KIRKHAMFurniture-Making1982.pdf

division of labour; the term was simply used to describe an existing skill.
The abandonment of the word joiner may have been an attempt by the craftsmen
to make their work appear as respectable as chair-making or cabinet-making,
both of which had also developed out of joinery. The substitition of the
term bedstead-maker in place of that of bed-joiner was slow. Bedstead-
maker was used before the mid-eighteenth century 142 but it was not until
the 1780s that it began to be commonly used 143 . Bed-joiner was not greatly
used after that date but the term did not finally go out of use until the
early nineteenth century144.
The work was not very skilled and could be quickly learned by an
apprentice, provided that he was strong 145 . The bedstead-maker was
essentially a frame-maker and 'putter-together' of parts made by others146.
Carvers or turners shaped and decorated the pillars and cornices while the
hangings were made by upholsterers. In the mid-nineteenth century, the
bedstead-maker was even able to obtain the wood for the frame ready-cut to
the requisite sizes by the sawyer 147 . There was little that could be
classed as cabinet-making in the production of most bedsteads, but the 1811
London piece-rate book included a few bedsteads148.
It was not the case that the cabinet-maker made the better quality
beds as opposed to the bedstead-maker producing ones of inferior quality
because, after the formation of a trade society of bedstead-makers in the
l82tJs, the bedstead-makers worked to the piece-rate agreements in the 1811
149
book . By the 1820s there was a sufficiently large number of bedstead-
makers conscious of a separate identity from cabinet-makers and other
furniture-makers to form their own trade society which may even have been in
existence in the previous twenty years when such orgariisaticns were illegal150.
The quality trade produced the better class of beds but there is no evidence
to suggest that, from the 1820s at least, they were made by cabinet-makers
rather than bedstead-makers. When Henry Mayhew investigated the quality
Lo