Shapland & Petter; Barnstaple Cabinet Co. (1854-1999)
Shapland & Petter; Barnstaple Cabinet Co.
Barnstaple, Devon; furniture makers (fl.1854-1999)
Henry Shapland was born in 1823, the second son of William Shapland, a baker of Queen Street, Barnstaple. He went to the town’s Bluecoat School until the age of ten and was later apprenticed to John Crook, a local cabinet maker. He completed his apprenticeship there before moving to London until 1847. In that year he married a Barnstaple lady and in October 1847 he and his wife set sail from Cardiff for America. While in America he saw a German carving machine which produced finely carved mouldings on curved surfaces, and returning to Devon, he set up in business on his own. By March 1851, at the age of twenty-seven, the census records showed he was living in the Pilton area of Barnstaple with his wife and two children, describing himself as an ‘ornamental moulding maker employing one man’.
He set up his first workshop in a small room in water powered woollen mill at Raleigh, near Barnstaple, where he reconstructed the machine that he had seen in America. After a short while he moved to Bear Street, near the centre of the town. From his small factory, Shapland and his helper, George Trevesick, started to manufacture mouldings, initially to sell to piano manufacturers in London. In 1854 Shapland and Henry Petter (b.c.1827), another Barnstaple man who had returned from London where he had been working in the publishing trade, founded Shapland and Petter. Both men were Plymouth Brethren. With Petter’s contacts and business acumen, furniture as well as mouldings was made and sold both in Barnstaple High Street and wholesale to the trade. In 1864 Shapland and Petter bought the Raleigh mill and converted it wholly to furniture production. Shapland & Petter advertised ‘High-class Bedroom Suites in Oak, Ash, and Fancy Woods’ in The Furniture Gazette, 3 January 1874, and was listed in The Furniture Gazette Directory, 1877.
By 1870 over 100 men were employed at the Raleigh Cabinet Works, still only powered by two large water wheels. By 1872 the firm had grown sufficiently for the North Devon Journal to report that for the annual works outing a special train was needed to take the employees to Exmouth. In 1887 Henry Shapland snr and Henry Petter snr retired and the firm continued under the management of their sons.
In 1888 a fire destroyed the firm’s premises and this created an opportunity to build a new and modern manufactory at Bridge Wharf on the River Taw near the centre of Barnstaple. ‘While the ruins of the whole premises were still smouldering, architects and the practical cabinet manufacturers who employed them were planning on a large scale, a factory more extensive and in every way better equipped than the one which had just been destroyed. This is the present, factory; it adjoins the railway and has accommodation for the berthing of ships which bring coal and timber. . . The planning of the new works was carried out with due regard to the danger of fire, the buildings being arranged in separate blocks…’ [article in North Devon Journal, 6 November 1924].
The new buildings included a sawmill and drying kilns (a special system for this having been invented by Shapland’s son, Richard Arthur Shapland) and all machinery was steam powered. Block C held the two boilers for powering the whole factory. In Block D, Mr Seyfert with a staff of twenty men, carried out initial machining and on the next floor ‘jointing up’ took place. The machinery department in Block E housed two machines for joining up lengths of timber and mortising and there were also moulding machines. On the top floor of Block E was a knife grinder and tool sharpener, horizontal and vertical boring machines and others for squaring up work, a dovetailing machine and machines for cross dovetailing and sand papering. On the ground floor were turning lathes, square moulding machines and the veneering department. Marquetry and inlay work was carried out near to the veneering department. Block F housed sawing machines and in Block H work waiting to be handed out to cabinet makers was stored along with the carvers department. Cabinet makers worked in Blocks H & I and the assembled work was then passed to the examiners, Messrs Gabriel and James, who then passed it onto the polishers. Some metalwork was also carried out on the premises. By 1900 Shapland & Petter were employing 400 people and were rated as one of the leading companies in the mechanisation of furniture making.
The Furniture Gazette, 16 March 1891, announced that the firm had taken ‘commodious showrooms’ at 3 St. Andrew Street, Holborn Circus, where a selection of cabinet furniture was displayed. From c.1893 Shapland and Petter sold directly to customers at their shop in 67 Berners Street, London, and they also supplied Liberty, Waring and Gillows, Norman and Stacey, Wylie and Lochhead and Christopher Pratt's of Bradford. They were recorded as wholesale cabinet makers at this London address in the London Post Office Directory, 1895. Shapland and Petter had few inhibitions about allowing other companies to sell Barnstaple products as their own wares; the Wylie and Lochhead catalogue of 1902 has Barnstaple pieces without attribution. Only three examples of Shapland and Petter furniture have been identified as being supplied to Liberty but designs were probably copied.
The National Archive Register of Designs has six patent applications from Shapland and Petter between 1884-1894 and several more 1900-1902, but Shapland & Petter generally did not seem concerned about protecting their designs. Some pieces have numbers stamped into the wood but these were probably job numbers and not registered designs. The Heal’s archive reveals Shapland & Petter were well-established bedroom suite suppliers to the firm, with a peak of seventeen ranges being offered in 1900. In the 1920s Heal’s were still buying from the firm but by 1930 this had dwindled to just one bedroom suite. During the First World War Ambrose Heal approached Shapland & Petter to manufacture his ‘Unit Furniture System’, a system patented in 1915 in both the UK and USA, which finally went into production c. 1923.
The firm participated in the 1902 Budapest Exhibition. The Furniture Record, 28 October 1902, singled out Shapland and Petter for special mention and published an illustration of the exhibited furniture: ‘We give a few illustrations of some notable exhibits foremost among which must be placed the goods of Messrs Shapland and Petter Ltd… The high class productions of this firm are too well known to the best houses of this country to need much introduction. With such worthy representatives of British art furniture we may feel quite satisfied that our prestige is being maintained’.
In June 1904 the firm advertised in The Furniture Record and the Furnisher as ‘Manufacturers and Exporters of High Class Furniture of Original Character… Suggestions and Estimates for Fitments and Interior Woodwork of every description. Mantelpieces, panelling etc.’. The address of Shapland & Petter Ltd was 61 Berners Street, London (London Post Office Directory 1902).
Enamelling was introduced into the firm’s range of techniques for furniture decoration between 1900-1902 and this was illustrated in their new catalogue of 1903. The Della Robbia Pottery was a supplier to the firm and possibly the Medmenham pottery was as well. Stencilled and painted panels, gesso or moulded panels, leaded and stained glass, inlay (often mother of pearl, abalone or copper), marquetry and intarsia were also used for decoration. A mahogany card table inlaid with fruitwood and mother of pearl briar rose panel, c. 1900, is. illus. Agius (1978), p.122.
There was probably a link between the Barnstaple Guild of Metalwork and School of Art and the company, and indeed Richard Arthur Shapland was a member of the committee for administering the School. Handles and probably some other metalwork were also purchased from Loach and Clarke, Birmingham, with the L&C stamp.
The head of the firm’s design team in the late 19th/early 20th centuries was William Cowie with James Henry Rudd and Henry Percy Shapland (grandson of founder, Henry) also involved. James Rudd was praised in the North Devon Journal of 1909 for his furniture designs and received a commendation from W. R. Lethaby. He went on to design tiles for Pilkington.
Christopher William Deubler (a German by birth and fellow Plymouth Brother) was a freelance craftsman and probable designer and executor of many of the pictorial designs for Shapland and Petter furniture. The firm were active purchasers of contemporary furniture design publications, including Tims and Webb’s Thirty five Styles of Furniture (1904), along with other design books by Strange and French, Hoffman and others.
Henry Percival Shapland (born 1880) was the son of William Henry Shapland and grandson of the founder, Henry. After a brief time working in the design department he left Shapland and Petter to pursue a career in architecture and furniture. Henry Pringeur Benn & Henry P. Shapland were the authors of Nation's Treasures; Measured Drawings in Fine Old Furniture in the Victoria & Albert Museum, 1910. By 1926 Shapland was editor of The Cabinet Maker and lecturer at the Royal Society of Arts as well as the author of other books on furniture. Some designs by him are in the archive of Shapland and Petter. The Barnstaple Museum has a copy of the firm’s catalogue High Class Furniture, Shapland & Petter, Raleigh Works, (c.1906) and also an archive of furniture drawings.
In 1909 Shapland and Petter opened a new factory and business, the Barnstaple Cabinet Co. This new company displayed an inlaid bureau, designed by J.H. Rudd and made by D. Pennyfield, at the Arts & Crafts Exhibition Society, London, 1910 (cat. no. 460). In 1924 a new combined company, Shapland and Petter (1924) was formed, replacing both Shapland & Petter (1894) and Barnstaple Cabinet Co. The combined business employed about 450 people. The firm exhibited at the British Industries Fair (1947). The business was still thriving in the 1970s and in 1999 Shapland & Petter was taken over by LS Group.
Sources: Arts & Crafts Exhibition catalogue 1910; Bennett, Shapland & Peter Ltd of Barnstaple. Arts & Crafts Furniture (2005); Carruthers, The Arts and Crafts Movement in Scotland (2013); Heal, Sir Ambrose Heal and the Heal Cabinet Factory 1897-1939 (2014).