Fretwork
I was named after the four surnames of my four grandparents, all descended from Scottish clans. My first Christian name, Gordon, was to honour my maternal grandfather Robert James Gordon. He was the son and grandson of Scots shepherds who lived and worked in the area of Donnybrook north of Melbourne. A local cemetery there marks the burial site of scores of my ancestors. I have guessed that the early arrivals in Victoria from Scotland came about as a result of the shameful enclosures in the highlands.
He appeared as a very old man when I knew him in the first decade of my life, but I guess he was no older than I am now. He always wore a waistcoat and smoked a pipe constantly. He had six children, my mother and her brothers and sisters.
I discovered long after my grandfather and grandmother were dead that he had married by grandmother (surnamed Keith, hence my second Christian name) after she had been turned out of her family home because she was pregnant with another man’s child. The first child was given the surname of my grandfather. My opinion of my grandfather went up at that news. The news was a bombshell to my mother and her siblings when they all found out late in their lives, but on reflection, they always said their eldest brother was different from every other member of the family.
They were a very poor family, living in an extremely small wooden workman’s cottage with only two bedrooms for eight family members. Later, my wife and I were to live in that cottage when we were first married and equally as poor. However, near us lived our most famous resident, Dame Edna Everidge, with her front garden full of gladioli. There were no gladioli in my grandparents’ little garden, only potatoes, tomatoes, onions, cabbage and other ingredients in the daily soup and meal.
All of their lives this family had little money after rent, and had no outings, no car, no good clothes and no recreation or sport for which they had to pay. Every night he would sit at the kitchen table with large squares of three ply, once the sides of boxes of tea donated to him from the local grocer. On these he drew intricate patterns, scenes, designs, which he then slowly cut out with a handsaw with a fine blade. These were glued together to formed dozens of scenes, photo frames, pipe racks, ornamental clocks, holders of small vases, racks for spoons and kitchen utensils. These covered all walls with triangular shelves in every corner of the rooms. This was called fretwork.
My grandfather worked on the Victorian Railways, and I always imagined he was a train driver of a magnificent steam train, an idea gathered from some smoking steam trains cut out from wood, decorating their walls. I was at University when my mother told me he had been a railway ganger all his life, working with pick and barrow placing ballast under the tracks. No wonder he never answered my childhood requests to be allowed to travel in the driver’s cabin of one of his steam trains.
But he was always proud and thankful that during the depression he was always employed and able to keep his large family without going on the dole or relying on ‘susso’. In thankfulness to God for this employment, he cut a magnificent fretwork piece a metre high, and half a metre wide, consisting of over six hundred pieces, and including in separate letters, the entire Lord’s Prayer.
Why this piece of religious truth? They weren’t Christians, as I said to my grandmother once. She was horrified. Of course they were Christians, it was just that they did not ever go to Church. This was because he did not have a suit and she did not have a hat! So he had made two copies of the Lord’s prayer in thankfulness to God that he had been able to support his family throughout the depression without ever being unemployed.
Ironically, that eldest child, Harold Keith Gordon after such an uncertain start, went to work as a labourer in an orchard. The orchardist was a Methodist layman and encouraged the lad to attend his church, then to study at night and eventually to pass his entrance to Melbourne University where he graduated as the first member of our family ever to do so in history. He graduated and was ordained, also as a Methodist minister, and later served heroically through Japanese occupied Papua New Guinea as head of the Methodist church there.
Fretwork is the cutting of an intricate design, mostly in thin wood, but can be done on anything that can be cut. Fretwork is an interlaced decorative design that is either carved in low relief on a solid background, or cut out with a fretsaw, jigsaw or scroll saw. Fretwork is used to adorn furniture, musical instruments or just for decoration. Much fretwork has a gothic or oriental influence and has been used as a decorative element in Chippendale and Chippendale-style furnishings. The thin-bladed fret saw is essential for the ornamental woodwork, which is extremely elaborate. Some of the lattice and ornamental designs made of wood decorating Victorian era houses are simply large-scale fretwork.
The art of fretwork began more than 3000 years ago with fretted inlays on furniture in Egypt. It became popular in North America and Europe from the mid 1800’s until the mid twentieth century. Fretwork of the 1800’s and early 1900’s was done with hand fretsaws or foot-powered scroll saws. The evolution of the scroll saw is linked to the rise in popularity of fretwork. Fretwork-like decorations on early Egyptian, Greek, and Roman furniture, were probably carved or cut with a knife. It wasn’t possible to saw delicate wooden shapes until the late 1500’s, when a German craftsman (possibly a clock maker) devised a method for making fine, narrow blades. By the 1860’s, the first mechanical fret saws – called scroll saws – began to appear in the United States. And so a great art form and hobby were born. Today, there are over fifty models of scroll saws available with many options.
What are the sizes of the blades? They start smaller than a needle then are enlarged from that. The more detailed and intricate the pattern, coupled with the thickness of the wood, is what determines the size of the blade you want to use. The decorated cut-out nature of this craft made for delicate items. A common fretwork item such as a clock case might lack a firm structural framework and strong joinery for the decorated panels, making the clock case easy to damage. The lacy decorations of fretwork, often very detailed and finely cut, test the limits of the wood itself. As such, surviving fretwork items often have areas of loss.
When my grandfather died, I was given his fret saw, some remaining blades and a small hand drill with bits less than one eighth of an inch in size. The drill is needed to drill holes in the centres of intricate work and in the centre of letters through which the thin blade is passed to be fitted to the saw frame so the inside cuts can be made. For some years, I also made pieces of fretwork based on designs in woodworking magazines.
Fretwork is included in The Macquarie Chairs, two of the most important pieces of furniture in Australian history. Towards the end of his governorship in New South Wales Lachlan Macquarie commissioned two convict artisans, William Temple and John Webster, to make him two large ornamental chairs. These chairs appear to have been designed for matters of state rather than personal comfort, and are referred to in the inventory of the contents of the drawing room of Government House, Sydney drawn up by Macquarie’s aide-de-camp, Henry Colden Antill, in March 1821. The fretwork includes his family coat of arms. One of these chairs is now the property of Macquarie University and is used by the Chancellor at every graduation. The other is in the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney.
One Sydney house is famously decorated with fretwork. The Chalet (1867), formerly The Nora Heysen Studio, and is found at 2 Yerton Avenue, Hunters Hill. “The Chalet” is a very rare and distinctive example of an early prefabricated timber Swiss cottage in Australia. Dating from 1855, the house was imported from Hamburg, Germany, by Swiss emigre, Leonardo Etienne Bordier, and erected by indentured German tradesmen at Hunters’ Hill, an early French settlement of Sydney.
The Chalet is distinctive and rare in Australia as a fine, highly crafted example of a picturesque and authentic Swiss, or possibly Bavarian, timber cottage from the Victorian period. The Swiss cottage is complete with its original collection of fine, decorative details, such as moulded timber decorations, joinery and doors, door hardware, fixtures and fittings, all of a distinctive French style, which is very rare for Australia. The Chalet demonstrates the early use of imported prefabricated buildings to address the housing shortage due to the 1850s gold rush.
The property is also significant for its association with artist Nora Heysen, who lived and worked at The Chalet from 1954 until her death in 2003. Nora Heysen (1911-2003) is recognised as one of Australia’s foremost female painters and was the first woman war artist in World War II and the first female recipient of the coveted Archibald Prize in 1938 at the age of 27 years.
Fretwork items, as most folk art items, are often functional and ornamental. The labour intensive and obsessive nature of this craft, and the time invested in creating a highly decorated item, is a most desirable trait of fretwork. The more “over the top” the decoration is the better. Many of the surviving fretwork clock cases have a “Gothic” architectural appeal. I have seen such clocks standing more than a metre high.
The most famous fretworkers in the USA, the Bily Brothers farmed the family farm near Spillville, Iowa and around 1913 they started crafting clock cases during idle time. Over several decades they fashioned an assortment of forty amazing folk art automations of time, of music and of movement in the fretwork style. The brothers were bachelors, educated to the 4th grade level, and started their hobby work when Frank was in his late 20s and Joseph in his early 30s. Though isolated geographically, the “mail order” of woodworking catalogs and subscriptions to craft magazines allowed the brothers access to scrollwork patterns, specialized lumber, and clock movements for their creations. The Bily brothers fashioned a foot-operated scroll saw by using a treadle sewing machine base to drive the saw blade. Their fretwork clock cases illustrate the use of commercial patterns, patterns of their own design and a variety of carved details and decorations.
Joseph and Frank’s brother John was severely disabled, and these folk art wonders were fashioned, in part, for John’s enjoyment. The brothers are remembered as shy and retiring by nature but they became famous through their craft. As word spread of the wonders to be seen at the Bily farm, the clocks were displayed in an out-building with visits of upwards of 40,000 people. Collector Henry Ford offered the brothers a million dollars for a single clock, the clock to be exhibited at Ford’s new museum in Dearborn, Michigan. Rather, in 1946 the Bily brothers gave their collection to their community of Spillville and The Bily Clock Museum was founded and remains in operation to this day.
In the small western NSW village of Lockhart NSW, I saw remarkable examples of fretwork, especially large clocks in the Brookong Nook Craft Shop. The crafts are varied including beautiful needle work, talented artists, a lovely baby section, fretwork clocks, cushions, wonderful jams and sauces, honey, farm eggs, and vegetables, just to mention a few.
On the wall of our dining room hangs a magnificent piece of fretwork, the large Lord’s Prayer with every one of the six hundred cut parts in perfect condition. It evokes questions from guests, but it reminds me of my grandfather’s thankfulness that he was employed throughout this life and able to bring up his family, even though poor, including my mother.
Rev The Hon. Dr Gordon Moyes, A.C., M.L.C.