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HOW A BUREAU WITH TREACLE TINS FOR A BACK WAS GIVEN NEW LEASE OF LIFE
Posted by Sharon Dale - Yorkshire Post on 11/07/2009
When Rachel Barnett bought a battered old bureau from Jackie Pudding's junk shop in Greetland, near Halifax, in the early 1920s, she wasn't aware she was recycling.
The word wasn't even invented until 1926 and even then it was technical terminology used in the oil refining industry.
She didn't know she was saving the planet either. Buying second hand was simply essential and it was all her budget of a pound would stretch to.
Mrs Barnett had saved hard to get the bureau for her eldest child who had won a coveted place at the local grammar school.
It was given pride of place in her dining room and is still going strong almost 100 years on after successive generations of her family practised the maxim of “mending and making do”.
“It was past its best when my grandmother bought it,” said Linda Allen, who now owns the bureau. “It had flattened treacle tins for a back and the drawer bottoms were made from old wooden packing cases, so it had already been patched up then.”
Linda's mother Kathleen inherited it in 1947 and her late father, a joiner, is thought to have spruced it up. But by the time Linda took it for her own home in Halifax in 1984 , it was looking decidedly shabby. After seeing a story about Chris Gummer's furniture revamping service in the Yorkshire Post, she took it to The Workshop in Ebberston, near Scarborough to give it a new lease of life.
He sanded it, painted it black and gave it a stylish leaf motif.
www.the-workshop.info
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