The Ghost Marks Joiners Leave When They Repair Old Frames
When stripping paint from an old sash frame, it is not uncommon to find a number of marks, scratched or cut into the wood. Most of these will be assembly marks, left by the joiner who assembled the window in the workshop. These can be pencilled in with a sharp pencil, using a marking gauge or knife to make a clear Roman numeral, II or III for example. Some frames will have the date when the window was made, or even the maker’s mark, scored into the wood with a sharp tool, possibly before the first coat of paint was applied, around 1840.
These are the assembly marks of the joiner, the way that a Georgian and Victorian joiner worked. The window was made in the workshop, the sashes were all made in the workshop and then brought up to the building where they were fitted, and a joiner worked on the building site, the parts were all handed to him, and they were all numbered. The joiner would have to take great care to assemble all the parts in the correct order, and to match them up. The marks would have been taken down in the workshop by the maker of the sash, and would have been numbered, and the parts would have been packed up and taken to the building site, where the joiner would have worked from them, assembling the sashes in the correct order.
In addition to the numbers, there will be scribe lines which are the faint lines left on the wood where a scribe gauge was struck to read off a measurement. Also present will be the odd saw kerf, where a joiner has cut and then refinished a section of wood that wasn’t quite right the first time. Each of these tiny marks is a record of the joiner’s decisions, and collectively they form the legible evidence of the window’s original construction and subsequent repairs and modifications as described in Historic England’s guidance on the repair of historic window sashes.
Careless sash window repair is far more damaging than people may initially realise. By sanding down a painted rail without looking for and recording the pre-existing historic paint and surface marks, and by filling in historic paint or written numbers with filler, a repairer is removing items that cannot be made again. There is a useful background explanation of Historic England’s guidance on conserving historic windows.
For Sash Window Repair contact sashwindowpreservation.co.uk/services/sash-window-repair.
The marks were made for the next person to be working on the window – the joiner on site – and they were assuming he would be paying attention and using them. They were made for him to know how to assemble the window parts in the correct order.
