The Howkins plane.

I’ve seen some mangles that have, and a few equally old garden rollers that have, even the occasional antiquated farm implement but there are very few woodworking planes that have the definite article cast into them. The Howkins Plane proudly does and it is a small self-importance entirely deserved for a such a unique blip in British woodworking tools. It was patented in 1913 and went into production in 1920, presumably the ‘war to end all wars’ put paid to an earlier introduction. I found something quite poignant in reader's questions section of the March 1923 edition of The Woodworker.

The Woodworker wasn’t in any way obviously political or socially campaigning, a few years later their editorial would regularly bemoan the lack of training and education in manual skills, but in 1923 it was all meat safes and enclosed washstands. So it is probably not surprising that on the face of it they took E.W. and others’ enquiry at it’s most pragmatic level. It is very difficult to find any accurate statistics on post-war suicide rates and even then the prevailing economic slump and political manipulation would have had a bearing, but 3 million British men experienced the ravages of life and death in the trenches and about 2 ½ million returned to a land unfit for heroes.

In 1917 Henri Barbusse, soldier and author, wrote, “People are machines of forgetfulness”, but unfortunately they are not always, and some men could not expunge the horror of war and I can’t imagine how many were living quiet lives of desperation until one day they decided to not. There was some enlightenment in the diagnosis of shell-shock, what is now known as combat stress reaction and 48 psychiatric hospitals were established to deal with those who were suffering. By the time E.W and others posed their question there were 65000 victims receiving disability pensions and 9000 were still hospitalised. Shell-shock was relatively short-term and well understood, respectable in a way and accepted after 1918. Post-traumatic stress disorder is far more enduring and the fear, acute depression and debilitating anxiety became apparent, as the name suggests, only after the war and would ensure, if someone sought treatment, an attached stigma that would make employment almost impossible to find.

Kafkaesque beaurocracy ensured that many discharged servicemen wouldn’t receive any monetary assistance, pittance as it was it may have gone some way to at least alleviate some parts of their troubled lives. The relentless hell that 1914 had brought on these broken men continued for many to the end of their silent nightmare, and a simple coffin must have seemed a simple way out. Lessons were learnt very slowly in subsequent aftermaths, and that there is a charity combatstress , doing great work that the NHS obviously can't fit in around it's fertility and gastric band priorities, speaks volumes on how far we’ve gone or haven’t in the intervening 90 years.

On a more uplifting note the Howkins’ cutter could and still can be raised and lowered by a well engineered mechanism as seen here.

Spot the difference, there’s only one.

There are some very good things about the Howkins, not least a flattened section at the front of the body with a thoughtful contour that is a nice bearing for even the most spatulate thumbed and the plane’s willingness to accept any type of cutter.

                                     

Well, I hear you say, that’s all fine and dandy, but if I buy a Howkins can I expect much in the way of travails or humiliation going cross-grain as if I were making a dado? No, despite your strange use of all of those words you can relax, there are bifurcated spur cutters that fit below the main cutter and goes wherever it goes. However, this isn’t the best plane to do that, if, and I think this may be a huge if, but if this was your only plane then you could perform the dado cut, but not with the aplomb and certainly not the flourish you might have been hoping for, as you will find yourself adjusting your cutter depth after every couple of strokes.

This constant twiddling will almost inevitably lead to a puff of between fingers derision from your audience‘s face, I assume there always is one of some sort or another who have a deep and meaningful relationship with their plunging router, and it will leave you with the telltale flushed countenance of 39 deficiency. But if on the other hand the dado is a stopped dado, or for that matter a groove of the same ilk, then you can raise your eyebrows, momentarily close your eyes and nod slowly with pursed but still grinning lipped and detached nonchalance, because it is in precisely the tricky subject of stopped ploughing that the Howkins has an o level. Not only that but it can also cut a groove that describes a circle or ellipse pivoting around a screw or similar put through one of a choice of holes in the extra drilled iron fence, stored conveniently above the quite crude wooden affair.

Some I’ve seen have threaded rod used for fence arms, this one has two countersunk set screws and for making an arc, longer arms will be needed. I have read some wild assertions about sliding dovetails somewhere, the fantasy for every combination planer, but without a handbook or instructions it may have been a different model. This is a model B, there were others that went back as far as A and then stretched to D, and there were without a doubt differences, without a doubt. There is also a complete mystery about their origin, nobody, not even the internet, seem to know where these strange outlandish planes were made or by whom, call me Nactus von Däniken if you like but what if ….