Tony Seo writes:

> The other issue is the fact that the English continued to work in the
> traditional way for a lot longer than the American's did. By the end
> of WWI, almost all furniture making in this county was done in
> factories. Not saying that there weren't any smaller traditional shops
> but they were fewer in number. Over in England a lot of the cabinet
> makers continued to use hand tools up to the WWII era. A lot of rural
> England (if my reading is correct) wasn't electrified or only
> marginally so until after WWII. So English planes have a lot more
> working patination on them.

Something similar to the U.K. experience happened in Australia. The
aftermath of WWI followed by the depression in the thirties and the post
WWII austerity years meant that very few could afford to set up what
then would have been state-of-the-art furniture factories and quite a
lot of common and cheap furniture was produced by relatively labour-
intensive means in numerous localities. I don't know when Mathieson &
Son in Glasgow stopped exporting their wooden planes to us but, judging
by the number still appearing at the fleas, it seems that these exports
must have been resumed at some time following WWII. However, there seems
to have been a period after WWII when we were driven to rely on our own
resources as is testified to by the appearance of wooden planes of
European pattern but made of Australian hardwood by Bergs during, I
think, the late forties or early fifties. At the same time as Bergs
wooden planes made their appearance quite a few Australian manufacturers
of metal planes came on to a market which really had been starved for
new tools. All of the planes at the manual arts schoolroom which I
attended were wooden ones with the exception of one metal jack,
jealously guarded by our teacher. I think that wooden planes retained
their position in the market here for quite some time because of their
comparative cheapness.

Regards from Brisbane,

John Manners

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