John Evitt Sheet Metal Works

John Evitt / There are numerous wall pieces about this situation – more than seen here and also four books/legers, each dealing with different aspects of the workshop: Furnishings – Jobs – Record of My Visits – Introduction and History.

The Evitt metalworking business began life in the early part of the industrial revolution – one of a forest of small and large businesses somewhere near the epicentre of world trade at that time. They were a small cog within an intense dynamic of working life –hundreds of firms competing and trying to keep pace with new technologies –exploiting opportunities involving mass production and distribution afforded by their proximity to the river Thames.

Among them were many tea merchants, brewers, both beer and vinegar, furnishers, sweetmakers, jam factories, granaries, biscuit makers and so on.

Some flourished and became Typhoo and Brooke Bond, others were swallowed up. The metalworks didn’t expand, or at least not in any significant way, but its particular quality was a quiet implicit persistence just to be.

Empires rose and fell during the lifetime of this little firm which witnessed and survived – the Crimean and the Boer as well as the First and Second World Wars – Bill Sykes and a myriad of other characters real and fictional engaged in nefarious enterprise within its compass.

When I came to the situation, work there was not plentiful, but it ticked over. And this was always possible as long as there were still enough satellite industries still remaining in the area. This was January 1975 and I was privileged to have met both of the men who kept the place going and plied their engineering skills and intelligence within its grimy walls and shadowy atmosphere.

At this point I need to state my own motivations for observing with such scrutiny the very particular qualities this workshop possessed.

Barrow-in-Furness, the town I was born in, was founded on heavy industry – iron, steel, and shipbuilding. I went to Manchester Art College after school but was forced to leave when Barrow local council refused to offer me a grant because I was not studying engineering. The destiny I was determined to avoid was the Shipyard but due to circumstance I did spend time in there as a coppersmith’s mate on nuclear submarines, frigates and destroyers and worked on H.M.S. Sheffield the type 42 destroyer which was hit by an exocet missile and sunk during the Falklands war. I also worked in the steelworks as a tongsman pulling white hot billets of metal from a furnace and squeezing them through rollers by hand to fashion them into shapes suitable for making fencing posts, barrel hoops and machetes which would be used for cutting sugar cane in the West Indies.

Both of these situations had strong Dickensian aspects - in the steelworks we were supposed to drink small bottles of lime juice every twenty minutes to replace the salts lost by your body through sweating so much. My hands would be covered in blisters before they toughened up – our clothes were ragged and burnt, and flesh on arms and legs bore evidence of the job. I actually liked it there because everyone mucked in and had a pride in their very necessary dexterity in handling the fierce materials and a pride in being able to cope with the elemental inferno like atmosphere. It wasn’t a situation one forgot in a hurry.

It took me a long time trawling London to find a place that contained similar aspects, physicality, and ethics.

Charles Rose (Chas) had been there since he was 14 years old and the last John Evitt left the business to him when he died – Joseph Underwood (Joe) had also worked there for many years – 25 and a bit.

There are perhaps not as many photographs of the people as I would have liked. That was partly through a respect for their wishes not to be gawped at and partly because of my own agenda which was about the place itself and the objects in it – tools, devices, surfaces and materials which had all seen empires fall and remained as symbols of the times the workshop had lived through – and symbols and reminders of ALL the people who had worked there – some who went off to wars and did not return.

People whos working lives were fused into the building and its contents – hands pressed into the toughness of the material. Souls and personalities, efforts and skills, pressed into the handles of tongs, and hammers or vice jaws, or the workbench – each bit of the process etched into the fabric of the place and the objects it contains. A testament to the toughness of the people and the circumstance. Also to all people who work or have worked in challenging and mucky environments.

ART – art with a narrative and a function.

As well as the hundreds of images in four books there are, or were, many many wall pieces using a mixture of photographs, drawings and materials from or related to the place… much of the substance of this work has still never been shown in any complete form.