Once a Curator

Unbelievably it's fifteen years since I left Wycombe Museum, and a couple of years since my last visit. But I still have the habit of casting an eye over the interesting chairs I see about (the Museum's collection majored on the long-standing furniture industry in and around High Wycombe, which grew out of traditional Windsor chair-making in the area), and the positively reprehensible habit of occasionally picking them up and examining them more closely.

We have a very agreeable café in Swanvale Halt (actually we have two, with interestingly divergent personalities and identities) and I often find myself in there on a Saturday morning as I may have let slip in the past. Yesterday I noticed this little Windsor side chair:

This is a very common kind of chair, and I have one in the Rectory, although slathered in white paint rather than in its natural state. You may even have one hanging about. It has an elm seat and beech turned parts. Did it have a maker's stamp in the traditional place at the back of the seat? Indeed it did. 

Who was O.G? He would have been a small-scale craftsman assembling parts, possibly with his own workshop or renting bench space in a factory: the Museum might be able to tell me, if I asked. At any rate, his hands put this chair together. Perhaps if you've got a similar one around, you could look for a stamp too that links it directly to the soul that made it.