Wheelwrights and Cordwainers

[Suzy100]

Is it Feasible that a Cordwainer/Shoemaker could also be called or known as a Wheel Wright?

[Rena]

I wouldn't have thought so unless the ancestor was young enough to have had an apprenticeship in both occupations.

There could have been "cross over" skills with shaping wood for heels of leather shoes and also wooden clog making being transferred to shaping wooden wheel spokes 

[janan]

They are both skilled trades so it does seem unlikely. However I imagine someone could learn one trade from a father then do an apprenticeship in the other especially as there might be the cross over skills mentioned by Rena.

One of mine seems to have worked as a general brazier like his father but his apprenticeship was as a needle-maker.

Jan

[Rena]

It might be of interest to see what wheelwrights did, and there are several illustative videos on youtube, some are short and some much longer.

I just entered "Wheelwright" and there are several results, I chose this Victorian example of an old wheel being repaired.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBM0RzElvRE

and here's a demonstration of working with wood in the shoe trade:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-IcyDp3S1U

[jim1]

Wheelwrights were exactly that, they made/repaired wheels traditionally. Into the 19th. C & the Industrial Revolution wheelwrights were also working in factories & their skills developed more as engineers.
Highly unusual for a man to be both wheelwright & cordwainer which was also a highly skilled trade.

[Annie65115]

I have an ancestor whose occupation varied between wheelwright and carpenter; his apprenticeship was as a wheelwright but I think that trade became much more mechanised during his life, so his specific skills were less called for and therefore he used his general woodworking skills to do (probably fairly basic) carpentry.

I can't see a crossover between wheelwright and cordwainer, even less so if you consider that each apprenticeship lasted 7 years!

[Suzy100]

Thanks everyone.  Now I think I have two families on my tree, the Shoemaker being the right one.  But I still cannot find anything else on him ie a death.  I have the death for the Wheelwright!  It is the Smallbones from Hurst, Berkshire.  So I will go back to my tree and sort it out.  Another jigsaw!

[Rena]

I can't see a crossover between wheelwright and cordwainer, even less so if you consider that each apprenticeship lasted 7 years!

I have an instance of there being no "cross overs".  My first job was with a very large heavy engineering firm making earth moving machinery.  It employed skilled men over a large spectrum of engineering and carpentry.  There was a recession in the early 1960s and I especially remember one pal who was a time served engineer boilermaker (the highest paid engineering grade) who was one of the unlucky ones who lost his job on the Blacksmith Shopfloor.   He was immediately approached by one company who offered him employment as a blacksmith.  The company was a local brewery but he he turned down the offer because he didn't know anything about shoeing horses or fitting metal rims onto dray wheels.

[GrahamSimons]

Were these Londoners? In order to trade within the City you had to be a freeman of one of the livery companies; latterly the trade people actually did bore no connection to the livery company's apparent trade. I have a chemist and druggist who was in the Wheelwrights' company, and a stockbroker in the Pattenmakers', among others.