It was only in August last year (2011) I bumped into an old friend Alan Mitchell who was the kingpin of woodworking magazine editors in the Seventies and Eighties. Out of respect I captured him on film to include in 'Furniture Today Part Three'.
With sadness I learned today that Alan had died in early December. I discovered this while Googling for some dates of his editorial office. Alan was a legendary 'fixture' in the woodworking media for many years, in fact a kingpin. Not just that he was a truly democratic and friendly person who went out of his way to scoop interesting stories and even landed up unnannounced at my small furniture gallery in Bath in the mid 1980's, having climbed a very steep hill, to run a feature.
It was heartening to see him at the Cheltenham 'Celebration of Craftsmanship and Design' exhibition Private View and he was immediately friendly and thanks to the organizer Jason Heap for having a 'flexible approach' regarding who is invited to Private Views that the impromptu opportunity arose for me to pay my respect to Alan on film. The policy at this major UK annual furniture show before Jason took over was to limit the Private view to clients and exhibitors only, breaking with the great tradition that Private Views are also social events and to use modern media language are the equivalent of Facebook to do business in a social networking environment!
Anybody who is in the tough business of sustained economic survival surely knows that you have to think outside the box and consider all sorts of ways to find customers and often the best results come from indirect means. Alan Mitchell was neither a prospective client nor a current craft journalist at this exhibition Private View so under the old regime he would not have been invited but clearly he was a man who gave his life and passion to woodworking and was not one for cultivating favourites or enemies but just did his job fair and square and genuinely liked the people.
Magazine editors and the craft media have great power and 'make and break' names. It was unusual to come across a magazine editor with the integrity Alan Mitchell had, but perhaps that was an age when the term might be more frequently used.
It has been a challenging couple of years for me - the great furniture maker Alan Peters died in 2009. He was my schoolboy hero and later a good professional acquaintance, someone of great integrity in his work, then a good male friend of mine who seemed to have everything, took his own life in the same year. Then in 2010 my charasmatic and colourful older sister Jill (who once turned down a date with Jimmi Hendrix) died of cancer within about three months, and then my half-sister Barbara died of a brain tumour, having suffered dementia at a shockingly young age. Now in 2012 my aunt who was my guardian and offered me a home when I was 17, is on her deathbed and probably has weeks to live.
Life is strong yet fragile. We know it all, yet we know nothing. We are here today and gone tomorrow, but the show goes on with new kids on the block re-inventing wheels and who one day will follow the same destiny!!
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