The Final Chair

The Infants School has recently replaced all its old wooden chairs with folding plastic ones. The old ones stood in the school hall in great precipitous stacks of varying sizes, hard to move and not all that easy to sit on. I prefer them to the new ones, which are plastic, folding, and largely blue, but that's just me. The school sold them to parents and gave some away, and retained just one - possibly just for me to sit on when I do assembly. 

On a whim yesterday I picked it up and looked to see if it had any kind of identifying mark on it, and found the stamp 'D&H 1965' underneath the seat. This rang a tiny bell way, way off in the back of the Wycombe Museum bit of my memory - Dancer and something, was that the name of the firm? In fact, Dancer & Hearne was one of Wycombe's older furniture makers, based mainly in Penn Street, a village a couple of miles from the town itself. After World War Two it specialised more and more in contract furniture precisely for schools and other large government orders. In the late 1960s it was taken over by Parker-Knoll who found themselves in despair at the 'industrial anarchy' prevalent in D&H's chronically old-fashioned factory. Finally, in 1970, the Ministry of Education gave up ordering wooden chairs, depriving D&H of the core of its order book in a stroke, and the firm closed. 

I will be sitting on a little bit of industrial history!