Written By Alice Gibb
One tradesman once found in most rural Ontario communities hamlets was the harnessmaker. But even in the late 1930s, Edward Innes, 77, of Thorndale, was one of the last old time practitioners of that skilled trade.
Innes began apprenticing in the trade of harness making and leather work in London as a lad of 15 years old. One of the first projects he worked on was making the tugs used on London’s horse-drawn streetcars in London, forerunner of today’s LTC buses. The tugs were hand stitched and heavy since the horses had to start the streetcars off with a jerk.
Eventually the leather tugs were replaced with lighter tugs made of rope. The rule-of-thumb in those days was one horse per streetcar except during Western Fair when teamsters would pour into London from around the area. Teams and wagons were hired to transport visitors from the train stations and other parts of London to the fairgrounds.
When Edward Innes started in his trade, all the tugs and other harness parts were sewn by hand. “Once in a while, I (still) get a hand sewn set of tugs to repair,” he told a Free Press reporter. “With the machine-sewn ones, you can just tear them apart by pulling. With the old hand-sewn stitches, you have to cut every loop.”
The hand sewing on leather harness was done using an awl and two needles. The hole was punched with the awl and then a waxed thread in a needle was pushed through the hole, one from each side, in opposite directions.
The harnesses that Innes worked on as a young man were always finished in black. The leather was washed over and over again with a stain “ink” when finished. One way to tell whether a teamster took pride in his profession was to see if his harness was in good shape.
“Nobody would go out on the road unless his harness was oiled and the brass polished, “ Innes noted.
By the late 1930s, the fancy single road harnesses were just a memory. And for horses that were hard to handle, curbs were more like military riding bits. That meant they used a chain which pried upward on the horse’s jaw. Unfortunately for the horses that were bad actors, those curbs could sometimes badly damage or even break a horse’s jaw.
While hand-stitching harness in his Thorndale shop, Innes confessed to the reporter that he would no longer like to tackle a complete design of harness from memory. But at 77 years of age, he was pleased to repair whatever pieces of harness people brought into his shop. His family was now scattered, with son, George, farming near Dorchester. But despite some heart trouble, Edward V. Innes was one of the last Middlesex County residents still carrying on the traditional trade he had learned 62 years earlier.
