by Chris Harris
I bought the most amazing round, huge, beautiful, high-quality Victorian mahogany dining table on Thursday at Ford Airfield Market. To be honest, I only bought it because it was an absolute bargain, and I try not to buy such large pieces of furniture these days. It had started to rain, so I bought it from a house clearance dealer who turned up with a large van full of furniture and other goods from a clearance. Dealers like this need to sell as much as they can to empty the van and make room for the next job, so sometimes you can buy things for extraordinary prices. This table cost me just £20.
It was only when I started moving onto the wheels that I realised quite what I had bought. As I lifted it onto them, it was noticeably and incredibly heavy, and when we eventually tipped it onto its side it became apparent that underneath were all the signs that this had once been an unimaginably large extending dining table. The two remaining semi-circular leaves are made from some of the most extraordinarily thick mahogany I have seen in a long time. There were almost certainly four additional centre leaves, which have unfortunately disappeared somewhere during the table’s long life. Had those leaves remained with it, I suspect the table could easily have been worth £2,500 to £3,000, perhaps more, and possibly as much as £5,000 depending on its exact age and maker.
As beautiful as the mahogany itself is, for me the most interesting part of the table is actually underneath it. Anyone interested in how things work can see immediately that this is not simply a piece of furniture but a properly engineered dining table, constructed perhaps 150 years ago or more. Running along either side underneath are rows and rows of lengths of oak forming the extending mechanism, allowing the table to pull apart and accommodate the additional leaves. When fully extended, two additional sets of legs hidden within the table would drop down to support the enormous extra weight. Even in its present form, the table top alone probably weighs in excess of 100 kilograms, and each additional mahogany leaf might have weighed another 15 to 20 kilograms. Fully extended and complete, the whole top could easily have weighed well over 150 kilograms, roughly the combined weight of two people.
What I particularly enjoy is that the part of the table which would originally have been completely hidden from view is, to many people now, one of its most fascinating features. There was no sense that because something could not be seen it could therefore be made cheaply. The internal structures are made from substantial pieces of solid oak. Even the parts intended never to be noticed were built properly, and everything about the construction gives an impression of exceptional quality. You look underneath and immediately understand that this was a serious piece of furniture made to last.
There is also something fascinating about imagining the people who made it. Depending on the exact date, top craftsmen in the mid nineteenth century were standing around these very pieces of timber, measuring, cutting and fitting everything together in a furniture workshop that would have looked completely different from one today. The tools and machinery available to them would have been primitive by modern standards, and they would have depended much more on the skill and judgement of individual craftsmen. Of course, people still make exceptionally good furniture today, but modern makers have access to precision machinery and equipment that lets them cut and produce components with extraordinary accuracy. With a table like this, much more of the quality came directly from the people making it.
That, for me, is one of the great pleasures of old furniture. There is always far more to think about than simply how it looks or what it might be worth. You can examine the timber, the joints, the mechanisms and the wear and start thinking about how it was made, where it might have stood, how many people may have sat around it and how many different owners it may have had. In this case, the fact that the original extending leaves have disappeared is obviously unfortunate from a commercial point of view, but it almost makes the surviving engineering underneath even more interesting. What remains is a remarkable example of the thought, materials and craftsmanship that went into producing a very high-quality Victorian dining table.
