaper was printed in gold, extreme care had to be taken to keep paste off the surface. There was a small quantity of this wallpaper left at the end of the job, and at my request my father used it on an old room divider screen that my grandparents had left at Manley Road. I still have the screen, covered in the William Morris 'Indian' design in gold, a colourway I have never seen or found again.

Screen with "Indian"

I similarly fell in love with Laura Ashley wallpapers and fabrics when Brana and I set up home together in the 1980s, firstly in Bideford and then in Crediton. Culver House especially needed large quantities of wallpaper and fabric, and we bought whole rolls of fabric in the sale, and scores of rolls of wallpaper. I especially appreciated the designs based on what are called documents: fragments of wallpaper or fabric that survive from the past.
However, I did indulge my passion for William Morris in Culver House, so that the drawing room was papered completely with a William Morris wallpaper.

"Bird and Anemone"

I am fearless in my love of wallpaper, enjoying rich patterns and colours when Brana would prefer the magnolia with which she grew up, but she has been tolerant of my passions. It has been me who has sewn the curtains we needed, but my father over twenty years generously gave of his skills and time to decorate rooms for us. I know he would love to follow his father and help me again, even though he is now 94. I have a large stock that I have built up over the past fifteen years of wallpapers by William Morris and others, such as Cole and Sons and Watts and Co, all special papers that give me pleasure to look at and appreciate.

"Seaweed"

"Brocade"

My father and grandfather both kept good records, detailing each job, with the customer's name, the work done and the materials used. Many of the customers' names I recognise. Some I knew from working in their homes, many I knew from answering the telephone for my father, or from hearing him talk about them. Some I never knew but stories about them live on, so that I only have to propose a name to my father and memories come flooding back, both for him and for me.