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A new relief road is going through the wood he has carved every tray from since 1988. There is a reason he is not starting again somewhere else, and it is the reason his last serving trays are now half price.

2 days ago | Advertorial | Philippa Ashby

Lionel Hatcher found out from a can of orange paint.

Last spring he walked up through the wood behind his barn to look at an elm the March gales had brought down. Somebody had been there first. There was an orange cross sprayed on the trunk, a numbered metal tag nailed into the end grain, and a line of pink surveyor’s tape running off through the trees towards the lane.

The letter came nine days later. The council was taking the family’s 85 acres under a compulsory purchase order for a relief road that still hasn’t broken ground. The timber rights had already gone to a timber broker from outside the county. For nearly forty years, when an elm came down in that wood, Lionel hooked a chain to it and dragged it home. Now the broker’s crew gets there first. Every fallen trunk is graded, tagged and sold on as “character timber” at furniture-maker prices, a good share of it on lorries to the docks.

“I want to be clear, I wasn’t planning on packing it in,” he says, flatly, no drama in it. “Nobody asked me a single question. The wood changed hands and I found out from a paint can.”

It started with the Great Storm

The Weald, October. The workshop is an old brick-and-weatherboard barn beside a disused oast house. It smells of sawdust, wood smoke and, faintly, damp leaves. The workbench is worn pale in two places where his forearms rest. On the wall hang a bandsaw, a row of carving gouges and one photograph: his grandfather and two men in front of a stand of elms, taken in 1931, the year the family bought the wood. Up the road in Sevenoaks the town still talks about the night it lost six of its seven oaks, and for most of Lionel’s life everybody round here has had a story about where they were when the trees came down. From the window over the bench you can see the edge of the wood. These days you can also see the fence, and the sign in front of it.

“My grandfather bought the wood,” Lionel says. “My father coppiced it and felled the odd tree, the careful way. I was out there with him from the age of fourteen.” In the small hours of 16 October 1987, the Great Storm tore across the south of England and brought down something like fifteen million trees. In the wood, elm and oak went over like skittles. The timber merchants took the straight butts. The crowns, the twisted trunks and the ones split down the middle were dragged into heaps and burnt, all that winter. Lionel was twenty-nine.

“I wasn’t saving a tree,” he says. “The tree was already gone. I just couldn’t stand there and watch that elm burn.” In the spring of 1988 he took one trunk home on a borrowed trailer. It sat in the barn for two years drying out. Then he carved a tray out of it for his mother — a Highland cow, like the pair the farm next door kept on the meadow. It is on a kitchen dresser in Tonbridge and it has been in use every day for thirty-six years.

Every shape he has carved since is something from that patch of Kent. The Highland cow. The eagle, for the white-tailed eagles that came back to the south coast and that he still drives down to look for. The trout and the carp, for the pond at the bottom of the wood. And the bulldog, for Bramble, who slept under his bench for eleven years.

Two things ruin a wooden serving tray

“Everybody buys the cheap one once,” he says. “A year later the shine’s gone cloudy, it’s flaking at the edges and there’s a crack across the middle. So you buy another one.”

The first is the lacquer. Tip almost any shop-bought wooden tray towards the window and you will see the shine — a sprayed-on coat that makes cheap wood look rich in a photo. Olive oil, lemon, a warm dish and a few trips to the sink, and the coat goes milky. Then it lifts. Then the little clear flakes are on your cheese.

The second is wood that was dried too fast. A freshly fallen elm trunk is well over half water. Lionel air-dries his wood for months, finishes it in a small drying kiln, then lets it rest again before a gouge touches it. Skip that and the tray looks perfect the day it arrives and shows a hairline crack across a compartment six weeks later for no visible reason.

He throws away one tray in five to stay ahead of the second problem. He doesn’t have the first problem at all, because there is nothing on his trays to peel.

Why a peeling tray cannot be saved

Most weeks somebody turns up at the barn with a tray under their arm and asks him to save it. Never one of his — these are trays people bought in the shops or online, sometimes for good money, and used for a year or two. There is a crate in the corner full of the ones he had to hand back: an acacia platter shedding its finish in little white flakes, one gone grey and furry after a few trips through a dishwasher, a bamboo one that came apart in three layers like a wet book, a “rustic” one with a crack straight through the cheese compartment.

He can tell you what killed each one, usually in about four seconds. What nobody can do is bring them back. “There’s nothing in there to fix,” he says. “Once lacquer lets go, you’d have to sand the whole thing back to bare wood, and a cheap tray hasn’t got that much wood in it to begin with. Once it cracks across, that crack is staying.”

Most of them go home with one of his instead. One serving tray, carved from one block of English elm, oiled and nothing else — nothing sprayed on, nothing to flake off two years from now.

What comes off a plastic party platter

In 2013, doctors at Kaohsiung Medical University in Taiwan tested something most of us do without a second thought. They served hot noodle soup in melamine bowls — the hard, shiny plastic most party platters, children’s plates and divided snack trays are made of — and measured what came out in people’s urine over the next twelve hours.

After the soup from the melamine bowls, the volunteers passed roughly six times as much melamine as after the very same soup from ceramic bowls. Heat is what pulls it out of the plastic, and acid helps it along: hot sausage rolls, warm dips, chipolatas, tomato chutney, a squeeze of lemon. Exactly what ends up on a party platter.

Every tray gives a little of itself to whatever sits on it. The difference is what it gives. Plastic gives up plastic, and plastic doesn’t belong next to your food — not hot, not sour, not at all. Wood gives up nothing you would mind eating.

What makes Lionel’s serving tray different

Carved, not pressed: Every compartment is cut out of the solid block by hand. Nothing glued on, nothing pressed out of a mould.

Rescued, not felled: The wood comes from trees that came down on their own in the Kentish Weald — storms, disease, old age. No living tree is cut to make a tray.

Deepens with the years: Elm mellows from warm honey to a rich, dark brown in its first year in the light. A tray bought this autumn will look better next Christmas than it does the day it arrives.

Dried slowly, then rested: Months of air drying, then a kiln, then rest again before the first cut. This is the step cheap trays skip.

Food-safe finish only: Scraped by hand and oiled with food-safe mineral oil. No lacquer, no sealant, nothing to chip off into your food.

No two alike: Every tray comes out of a different trunk, so colour, weight and grain vary. Yours is the only one like it.

One tray, a dozen jobs

Cheese in one compartment. Crackers in the next. Grapes, nuts and olives in the rest.

Lionel carves the compartments deep and rounds every inside corner, because he knows how a serving tray actually gets used. It goes on the table on Christmas Day with Stilton, chutney and pickled onions. It goes on the coffee table for the football with crisps and nuts. It goes in front of the grandchildren with apple slices, cheese cubes and the four crackers they are allowed before tea. On a chest of drawers it holds keys, rings and reading glasses. Same tray, a dozen jobs, and nothing about it says kitchen gadget when the guests arrive.

What his customers say

Three reasons there is no next wood

Everybody who hears about this asks him the same question, and they usually ask it within about ten seconds: why not just buy the wood somewhere else?

There are three answers, and any one of them on its own would be enough.

One: there is no wood he can afford to carve. An elm that comes down in a storm, split and twisted, used to be worth nothing to anybody. That is why it went on a bonfire and that is why Lionel could have it. To the broker it is now worth furniture-maker money. “I rang him about one trunk. One. Lightning took it down in July, split right through, no sawmill in England would want it. He wanted nine hundred pounds.” Lionel shakes his head. “For a tree I’ve pulled out of that wood for nothing since I was twenty-nine. At that price a tray costs two hundred quid. Nobody puts cheese and crackers on a two-hundred-pound tray.”

Two: his hands are about done. “And if I’m honest,” he says, turning his right hand over on the bench, “these are about done too. Nearly forty years of gouge work. The thumb doesn’t close the way it used to.” He can still put in a day at the bench. He can’t put in a day and then get up and do it again the next morning. Every tray on the shelf was carved while his hands still worked properly.

Three: there is nobody to hand it to. Lionel is 68 and he works alone. There is no second bench in the barn, no apprentice, no son who wanted the trade. “It takes years before you’ve got it in your hands,” he says. “Nobody has that sort of patience for a wooden tray any more.” What comes out of that barn in a good week is what one man can saw, dry, carve and oil by himself, and one in five of those goes in the burn barrel before it ever gets wrapped. There is no factory behind it and no second batch waiting on a shelf somewhere.

The last thing he still gets to decide

Which brings us to the price, and to the only real choice he has left in any of this.

So he cut every tray that is left in half, from £98 to £49. “Nearly forty years of making something people put food on,” he says. “I want to picture them on a table on Christmas Day. Not in a lock-up off the A21 with a padlock on it.” He nods at the window and the fence. “They’re getting the wood. Fine. They’re not getting these.”

His niece Kirsty (34) set the little shop up online for him over a single weekend. “At my age I don’t know the first thing about all that internet business,” he says. “She told me I wasn’t going to spend another winter stood behind a trestle table at a farmers’ market in the cold. She was right.”

Where can you buy Lionel’s serving tray?

The serving tray is sold only through Cedar & Tin, the small shop Kirsty runs for him. Not on Amazon, not in the shops, not through anybody else. Whatever is still on the shelf when the workshop closes on 30 November is posted from Kirsty’s house until it’s gone — and then there are no more.

One word of warning: a machine-cut tray stained dark photographs almost exactly like a hand-carved one in a listing photo. The difference only shows when you run a thumb along the inside of a compartment, where the wood either follows the cut of a gouge or the flat path of a router.

Fill it. Serve on it. Put it in front of fourteen people on Christmas Day. If it isn’t right — the size, the colour, the grain, or no reason at all — send it back within 90 days for your money back. No restocking fee, and nobody will ask you to explain yourself.

This is a paid advertisement for Lionel’s Hand-Carved Serving Tray, sold by Cedar & Tin.

Melamine figures: Wu C. et al., “A crossover study of noodle soup consumption in melamine bowls and total melamine excretion in urine,” JAMA Internal Medicine, 2013.