Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 119
The end of an era -
bricklayers and their
labourers stand in front
of recently completed
gauged arches in
Ashford (Kent), 1913.
(Courtesy of Richard
Filmer)
to continue the high quality of work. So it was after the Great War. It was
impossible to fill, and quickly educate and train to the same standards, crafts-
men to fill the huge void with so few young men remaining alive or unin-
jured. In the main, only the youngest apprentice bricklayers and their senior
craftsmen - too old to fight - were left within the craft to learn from, and only
a select few of the latter possessed the high-level skills, knowledge, and experi-
ence of quality gauged work. This was too great a blow for a bricklaying craft
that, particularly in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, had invested so
much in that fallen generation. It never recovered.
To give clarity to this loss, the census of 1911 gives 1,140,000 males as
employed in building and construction. By 1921 this figure had dropped to
894,000 (Chadwick-Healey, 1971). Lloyd (1925, 27) gives union figures as '…
there are now 36,000 bricklayers, as compared with 92,000 before the war…'.
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