When I say my brother Paul and I grew up in a sawmill, I’m not exaggerating. We spent most weekends and a great deal of every school holiday at the Venables sawmill, the family business in Stafford.

Paul and I played, watched and listened. We saw how the sawyers and the graders went about their work. We felt the textures of freshly cut and seasoned wood, we sniffed the scent of resin - oak, ash, beech - we knew at first hand the structure, the colour and the grain of each. We learned the story of their long years of growth in the woodland and how rain and drought and soil and location had affected their development.

This was our life, our father’s life, and the life of three generations before him. Our working destiny was cut, shaped and formed in the sawmill. Here we breakfasted and lunched together. Here we discussed and argued, sometimes passionately, about every aspect of a sawmillers business.

I remember well the first time I was sent to France to look for new sources of quality Oak. Our stocks had been sadly depleted by the restoration of a cathedral roof destroyed in a devastating fire. I spent a week driving the four corners of France finally finding a sawmill with the quality of oak we were looking for. On my return I described the place to my grandfather, retired many years from the business. “Yes”, He said, “Monsieur Durand owns that mill.” He had done business with that same mill fifty years before I got there and he had found them one of his best suppliers. The pace of life changes but the knowledge of wood is handed on from one generation to another.

Paul and I started to buy in France in the early 1980’s and it’s not just brotherly love when I say that I believe that there is no-one in the UK with the knowledge of French sawmills that Paul has. Wood is like wine, and different trees grown in different regions produce different grades of timber. To Paul knowledge of wood is a sixth sense.

Our work here at Venables Brothers is based on a knowledge of and lifelong passion for our material. This is rooted in generations of experience with a hefty wedge of professionalism thrown in.

Chuck Venables