Sep 3, 2026 · 1 hr 7 min · 10 segments
Bill and Alison Lloyd are truly legendary in Cumbria. Perhaps best known for their musical ability as folk performers on the festival circuit and with their studio and recording business but also well…
Well, you've more than kept in touch with it, haven't you? Because you have an apprentice now, don't you? And you've kept in touch with apprentices and training, which I think is fascinating for...
you? Yeah, well, when I was working in the wood, I worked with a man called Bill Hogarth, who was the last of the coppice workers.
and various other places and when my dad Walter moved up from Lancashire where he'd been farming with a horse-drawn living wagon and started off running Project Phoenix which was the charcoal project he met up with Bill Hogarth and they worked together quite a bit and my dad lived in the woods he lived in a wagon or in a tent in the woods for the last 20 years of his life more or less And when Bill Hogarth died, it was realised that he had very unique skills, and he was the last of the coppice workers, really.
birch besoms, he produced hazel hurdles, he produced oak for oak bark tanning, he used oak for rustic peeled oak poles, many small products, tent pegs, all sorts of small things and in fact one of the first things that we did at the Woodmanship Trust and Walter was involved with this was we did a six-month trial in a coppice producing as many products as we possibly could and then doing a time and motion of how long it took to produce those products and what the market value of them was.
And he's written a book about... um, hazel called the useful hazel and another one about rope.
They haven't seen the light of day since my dad died but they're going to come out again.
Anyway, after Bill Hogarth died, a group got together and they established the Bill Hogarth Memorial Apprenticeship Trust.
And they raised funds to pay an apprentice over a three-year apprenticeship scheme, find a sponsor who was working in these craft skills, and the apprenticeship would learn the whole range of Bill Hogarth skills in small woodland.
Because the furnace woodland... was very unusual it's a very heavily wooded area of the country and there are a number of reasons for that one of the primary reasons was it was the first industrial iron smelting part of the country and to smelt iron you needed vast quantities of charcoal and the charcoal was produced by coppice so the on basically a seven year rotation you'd cut every seven years and the stools would keep growing and it would produce these high volumes of oak and alder which made prime charcoal wood and then that for six, eight months they'd fill the stores with charcoal wood down at Backborough which is one of the biggest industrial centres in the country in the late 18th century and they'd fill it with charcoal then they smelt for a few months and then they'd start it all over again so there's this huge area of unmanaged coppice And these apprentices would be trained to produce all these products that we described in the microeconomics.
Charcoal was very popular, hazel hurdles, cart mill races still used birch besoms, besom brooms.
And in the early days, it was very hard for apprentices to find anywhere to live because they were living on a very low income.
And at one point we had four apprentices living there in bender tents and caravans and... all sorts of different structures.
Well, you've more than kept in touch with it, haven't you? Because you have an apprentice now, don't you? And you've kept in touch with apprentices and training, which I think is fascinating for...
you? Yeah, well, when I was working in the wood, I worked with a man called Bill Hogarth, who was the last of the coppice workers.
and various other places and when my dad Walter moved up from Lancashire where he'd been farming with a horse-drawn living wagon and started off running Project Phoenix which was the charcoal project he met up with Bill Hogarth and they worked together quite a bit and my dad lived in the woods he lived in a wagon or in a tent in the woods for the last 20 years of his life more or less And when Bill Hogarth died, it was realised that he had very unique skills, and he was the last of the coppice workers, really.
birch besoms, he produced hazel hurdles, he produced oak for oak bark tanning, he used oak for rustic peeled oak poles, many small products, tent pegs, all sorts of small things and in fact one of the first things that we did at the Woodmanship Trust and Walter was involved with this was we did a six-month trial in a coppice producing as many products as we possibly could and then doing a time and motion of how long it took to produce those products and what the market value of them was.
And he's written a book about... um, hazel called the useful hazel and another one about rope.
They haven't seen the light of day since my dad died but they're going to come out again.
Anyway, after Bill Hogarth died, a group got together and they established the Bill Hogarth Memorial Apprenticeship Trust.
And they raised funds to pay an apprentice over a three-year apprenticeship scheme, find a sponsor who was working in these craft skills, and the apprenticeship would learn the whole range of Bill Hogarth skills in small woodland.
Because the furnace woodland... was very unusual it's a very heavily wooded area of the country and there are a number of reasons for that one of the primary reasons was it was the first industrial iron smelting part of the country and to smelt iron you needed vast quantities of charcoal and the charcoal was produced by coppice so the on basically a seven year rotation you'd cut every seven years and the stools would keep growing and it would produce these high volumes of oak and alder which made prime charcoal wood and then that for six, eight months they'd fill the stores with charcoal wood down at Backborough which is one of the biggest industrial centres in the country in the late 18th century and they'd fill it with charcoal then they smelt for a few months and then they'd start it all over again so there's this huge area of unmanaged coppice And these apprentices would be trained to produce all these products that we described in the microeconomics.
Charcoal was very popular, hazel hurdles, cart mill races still used birch besoms, besom brooms.
And in the early days, it was very hard for apprentices to find anywhere to live because they were living on a very low income.
And at one point we had four apprentices living there in bender tents and caravans and... all sorts of different structures.
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