TOM LOCK

CATALOGUE

RECORDING

SUMMARY

BORN: Hawkridge, Somerset, 1926

LIVED: Hawkridge

RECORDING MADE: 2001

RECORDING LENGTH: 2 hours 27 minutes

Tom Lock's family have been carpenters and wheelwrights for generations. They were also undertakers. His great great grandfather made his own coffin years before he died, keeping blankets in it under the bed. His great grandfather had an off-licence and opened the village post office.

When he left school Tom started working for his father. He remembers the hard winter of 1940, when they walked across the frozen river to get to work and the wildlife sought sanctuary in Dipper Copse. He collects antlers and began carving things out of them in the 1970s - corkscrews and steak knives, even a chair. It was meant to be a way of relaxing, but he started getting too many orders and it became a worry.

His two sons run the business now, the sixth generation, but he still does a few hours' antler work most days.

Tom Lock died in February 2020.

Photograph by Mark J. Rattenbury