A Stoneworker's Story
Purbeck Shop. By Eric Benfield. (Cambridge University Press I2S. 6d.) THE Cambridge University Press has a happy knack of dis- covering the articulate country craftsman. To those two admirable biographies, The Wheelwright's Shop and The Village Carpenter, sturdy and seasoned as the timbers they described, is now added Mr. Benfield's short but sound history of Purbeck Isle, its marble, and the men who quarried it. Purbeck stone, less famous than Portland but, with subtle differences, very closely resembling it, is no longer quarried on a large scale ; the Victorians for some reason regarded it with prejudice, and what Professor A. E. Richardson calls in his introduction "architects (who) can produce new fashions like conjurers out of a bag" appear to have little use for it. Westminster Abbey, however. contains Purbeck ; Salisbury, Exeter, Chichester and Winchester all contain "examples of its delicate workings "; it graces the Galilee Porch at Ely ; from the thirteenth to the middle fourteenth century it added distinction to many aspects of interior ecclesiastical architecture. Since then Portland has for general use superseded Purbeck ; yet -" there is more 'Portland' stone in Purbeck than in Portland itself," Mr. Benfield says. "Bed for bed the seams are the same, and side by side in a building only an expert could tell one from the other, but for some reason stone that is dug in Portland is far kindet to work." Out of this slight unkinciliness of character, the tendency for the stone to bruise under the careless chisel, have arisen prejudices that the present age of concrete and architectural sloppiness has only deepened. The results are the silent quarries on Purbeck Isle and the empty quays of Swanage Bay. All histories of dying or forgotten crafts have about them a touch of sadness, and it is very true of Mr. Benfield's bock Behind Purbeck stone stands what is left of a race of Purbeck men: craftsmen of splendid independence who sang at their work, who had their own Stoneworkers Company, with sternly guarded traditions and privileges, meetings for the hammering out of disputes and an annual beer-and-skittles each Shrove Tuesday at the town hall of Corfe Castle. It is a hard and significant commentary on our time that these men now live by quarrying stone not for cathedral interiors or the staircases of public buildings or even for the gutters of by-passes, but for ornamental bird-baths sold on a basis of a shilling -an inch. These men, as much as the stone itself, form the backbone of Mr. Benfield s excellent little book, and "the world," as he remarks, "will be the loser when the Purbeck quarryman no longer stands in a direct line with those first men who won their Charter."
H. E. BATES.
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