What the papers say…

Here is what the London Evening Standard

Fending for a living with furniture from Fenland
Deep in Fenland, on the edge of a wood and surrounded by roses, Tom Lane's office resembles a wooden cricket pavilion. From here he runs Rockingham Fender Seats. "I do 60,000 miles a year getting orders and measuring fireplaces," he says. Club fenders, from which his range is derived were popular in Edwardian times, providing additional seating in libraries and billiard rooms. They developed as more general items of furniture, gracing the drawing rooms of fashionable houses.

"And there is still a big demand for them today", says Tom Lane. "The trouble is there are at least three other fender people and we're all fighting for the same business."

It is not all suburban semis. He has made fenders for Highgrove, Prince Charles's retreat, and for the rural piles of singer Roger Whittaker, comedian Bobby Davro and ex-Tory minister Francis Pym.

Formerly a tenant farmer, after school at Rugby and three years in the Hussars, he was also a rose grower, which accounts for the mass of blooms surrounding his office.

"I had eight acres under glass. But I was using half a million gallons of oil a year to heat the glasshouses and the costs went spiralling upwards with the oil crisis. I switched to coal --and ran into the coal strike."

He has converted farm buildings into a showroom and a forge, at Thorney, near Peterborough and employs a blacksmith.

"We've been doing fenders for 17 years", says Lane. "We try not to get too drawn away into other things, but we also do fireguards, irons and low fenders."

The business and its name, came from a seat he had in the drawing room of his Georgian home near the village of Rockingham, Northants. "I bought my fender seat 40 years ago" he says. "It was made in about 1903. It's very simple, all steel, and it was the inspiration for the company".

The fenders are made in everything from brass to burnished steel, with seats of fabric or leather.

He advertises in posh magazines but 40% of business is from personal recommendation.

"We found that country shows were a good way of getting rid of lots of brochures but not much good for selling fenders."

He sells 200 to 300 fenders a year. The problem is that every single fender is custom made.

We do have an outlet in America. And last year they ordered 55 fenders which was a very good order. So for once in our life we were making 10 or 15 of them the same. They were identical and that was marvellous. "But it doesn't happen often enough!.

Here is what the Architectural Digest reported some while ago.

Fender Bender

The Edwardians, who were as determined to be comfortable as the Victorians had to be virtuous, created the fender seat - a small brass or steel fence that was placed around the front of a fireplace and padded on top with leather or tapestry. Now Tom Lane, gentleman farmer of Grange Farm, England, has started Rockingham Fender Seats, and he is producing them in a curved or squared front with support poles that are straight or rounded, in reed or rope designs. Amongst those who have enjoyed this asset are Lane's landlord, the Prince of Wales, whose designer Dudley Poplak uses the fender seat, and Baron Von Zuylen, whose designer George Spencer has also bought one.