Portrait of a Cooper.

My grandfather was a cooper. Joseph Crampton, born in 1899, made casks for Bass, Bulmers and other breweries, between 1921 and his retirement in 1965.

When he died in 1977, we found a pile of yellowed papers among his possessions: he had started to write about his life as a cooper, with anecdotes and impressions of the people in the cooperage, and had gone in to detail about his profession, complete with delicate line-drawings of tools and techniques. He had seen his craft as a dying art and had tried to preserve it.

Joe never finished his story. Now here I am - trying to do that for him, in a way. A few years ago, I asked one of the UK’s last master coopers, Alastair Simms, to go through the things Joe had left – old coopering tool catalogues and newspaper clippings, and those yellowed pages, and I asked him about his life as a cooper and the tools he used that my grandfather had written about.

A bit like Joe’ story, the film I'd wanted to make lay unfinished. But here it is. Portrait of a Cooper – it's only seven minutes long, so if you have a spare mo, please do have a watch.