Coopers Craft and Tools

In a time long before plastics, the barrel-making occupation - known as coopering - was a thriving industry. The art of coopering, or barrelmaking, is one of great antiquity and was probably developed from basketmaking. The shape of the cooper's barrel is a cylinder with bulging sides. How this peculiar shape was invented is not known; but it is the bulge (bilge) which gives the cask its strength. Barrels came in a great variety of sizes, some almost the size of a room, others not much larger than a football.

Coopering was such an important craft that every town had at least one cooper. As late as 1900 there were over 600 coopers in Dublin. Coopers also made buckets and other household items combining wood and metal.

The cooper used tools called in-shaves to smooth the insides of the barrels. The croze cut the groove around the top of the barrel, for the securing of the barrel lid. The head shave is a specialized plane, used to smooth the head of the barrel. For Guinness Barrels, onlyAmerican Oak was used.

While the name Guinness and Knox goes hand in hand, Christopher Knox worked making Whiskey barrels, together with beer barrels. Thomas Knox his son was a journeyman cooper, prior to joining Guinness. As such he would have been repairing or making such items as butter churns etc.

Here are just some of the tools my father used. Some of these may have been handed down from his father and his grandfather Christopher. We will never know!

On the top a curved drawknife, and on the bottom standard drawknife

This is a Draw Knife

This is a Croze Score Tool