Furnished with faith

History in the furniture-making

For more than 100 years, Ercol has been producing highly regarded furniture. The company is still run by the family of its founder Lucian R Ercolani, who was born in Italy but was brought to Britain and given an opportunity to develop his skills by The Salvation Army

Feature by Philip Halcrow

PHILIP HALCROW WELL beyond the mid-century

decades when the furniture manufacturer was making its name, Ercol’s chairs, tables and cabinets have been a feature of homes and public buildings. The company that was exhibited at the postwar pick-meup Festival of Britain in 1951 still has enthusiasts seeking out preloved pieces and continues to produce old and newly designed furniture at facilities including its 21st-century factory in Princes Risborough, Buckinghamshire. Only last year its classic Windsor chair design was the focus of an episode of TV’s Inside the Factory. Recently, though, Edward Tadros, who has just passed on the chairmanship of the company to his son, Henry, has been engaging in the sort of activities often shown in Who Do You Think You Are?

And in looking at his family history, he has been looking at the history of the company, because, down through its 100-plus years, Ercol has remained owned by the family of its founder, Lucian R Ercolani.

‘Grandpa was very Italian,’ says Edward

Lucian with staff outside the company’s former factory in High Wycombe, c 1925

furniture-making

An Evergreen easy chair in the current Ercol brochure and (below) in production Lucian R Ercolani

when we meet at the factory. ‘He had this idea of setting up a furniture dynasty that would go down the generations. Other companies, such as G Plan and Parker Knoll, have been bought and sold. But our family never sold Ercol. We decided we wanted to keep making furniture.’

Edward’s enquiry into the past has led him to The Salvation Army’s International Heritage Centre in south London, where he has set eyes on some archive material.

‘From an early age, I knew the story of how my grandfather came to be in this country and the association with The Salvation Army,’ he says. ‘But it was fascinating being in the heritage centre with my daughter. We were astonished to be sitting there, reading documents that referred to my grandfather and great-grandfather.’ If the family history is viewed in one way, it could be said the origins of Ercol’s classic furniture can be traced back to a bench in Florence, Italy, where Edward’s great-grandfather sat one day, having wandered into a Salvation Army meeting. ‘My great-grandfather Abdon was a maker of picture frames,’ says Edward. ‘He even went on to invent a machine that could make wavy mouldings.

‘At first, he was living in a village called Sant’Angelo in Vado, near Urbino.

He was a bit of a bandit, apparently. He married the daughter of the local landed gentry, much – I From an early age, think – to her family’s displeasure, so they I knew the story of eloped to Florence. Then at some stage how my grandfather he happened to come across The Salvation came to this country Army, and he found salvation, because he thought he’d behaved badly.’ The story of Abdon’s life-changing encounter was recorded in an 1895 issue of a Salvation Army magazine which Edward saw at the heritage centre. On his smartphone, Edward brings up photographs of the relevant pages of All the World. In the article, Abdon Ercolani describes how he was walking along a road with his little son, when his attention was grabbed by the sound of singing. He looked up and saw the words ‘Esercito della Salvezza’ – The Salvation Army – over an open door. Abdon says: ‘I went in and sat down on the front bench in the hall, and listened attentively to the explanation of the Bible. When the officers knelt down to pray I was Turn to page 10 f

invited to pray also. It was in this meeting that I received the assurance that God had pardoned me, and from that day forward I have continued to attend the meetings regularly.’

After some initial misgivings, his wife also began to attend Salvation Army worship and, says Abdon, ‘accepted the salvation of Jesus Christ’.

Summing up the story, the reporter in All the World writes that ‘Ercolani and his family are real Salvationists, and a great blessing and help to the work in Florence’.

However, Abdon’s passion for spreading the gospel caused problems. Lucian would later recall in his autobiography, A Furniture Maker, how his father would cycle around villages, having apparently become ‘obsessed with the idea that the villagers should hear the story of Christianity in plain language – with the unfortunate inference that they would hear it from the priests mostly in Latin’.

Edward tells me: ‘After joining The Salvation Army, he became thoroughly evangelical about his faith. It stirred up tension, and Abdon had his workshop smashed up. In the end The Salvation Army rescued him and brought him and then the rest of his family to Walthamstow.’

In his autobiography Lucian, writes of how, when the family arrived in London, The Salvation Army gave his father carpentry work, and Lucian himself served as a messenger boy between two of its centres while also studying drawing and design. Out of hours, Lucian attended – and played trombone in the band – at Salvation Army services, indoors and in the open air. He confesses: ‘During that period I felt it was our Lord’s dispensation to give my parents and myself shelter and peace in another country, and I felt that in recognition of this I should one day take steps to become a Salvation Army officer and preach the gospel as my father had begun to do.’

But, he says, over time another aim took

Lucian began

to work in shape in his mind. A Salvation Army officer pointed out to the joinery Lucian that the organisation had a vacancy in its joinery department, which seemed department to fit in with his studies and interest in following in his father’s footsteps. So Lucian began to work there as ‘a practical learner’, among people who ‘were living in a special building at the Salvation Army Social Headquarters’. ‘Nowadays, they would be called “dropouts”, but in their craft I cannot speak

A 1959 catalogue

Newly steam-bent, an arm is made for a Marino chair (right)

too highly of them,’ Lucian writes. ‘They could hold one spellbound demonstrating the action of a cutting tool, the niceties of angle, and explaining the oil-stone to use for sharpening tools.’

Eventually, the commitment of time necessary for his studies led to his ending his involvement with The Salvation Army. He would go on to work for other companies – including Frederick Parker and E Gomme – before setting up his own in High Wycombe. But, looking back on the days when he was studying design at college and developing his skills at The Salvation Army, he wrote that he felt he was ‘occupying my time in a fashion which I thought was pleasing to our Lord, who I thought was leading me’.

Recalling his grandfather, Edward says: ‘I actually don’t remember him taking a great interest in faith in the sense of being a great churchgoer. It was more of an ethos of Christianity in terms of doing things with integrity and conscience and treating other people well.

‘He was hugely committed to making good furniture. He was evangelical – if you can say it that way – about furniture and had a massive belief in the beauty and quality of furniture and of providing nice objects for people’s homes.

‘I can imagine him talking in terms of furniture-making being pleasing to the Lord: underneath the table must be finished as well as the top, because God is all-seeing. ‘He was also committed to the wellbeing of people who worked for us and made the furniture. As an employer, he wanted things done well. He was very demanding, but very fair. ‘And he saw the craftsman’s time as being the most valuable thing they had, so he made sure that they could use the best and most powerful machinery to do their job. Now too the CNC machines that shape the parts are increasingly sophisticated; but the other side of the coin is that when the parts come to be assembled it’s very much by hand.’

Edward believes that, as the company has been passed down, so has the ethos of the figure who is affectionately referred to as ‘the Old Man’.

‘I suppose we try to maintain it in two ways,’ says Edward. ‘First in the type and

quality of furniture we make. One design for a chair may be only 18 months old, whereas another design for a loveseat may be 70 years old; one dining chair may be by a Japanese designer, while another is designed by a Dane. But they have a heritage of design between them – the bent timber, sticks and so on. ‘Secondly, we aim to run the company It was an ethos with integrity and a conscience.’ Walking round the factory, we come of doing things across people gathering parts for the classic Windsor chair, working on the with integrity frame of a 1950s-designed Evergreen easy chair and steam-bending wood for a Marino armchair. In another area, one of the range of IO coffee and side tables designed by Norwegian Lars Beller Fjetland, launched in 2020, moves through a suddenly illuminated drying tunnel. Surrounded by machines, shelves of timber and employees playing their part in producing pieces of furniture for people’s homes, Edward reflects on how it all came to be. ‘If The Salvation Army hadn’t caught the attention of Abdon and hadn’t brought the family to London, we wouldn’t be here,’ he says. ‘The Salvation Army is a very significant part of our evolution.’