Best of British

A man who always knows which way the wind is blowing

Bespoke weathervanes

Graham Smith is one of the most prolific weathervane makers in the country. In the past 30 years, he has made 11,780 of them (he numbers each one) from the workshop in the garden of his Dorset cottage – and he thinks about weathervanes even when he’s off-duty.

‘I’m always peering into the skies, looking at the rooftops of houses and public buildings to see if they have a weathervane,’ he says. ‘And if they do, I check to see if it’s one of mine.’

He made his first weathervane as a present for his wife – it was rather unusual, shaped like a witch (he had seen one on a roof and decided to copy it). ‘When her friends saw it, I got a lot of requests to make weathervanes with personal touches as gifts for their husbands,’ he says.

Smith quit his job as a precision engineer and signed up to the Enterprise Allowance Scheme, set up in the 1980s. He explains, ‘The government gave you £1,000 to start a business if you could show you had £1,000 of your own money to put into it.’

Since then, he has produced weathervanes in all shapes and sizes: in the form of cricketers; the silhouette of someone doing the hoovering; even one with an extended family of 21 people on it.

‘Some of the bespoke requests can be very convoluted,’ he says. ‘I’ve got one on the go at the moment where they want the husband on a lawnmower, and the wife tending the flowers. They have a cannon in their garden, which has got to feature, along with a model railway and a sunset.’

To create the weathervanes, Smith makes a paper template, places it on a sheet of steel and draws around it with a scribe. ‘It gives me a very precise line to work to, so I can drill the metal with access holes and then cut it out with my jigsaws,’ he says.

Next, he smoothes off the sharp edges. Finally, he welds it to an arrow and directional symbols, and sends it to a local factory for ‘blackening’, to protect the metal.

According to Smith, the first recorded weathervanes appeared in Egyptian wall paintings, and in ancient Greece. Today, Smith’s own creations can be seen around the world, from Bhutan to New Zealand and Brazil. ‘If you laid every weathervane I’ve made end to end,’ he says proudly, ‘you could walk for six miles alongside them.’

‘I’ve got one vane on the go at the moment where they want the husband on a lawnmower, and the wife tending the flowers, along with a model railway and a sunset’

Interview by Faith Eckersall. Photographs by Sam Pelly Graham Smith by his workshop; tracing a design on to steel with a scribe; filing a sharp edge; finished vanes.