The last lacrosse stickmaker

I care passionately about traditional crafts but had no idea that anyone in the UK still made wooden lacrosse sticks. It turns out Tom Becket, just over the hill from me in Eccles has been making them for 50 years. 

The BBC reported last week  that Tom will retire at the end of the year bringing an end to 102 years of wooden lacrosse stickmaking at the firm of Hattersleys. By chance on Monday I was attending meetings in London to discuss issues facing traditional crafts, I knew my friend Tanya Harrod had a wooden lacrosse stick hanging in her hallway, a beautiful object. I arranged to borrow it as a prop for my presentations and was pleased to discover it was made by Hattersleys, I wonder if it was made by Tom.

The Heritage Crafts Association recently worked with retired ladder maker Stanley Clark to share the skills and knowledge that he had amongst a new and keen group of laddermakers. I hope there is anything similar we can do with Tom’s skills. A little online research shows me that lacrosse is originally a native American game and still much more common in USA and Canada than in the UK though we will host the world lecrosse championships in 2017.

Taking the lacrosse stick to my meetings in London helped raise many useful questions, folk often ask:

“Does it matter if this craft dies out?”

“If people valued wooden sticks then there would still be makers what is the point in encouraging folk to make things there is no demand for?”

“Wooden sticks are not as good as plastic sticks why make something antiquated when things have moved on?”

“Is there any point in supporting a failing business?”

All of these are questions which would have been asked about heritage buildings 50 years ago, if there is no congregation why keep the church? if the tudor building is not a good shape for modern use or is expensive to repair why not tear it down and replace it with a better modern building?

30 years ago the world of rare breed livestock faced the same questions, why keep Gloucester old spot pigs when they are fatty and not suited to modern intensive farming?

I have no doubt that in 25 years time we will not have to argue about why these skills should be valued and saved, we just have to find a way of keeping them going for a few years until we reach that point.

Here I am with my swill and lacrosse stick in Westminster Hall with it’s magnificent hammer-beam roof commissioned by Richard II in 1393. It was for many years the largest single roofed space in Europe. Wonderful that it survived the fire of London and the blitz