About

The history of the West family in timber started in the 19th Century. Based around the West Sussex/Hampshire/Surrey borders, the family would buy a `parcel’ of timber. A parcel is the industry term for a number of trees, often still standing in the woodland, and most probably sold through an auction.

The timber would be felled and cut into beam, posts or plank where they fell. This would be achieved by digging a pit and hand sawing. The resultant production being hauled out of the woods by horse and trailer. It would not have been unusual for the family to walk 12 miles to wherever they were working and back again in the evening!

Walter Luke West had his own business, more than likely working with his father James West, who in the 1851 census was described as a ‘Wood Reve’ which translates as a custodian of the woods. James West was shown as being 52 in this census, and by deduction, it is likely that he would have started work at 13 or 14 years of age, and it is unlikely that he would have changed jobs, which takes the heritage of the West family in the timber trade back to 1812, six years after the death of Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson.

The current company was created by Walter Luke West (the grandfather of some of the current directors) and Cecil Owen West (an uncle of current directors). We have tangible felling records back to 1865.

In the early part of the 20th Century, the family moved to permanent premises in the corner of the commercial railway yard in Midhurst. Steam engines provided early power for the bandsaws, and hand wound cranes provided the ability to move logs around the yard. During the 1960’s a report was written by MP Dr Richard Beeching for the government of the day proposing the closure of 6000 miles of predominantly rural railways, these became known as the Beeching Cuts. As a result of those cuts, Midhurst suffered from closures and the company were able to purchase one of the commercial rail yards in the town. This enabled expansion and new sawmilling equipment to be installed.

In the mid-1970’s the company purchased a sawmill at Selham – James Morley, this was a small softwood and chestnut business, on about an acre of land. The company continues to run this business as a going concern for a few years, but it was recognised that the business in Midhurst was expanding and the company required more land. The obvious solution was to expand the Selham site. Negotiations were held with Lord Cowdray to purchase an additional 11 acres of land to build a new sawmill and storage buildings. It took some time to gain planning permission to build the new development at Selham.

Following the purchase of additional land and having gained the planning permission, a new sawmill and production facility was built. The business moved, lock, stock and barrel to Selham in 1986. The land at Midhurst being developed to what is now Oakwood Close. The expansion enabled us to install drying kilns & drying sheds of over 50000 sq feet. Trading has changed dramatically across the years. Initially in addition to the sawmilling element of the business, we manufactured fence panels, indeed you can still occasionally see one of our fence panels with our tag around the area. This production was stopped in the early 90’s and toward the middle of the 90’s we installed a moulding facility. This enabled us to manufacture moulded timber sections. Across these decades the business has continued to be managed by members of the family.

Bespoke work has always been key to our production, and to achieve this we have continued to invest in new machinery. Having installed a second-hand moulder in the 1990’s, investment was made in a 7 headed moulder in 2005 from German wood machinery manufacturer Weinig, together with the ability to manufacture our own tooling. This enabled us to produce profiles to our customer specification very quickly.

Fencing has also been key to our business and in 2005 we purchased a fencing company in Ash, Surrey called PRO Fencing to further strengthen our fencing division. The company already had plans to move to a better facility in Farnham, which we continued, we also retained the trading name of PRO Fencing, and we have been trading from the Farnham site ever since. This side of the business is very strong with contracts with many of the major UK house builders.

As we have said continued investment in machinery is a constant in our business, and this has continued, with new 4 sided planers from Weinig, sliding board saw from Altendorf, multirip saws also from Weinig.

In 2018 saw one of the biggest investments and changes in the available technology to us when we installed a new 5 axis CNC, Edgebander and Heated Press all from the Austrian company Felder. The CNC is a high-tech router that allows us to mould on multiple axis. The edgebander  is designed for quick adhesion of solid lippings for doors, and the heated press allows us to glue veneers to flat surfaces.

In late 2018 we experienced a major fire at our premises. Starting, we think, after hitting a piece of metal or stone in a piece timber which caused a spark, which in turn percolated in our dust extraction equipment through the evening, developing into a major fire in the early hours. This destroyed our extraction equipment, spread to the main building damaging that and destroyed the control gear of our 1960/70’s Stenner Band Mill writing it off. The fire was contained to a small area of the main building by sterling work by West Sussex Fire and Rescue and in particular the Petworth and Midhurst fire crews. This stopped the ability to machine anything for 2 ½ weeks. Through hard work by our extraction supplier, we were able to install temporary extraction systems on each of our key machines, ultimately installing eleven different extractors throughout the workshops. This enabled us to resume production and in March 2019 the replacement extraction system was commissioned.

Having lost our log sawmill, we then needed to find new sawmilling equipment, after investigation of various different types of mill, we travelled to Slovenia to a company called Mebor, a company with a simliar heritage to ours. Family owned, originally sawmillers who became manufacturers of sawmillling equipment as they could not find the sawmill that they needed on the market.

After lengthy discussions,,a Mebor Horizontal Band Saw HTZ 1400 Extreme 20 was chosen. This is the largest of Mebor’s horizontal saws and will enable us to cut logs up to 8 metres in length and 1.9 metres in diameter, further strengthening our flexibility to produce timber products for our customers.