Turning Eighty Five.
When John Hayes asked if he could show some wood turning at Baile na Cille church, I was slow to respond thinking how would a few small wooden objects sit happily in such a large space. Louise Scullion then approached me suggesting a way forward, letting me know that there would be Eighty Five objects to celebrate his Eighty Fifth birthday.
The resulting exhibition was beyond my expectations, and illustrated the great versitility of Baile na Cille church to exhibit work from creatives of all kinds.
It also showed how visitors are keen to respond to great exhibitions with over 9 pages of positive comments in the Hulabhaig visitor book.
With special thanks to Louise Scullion for the text, posters and interpretaion boards and Matthew Dalziel for the photographs.
Wood Turning at Baile na Cille --->
John Hayes
John Hayes was born in 1938 in Grappenhall, Cheshire. His father was a public works contractor and architect. His maternal grandmother was an Urquhart from the Black Isle. Growing up in the make-do-and-mend war and post war years, he was always practical and independent. Aged 10, inspired by Thor Heyerdahl’s account of the Kon Tiki expedition, John built his own raft, lashing some planks onto some empty oil drums and ‘borrowing’ the linen prop and a tablecloth for mast and sail. It worked. Three years later his father gave him a small sailing dinghy and he taught himself to sail by trial and error, reading Arthur Ransome’s ‘Swallows and Amazons’ books and a ‘Teach Yourself Sailing’ handbook. His lifelong love of the sea and of boats and sailing was established.
The academic side of school never appealed to John, he was more interested in the practical, but things had to look right, good design mattered. At 14 he was asked to make a coat peg in the woodwork class. John wanted his to be an interesting shape and started to carve into it. The woodwork teacher told him he was nothing but a ‘wood butcher’, he has been happy butchering wood ever since.
School was followed by farm work, then two years of Agricultural College and a few more years on farms. Then work in the building trade as both builder and carpenter. He inherited his father’s interest in architecture. In his spare time, he went rally driving.
Wood Turning at Baile na Cille --->
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In 1973 he took a career break and found a job as a draughtsman on the archaeological dig on the Roman remains at Colchester. There he met his future wife, Liz. At the end of the season, she went on to work for one of the London violin dealers and restorers and before long the boss had persuaded John to join the staff too. There he learnt more woodworking skills, how to repair and restore violin bows.
Within a year, he and Liz had bought a small boat and sailed her down the Thames then round the Essex coast and up the river Crouch. Now weekends were spent exploring the Essex rivers and making friends among boat owners and barge skippers, coming back to London on a Sunday evening with an outboard engine, or a pair of oars and two cats in a cat basket. Inevitably the next move was to Burnham-on-Crouch and work in a boat yard.
Over the next eight years John worked on boats made of wood, of fibreglass and a 60’ aluminium ketch. There were older men at the yard nearing their retirement, they would talk about ‘sweet curves’, i.e. getting good flowing lines on the boat. This concept has had a great influence on John’s wood turning.
After eight happy years of sailing and boat building, the boat yard was sold. The land it stood on was ‘developed’ for expensive riverside apartments. John, Liz and their young daughter Judi moved to a cottage with an acre of neglected land in the village of Kenninghall in Norfolk, Liz’s home county.
Wood Turning at Baile na Cille --->
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In a small friendly village, a person with good practical skills will not be looking for work for long and John was soon fitting kitchens for a local firm. After a few years he decided to become self-employed so he could design and build individual kitchen units and furniture that would match the character of the old Norfolk houses. He also bought a lathe to make table and chair legs and started to turn bowls and other things for his own interest, learning by experimenting as he has always done. A local timber yard and another in Norwich often had small pieces of interesting wood he could use and there was always the odd chunk of hawthorn, sycamore or ash that had been cut out of the field hedges. Although Kenninghall was twenty miles from the sea, there was the occasional trip on the Broads, but the old wooden boat that had come up with them from Essex, stayed in the garden and his daughter and her friends played ‘pirates’ and flew the Jolly Roger on it.
In 1997 a neighbour in the village who had inherited a small house on Lewis asked if John would come up to the island to fix the roof. He did. It rained hard every day. John’s wife Liz really liked Lewis; she gave him a sailing chart of the area for Christmas. They came up again the next June to do more work on the same house and arranged to buy their present home in Carishader, moving up in September.
Other houses they had bought had all needed some work. This one required complete renovation. With John’s know-how and skills, they were able to do it all within eighteen months and have now lived here very happily for twenty-five years.
During that time, John worked on boats, both repairing and sailing them. Recently he bought a new lathe and started to seriously develop his wood tuning skills. The craft has a long history, people have used wooden vessels to drink from and eat off for hundreds if not thousands of years. John decided to celebrate his 85 years by turning 85 different pieces – the count at the time of writing is coming up to 130 and there are still new techniques he wants to try.
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