Lectures and Talks
If you require a speaker for a local history society, or a voluntary group such as Round Table, Rotary Club, Lions or WI then as long as it is within a reasonable distance (approx 25 miles +/-) of Warminster (BA12OEH) - (e.g. Yeovil, Radstock, Bath, Chippenham, Devizes, Andover, Salisbury, Blandford Forum, Shaftesbury) then I may be available. The length and subject matter can be varied to suit your requirements and any fee would be negotiable, but as a minimum travel expenses would need to be met.
I would also be available for presentations to commercial, educational or scientific bodies (at an appropriate fee).
Below is a Power Point presentation used at the Warminster Local History Society in 2011. If you download this for your own use, please acknowledge me as the author if used for any public display.
Page 35 contains an embedded video of the Thomas Firth works at Clay Wheel in Sheffield c 1942. Page 39 shows as a blank page - keep going - it finishes at page 61.
Billhooks Presentation 1.pptx
Microsoft Power Point presentation [8.7 MB]
This presentation was made on behalf of TATHS for a presentation to a group of museum curators from SHCG (Social History Curators Group) on Tool Identification in Bristol on 4th March 2013.
TATHS Old Tools.pptx
Microsoft Power Point presentation [6.8 MB]
Not the best of pictures, but the only rally I managed in 2012 - the biennial Steam Fair at Berwick St John (near Shaftesbury in Dorset), held in early September.
The spring of 2014 saw the publication of Volume 16 of the Tools and Trades History Society Journal. Pages 91 to 102 are a paper on the 'Vine pruning and other billhooks from Southern Italy and Sicily' - a pre-publication draft can be found on this site here...
TATHS is an charitable status society that was founded in 1983 to further the knowledge and understanding of hand tools and the trades and people that used them. If you are not already a member please join here...
On 30th September 2014 I will be one of the speakers at a conference to be held at the Weald and Downland Museum to celebrate the 50th anniversary of W L (Bill) Goodman's book 'The History of Woodworking Tools'. After the conference I will post the Powerpoint presentation on the 'History of Edge Tool Making' on this page.
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