Paul Roberts is the Dry Sales Manager and Sawmill Supervisor at Whitney. He talks to Robert Penn, Board Director and author.
‘I was born in Knighton, further up the Welsh Marches from the Sawmill at Whitney-on-Wye, but I grew up in Letton where my parents farmed, just a few miles down the river from here. I live in Hereford now. I left school at 16 and went to Hereford Technical College, to study furniture making. Will Bullough, former sawmill owner before Woodland Heritage bought it and a furniture maker himself, gave me a job, one day a week. I am 46, so that was 30 years ago. And I’m still here.
‘I have worked in every part of the sawmill over the last three decades. I even helped build the original workshop behind the sawmill. Today, I am Dry Sales Manager and Sawmill Supervisor. I oversee all dry timber sales. I also manage the milling operation and team. In addition to this, I am the trained Fire Marshall for the whole sawmill site.
‘A normal day starts with an 8am meeting with the milling team, to decide what they are going to cut that day. I might then help with selecting the trees or logs to cut. Once the milling team are up and running, I come down to the dry sheds, at the opposite end of the site. First thing, I look in the diary to see who has booked an appointment to visit the dry sheds during the day. Carpenters, joiners, builders, furniture makers and many others, they will book in for an hour, sometimes more, to work through the log stacks with me, to find what they need. Say someone is coming in for a staircase, I will get packs of stringers, treads and risers ready for them. If I haven’t got many people booked in with appointments, I will reply to phone messages and emails, take orders, look over cutting lists, search through the timber stacks and select boards for customers, and give the office measurements so they can prepare invoices.
‘Having a background in furniture making has always made it easier and more intuitive for me to understand all sorts of makers’ needs and requirements. I have a good idea of what most customers are looking for and, because I know these timber sheds so well, I can usually find it quickly too. The sheds are my domain. Everything has a place. Well, nearly everything.
‘Trends in timber come and go, like everything else. When I started, elm floors were very common – highly polished elm floors that were expensive then and would be very, very expensive now. No one bought ash 30 years ago, but it is one of the biggest sellers today: it is durable, sensibly priced and you can use it for floors, furniture, staircases, almost anything. The pale timber of ash has a fresh, clean look which is more fashionable again. We do keep a small selection of more niche timbers: there is some Scottish elm in here and we even have a small amount of quarter-sawn London Plane or Lacewood, but the main timbers are ash, chestnut and oak. Oak remains our bread and butter, as you would expect. It doesn’t really go in or out of fashion. We have oak boards from 15mm to 6 inches in the shed. British oak: it sells itself, really.
‘Whitney Sawmills has provided bespoke timber for so many interesting projects over the years. It is difficult to single any customer out, but I did enjoy supplying timber for the multi-million pound renovation of Hay Castle, just down the road. It was a very high spec job, minimal knots, no knots larger than 20mm, all that stuff, and a vast area, 200 square metres of flooring. It is enjoyable to visit the castle now, and see all the oak wearing so well, years later. Weirder still, and going back a long time now, we supplied all the timber to a project in California – an American millionaire wanted a Jacobean house in Palo Alto, and we built it. I spent a lot of time then, hand planing machine marks out of the floorboards– it’s where I got my nickname, ‘Rocket’ Roberts – but happily I got to go to California to check the timber arrived safely.
‘I don’t make furniture anymore. I have a four-year-old and a six-year-old. They keep me busy at weekends, as you might expect. I actually met my wife here at the Sawmill. She was a delivery driver. How about that? Whitney Sawmill is my life. It always has been.’