HEIRS OF STONE AGE.

Sun (Christchurch), Volume VII, Issue 2126, 7 December 1920, Page 7

HEIRS OF STONE AGE.

WORK IN A GUN-FLINT FACTORY. ONE OF THE OLDEST TEADES. Here ia a village, now for sale to the highest bidder, whoso name was a household word many years ago, whose work was of chief importance to the' Army during a century and a-half. Ita fame has passed, and most of the few of us who know the place, know it only as the centre of some wonderful shooting country. And yet here in Brandon is still carried on the trade which made it famous long ago, a trade which is one of the oldest in the world. I have been spending an afternoon watching flint-knappers at work, writes a special contributor to the "Observer." There were two of them, and they sat in a little shed in a pleasant garden, One, whose' left thigh was thickly padded with leather, took great lumps of flint, and, resting them upon his thigh, beat upon them cunningly with little hammers, so that the stone fell apart in little slips and slivers. Those pieces which were properly shaped for the business he dropped into a pail, to be passed in time to his companion. The other sat at a table whereon was fixed a tiny anvil. His tool was a kind of hammer-shaped chisel, and before him lay a pile of the slips of stone. These he took one bv one and chipped and trimmed them deftly till they Decame oblong, rectangular, and were fined down to an edge at each of the narrow ends. It sounds like a long business, but indeed it is not. The little tapping chisel was never still, and the flmts flew through his fingers, shaped by thft- swift, unerring touches. •'ln such fashion as this, men have worked in Brandon for centuries: in very similar fashion <hey worked long before the dawn of history when man, haVing need of a knife and a spear and an arrow, found that the fine, black stone could be fashioned to give a cutting edge. Because of the special quality of its flint, Brandon became the home and centre of the industry, very long ago, and Brandon flints were known and used for winning fire in homes all over the land. And while the Army carried the flintlock it was Brandon that served the need. • . The Flintlock. Unless w<j happen to have special knowledge, most of us cherish the delusion that all the flintlocks in the world have gone to live in museums. I came here with some such idea in my mind, but I know a great deal better now. There are tens of thousands of them at work in many distant lands. The West Coast of Africa and the Hudson Bay Territory, for instance, are steady markets for them, and where they go the Brandon flints must follow. My friend, Mr Snare, whose work I was watching, told me that he had orders on hand for over a hundred kegs—and each keg contains 5000 flints!

He showed me some of the orders. Ono has been accustomed for so long to regard flint as obsolete in this connection, yet here were twentieth-century business letters written about it. In a room at the back of his house stood a number of little kegs, packed and ready to start to far corners of the earth, and in the shed the hammers were working with unresting skill. There are in Brandon to-day four families of flint-workers carrying on the business,. The War, of course, made a break in it. Quite a lot was done in the way of fitting up tinder boxes with flint and steel for the use of the soldiers, but most of the workers had othor business to attend to. Mr Snare himself is over 60, but he joined up and served for over three years. But now, he and his nephew, who works with him, aro back at the very ancient trade which they have inherited from the centuries, The flint-worker becomes, it would seem, an enthusiast over his material. "There's nothing like flint," he assured me. "I should think it is the perfect material. There is no grain, and you can break it any way yon like." Turning the Btone on which his busy hammer was at work, he showed how tho thin strips of it could be cut

away in any direction. "And you can do anything with it," he added. Hint Arrow-heads. The words suggested a Those spear-heads and arrow heads which collectors cherish, could surely be made to-day f By way of answer he sought for a suitable splinter of stono and began to labour before my eyes as men laboured in that dim past, about which we know so little and are compelled to guess so much. Outside of the shed and the garden lay all this pleasant village, and the streets were busy with cars taking men home from their day's shooting. We were set about with* the circumstance of the 20th century—and here was being performed a task of one of the centuries which has no number to distinguish it. The hammer was laid aside) now, and he worked with stone en stone, fashioning the head with its point and barbs. After that he made me a little flint saw, thoroughly capable of tearing its way through wood, and later on he showed me pictures of copies of all sorts of implements of the Stone Age which he has made from time to time for the furnishing of museums. "If I found myself on a desert island without so much as a knife, I don't suppose I should ever starve while there was any flint about," he said. "You can make anything you want out of it.' I (That statement appears to be a slight exaggeration. Having seen him at work I am entirely confident that if he wanted to make a flint railway truck, he could do it, but it is another matter for the rost of us who have neglected for so long this trade of our ancestors. I have been trying to coax some bits of flint into useful shapes. The adventure was painful, and the results lacked beauty and value.) Craftsmen of the Stcne Age.

The chief business pf the flint-workers is, of course, tho manufacture of gunflints. They make them in six sizes, the largest to fit tho Dano gun, an effective kind of blunderbuss, made largely in I Birmingham for the u*e of the Arabs, and the smallest for rifics. In addition to this they very often make copies of thoso ancient tools and weapons for the museums, and mosaic work is yet another side-line. Tho Brandon quarries were exhausted some time ago, and now their raw material comes to them in truck loads from Norwich, and they get through an amazing quantity of it. But in the very best sense of the word they are craftsmen rather than manufacturers. Their trade lewis them inevitably to a deal of knowledge of geology and archaeology. And I fancythat they, as they sit in their little sheds and set the splinters flying, know far more of tho life and heart of the men of the Stone Age than any of tha rest of us can ever know. Their hands reach out across the thousands of forgotten years,