House of Mouse

THE ink-stained oak table, 137cm by 81cm, doesn’t look like a £2,000 table. It has lived in Leeds Girls’ High School since 1934, and is speckled with 74 years of spilt ink and scratches.

It has two octagonal legs, the size of a rugby forward’s thighs, but is solid, not spectacular. Then, you notice something crawling up the leg: a two-inch wooden mouse, carefully carved in the oak. This is why it’s a £2,000 table.

The mouse proves the table comes from Robert Thompson’s in Kilburn, near Thirsk. It gives a glimpse of the woodchip-smothered workshop and the carpenter’s chisel. It proves it was made by trained hand, not programmed machine.

Hidden yet highly-significant, it is one of the 20th Century’s great trademarks. Yet the mouse was not born in a boardroom, or out of blue-sky thinking.

It crawled out of the woodwork in about 1919. Robert Thompson, a Kilburn carpenter, was carving a cornice when a fellow carver said he was “as poor as a church mouse”.

Thompson carved a mouse, it charmed him and he stuck with it. He was humoured, he said later, by the mouse working through wood unnoticed. It matched his motto: Industry in Quiet Places.

Because Thompson, born in 1876, rejected the 20th Century’s thirst for instant, mass-production. As a young man, he served an engineer’s apprenticeship in West Yorkshire, travelling through Ripon every day, marvelling at its cathedral’s woodcarvings.

“He saw the construction of the furniture as part of the evolution of the whole thing,” says Ian Thompson Cartwright, Robert’s greatgrandson and company managing director.

“He said oak trees took 300 years to grow and his furniture would last 400 years. Also, I think if you look at modern, mass-produced furniture, what position will that be in, in 75 years?

Probably not here. “You get fine pieces of furniture that you can’t let the children use. Our furniture is very practical – the items from Leeds Girls’ High School have worn well in 70 years. That shows you the practicality of the thing.”

Robert’s career turned when he met Father Paul Nevill, a Catholic priest from Ampleforth College, near Thirsk.

Fr Paul wanted a large crucifix, but couldn’t find a carpenter with a piece of oak big enough. Robert said he had some – “I said yes without hesitation, knowing I hadn’t the oak and I didn’t know where it was coming from,” he later admitted – and his first Ampleforth assignment was complete.

The college became the House of Mouse and Robert’s reputation spread. He died in 1955 – he is buried in Kilburn – but his mouse, carved by descendants, continue to scurry to far-flung corners.

Nepal’s parliament, for example, has mouseman furniture, as does the Solomon Islands’ and Tonga’s. The mouse is trapped in other corners of the Commonwealth, from Canada to South Africa, Bahamas to Gambia. But it’s Yorkshire that dominates the Thompson inventory, from Richmond to Rotherham, Scarborough to Skipton.

Forget the white rose: in Yorkshire, the wooden mouse pops up more often. If the mouse ate, he’d have Yorkshire puddings and Wensleydale cheese; if he moved, he’d bat.

Robert’s firm is now run by different generations of Thompson men. For Ian, it was inevitable. “Since I was a small child I have been going into the workshop, so it’s almost been a matter of course,” he says. “I have got photos of me, three years old, with a mallet and chisel.

That’s how we were brought up.” There are 30 craftsmen – “We’ve had some there for 60 plus years who joined us when they were 16,” says Ian – all time-served at Kilburn.

Each craftsman’s mouse is unique, a keen eye can spot the difference. All the wood is English oak, and it is dried naturally – one year’s drying for each half-inch thickness of wood. So, a two-inch table top will take four years just to dry. It’s kinder, they reckon, than artificially “forcing” moisture out.

It’s furniture, customers say, worth waiting for. And the market keeps growing.

New furniture is sold more quickly than it’s made and the second-hand market, Ian says, is “buoyant”. Tomorrow’s sale has 86 items from Leeds Girls’ High School, who are moving premises. The chairs have £250-£300 guide prices, some tables are £2,000-£3,000. The library door frame and doors are £8,000-£12,000. Even the pen trays are £80-£120.

So what next for North Yorkshire’s big little business? “I can only say what will happen in my lifetime – what happens after is up to the next generation,” says Ian. “It’s only on loan. We’re only steering the ship.”

Would they ever leave Kilburn? “It would be so difficult to do that,” says Ian. “It would be like cutting off your right arm. Our roots are in Kilburn.

We have no wish to be bigger than we are. We don’t want to be run by someone more interested in our accounts than our furniture. Think of it from our customers’ view – if they were going to some trading estate on the outskirts of York, or Thirsk, it wouldn’t be the same.” But that doesn’t mean they don’t progress.

A visitor centre was opened in 1994 and, in 2004, reopened after a £500,000 revamp, boasting café, shop and viewing gallery.

No longer, it seems, are they as poor as church mice. “We have to keep looking forward all the time,” says Ian. “We opened the visitor centre to educate people, so they understand what we produce that much better. After all, if you have an understanding of something you appreciate it that much more.”

■ The sale of Mouseman furniture from Leeds Girls’ High School takes place tomorrow at Tennants Auctioneers, Leyburn, from 10am.

■ A new book, Mouseman – the legacy of Robert Thompson of Kilburn, is out now, in full colour hardback, at £15.99, from www.greatnorthernbooks.co.uk