A historical question: What were hewn "battens" used for?

[heimlaga]

In the mid 19th century lots of timber was exported from Österbotten (a region in western Finland) to England. A lot of it was shipped to Hartlepool and other East Coast ports aboard ships built and owned by farmers från Österbotten or Åland. Hewn beams and sawn boards and pit props and precut wheel felloes and wheel spokes are typical examples of what was shipped out.

One of the more common dimensions was called "läkt" in Swedish or "battens" in English and sold by the dozen. A batten was a long and slim spruce log which was hewn on two sides only to form a kind of slab two inches thick with live edges and the pith in the middle.
Has anybody seen such materials in some old buildings or du you know what theese battens were used for?

 

[andersonec]

Maybe it was just a technical answer to hand hewing, because of the amount of physical labour needed only two sides were flattened and the other sides were left untouched.

Only a guess..!!

Andy

 

[Jacob]

"Battens" was/is a loose general name for a variety of timber sizes. Mid 19C (and earlier) they were also importing vast amounts of sawn timber from Scandinavia - similar sizes then as now.
I don't know about your "hewn" battens but maybe they were for industrial use. It's easy to forget how much industrial stuff was made of timber, from road transport and railway wagons upwards - industrial plant, hoppers etc
The 'hewn" timber I see is either very large softwood beams with adze (or scrub ish plane) marks - some above my head as we speak 9" x 15" 1874. Or hardwood of all ages - sometimes pit sawn, sometimes axe/adze finished.

 

[heimlaga]

Those two inch thick hewn battens must have had a specific use. Such wast amounts were exported every year for decades. If I have understood things right they were made from very slim logs so I doubt they were sawn into smaller dimensions later. I was pondering if they could have been used as roof decking under tile roofs or maybe under thatch.

Hewn softwood beams were another mayor export product. Some of the beams you have seen Jacob might have come from Österbotten. I would probably recognize the style of hewing with some degree of likelyhood as many regions had their own broad axe types producing different patterns.

 

[blackrodd]

As Jacob says, battens can be almost any size, but today, we seem to refer to batten as anything 2"x 1", or less
I do, even though I can remember this at college/ night school.
It seems to be another term from many, many years ago that has almost lost its full, original meaning.
Unless the timber "Baulks" were rough hewn flat, to help in having a more staple load, at sea, and also being flat on 2 sides there was not a lot of waste being exported, my theory, it could be cobblers!
Scantlings, is another term from apprentice days, , I've just Googled Scantlings, and it says, "Very small sectioned timbers"
Never heard the term since College, 'nor cut any!
Regards Rodders

 

[Terry - Somerset]

Possibly may have been used in coal mines as pit props. I understand these were often sourced from the Baltic states, I assume because over the years the mining and other industries had reduced timber cover to around 5% during the 19th century.

Rgds

Terry

 

[Mark A]

Possibly may have been used in coal mines as pit props. I understand these were often sourced from the Baltic states, I assume because over the years the mining and other industries had reduced timber cover to around 5% during the 19th century.

Rgds

Terry

My thought too.

 

[blackrodd]

Possibly may have been used in coal mines as pit props. I understand these were often sourced from the Baltic states, I assume because over the years the mining and other industries had reduced timber cover to around 5% during the 19th century.

Rgds

Terry

My thought too.

Pit props, You may well be right, but the stuff that my firm sold for that was a particular size, which I think was 6"x 2", and mostly elm, and oak, and not even seasoned.
Regards Rodders

 

[glynster]

Battens were traditionally (and still are) used in wall finishing & construction by plasterers. They provide a vapour barrier between the plasterboard and the solid stone/brick wall - because almost all UK houses are of solid wall construction - the battens are fixed to the wall and the then the plasterboard (drywall - gyproc) is nailed to them. They can also be used as a depth guide in solid wall plastering (Plaster applied directly to a solid wall) so the plasterer can throw the plaster on quick and fast and then run his darby over the battens and flatten out large areas of backing plaster in one go - the battens can be buried or removed before the top coats of plaster. They are also used generally as spacers and intermediate wall fixings etc - to attach curtain poles to etc.

The kind of battens you describe are probably the type you still find as the older equivalent of the "Stud" in traditional plaster and lathe walls (woven spruce strips over a crude "batten" studwork onto which plaster was applied - I believe the lathes were often split with a hatchet as needed - maybe the battens you describe are the source timber for that ). I've only ever known battens as a term primarily in the building/plastering trade

 

[heimlaga]

Thanks glynster.
Your explanation makes a lot of sence. Wood in that dimension would work as studwork behind lath and plaster. One flat surface against the masonry wall and the other flat surface facing out and used for fastening the lath. For ligth partition walls there would be lath and plaster on both sides of the studs. The sides of the studs that faced into the hollow of the wall could be left round to save labour. Which they were.

Pit props were an entirely different thing. Another mayor export of ours for over a hundred years from the mid 19th to the mid 20th century. They were round spruce or pine poles some 5 or 6 inches in top diametre I think. They had a standard lenght. The bark wasn't even removed.
As late as the 1950-ies steamships would archor in sheltered bays along the coast to load pit props out of the water. The pit props had floated downriver and at the river mouth they were collected within a girdle of floating logs and later towed to the side of the steamship. They would have an iron frame that was lowered from the ship onto a floating timber raft alongside. Local workers stood on the raft stacking pit props inside the frame until the water was knee deep on the raft. Then they would stand on the stack of props inside the frame and continue stacking until the frame was stacked full. Then the frame was lifted inboard with the ship's steam winch and lowered into the hold where the pit props were stacked again.

 

[AndyT]

I've had a look in a few books but can only offer a few pointers that might be helpful.

During the C19th, Finland was governed as part of Russia, so in looking for where contemporary descriptions of the import of timber from Finland, we need to look for descriptions of the trade with Russia.
As far as I can see the main distinction seen from this end of the trade was between the timber coming out of the White Sea ports of Archangel and Onega in the north (which we could think of as just Russian) and that from the Baltic sea and Gulf of Bothnia in the west - where Russian (ie Finnish) wood is considered alongside timber from Norway and Sweden. Frustratingly, the descriptions I have found all seem to concentrate on the Archangel timber.

As for the sizes, the practice was to import as 'baulks' (ie the whole log, squared) planks, deals or battens. The difference between these last three was in the breadth. Sawing into 'scantlings' was done by the timber merchant at the English end of the trade, not by the exporter, though by the end of the century this practice ceased to apply, as more timber was sawn into scantlings before export. The word 'batten' has lost its timber trade meaning and is now used just to refer to wood of very small section, used to hang roofing tiles from, or as an intermediate layer for fixing to.

These pages may help unravel some of the complexities - they are from "Every Man His Own Mechanic" a very readable book from 1882 which sought to explain to the thrifty middle classes how they could do their own jobs without employing any pesky tradesman.

As for the uses of battens from the Baltic, this description is of the Swedish side of the Baltic from very late in the century and confirms that softwood from there was really the general purpose building timber of the time, so in general, battens would be used for anything where the size was right for economical re-sawing and the quality fitted with the class of work.

But if the nub of your question is what might make riven battens preferable to sawn, then I can only guess along with the others. I reckon that the most likely uses would be for low-quality work where economy was more important than straightness. Disposable uses for packaging would make sense and so would further splitting into laths for lath and plaster construction. The second half of the C19th was when Britain was going through a huge building boom, with millions of cheaply built terraced houses constructed. These all had lath and plaster for ceilings and internal partitions; the lime plaster was pushed through the gaps between the laths and will stay in place even after it has come unstuck from the wood. (I've never seen lath and plaster against a brick wall though - that's a modern technique suitable for big sheets of factory-made plasterboard.) They also had plenty of the lower grade timbers - I've seen ceiling joists with bark on the side, well below the nominal dimensions.

 

[heimlaga]

Thanks Andy!!!!!!!
Apparently I had totally missunderstood the term batten. A batten was actually a 7 inch wide plank 21/2 or 3 inches thick. That explains a number of things. A hewn batten must have been a half log which was hewn square. Not a slab taken from the middle of a log as I had been missinformed.

This also explains the existance of those gigantic old English flat belt driven cirkular saw benches with rope feed and blades over a metre in diametre. To me they have seemed utterly impractical as you need at least two square surfaces on a log to keep it stable on the table. They were surely made for large scale resawing of imported planks and baulks.

From here it is only some 40 or 50 nautical miles across the sea to Umeå the nearest old time timber port in Sweden. People speak related dialects of Swedish on both sides of the Gulf of Bothnia and many of us have friends and relatives and business connections on that part of the Swedish coast. In the old days the ties were even closer. What applies on the coast of northern Sweden usually applies here too more or less.
Archangelsk and the area around lake Onega or Äänisjärvi as we call it is a world apart from us.

Great information
Thanks a lot!

 

[blackrodd]

Battens were traditionally (and still are) used in wall finishing & construction by plasterers. They provide a vapour barrier between the plasterboard and the solid stone/brick wall - because almost all UK houses are of solid wall construction - the battens are fixed to the wall and the then the plasterboard (drywall - gyproc) is nailed to them. They can also be used as a depth guide in solid wall plastering (Plaster applied directly to a solid wall) so the plasterer can throw the plaster on quick and fast and then run his darby over the battens and flatten out large areas of backing plaster in one go - the battens can be buried or removed before the top coats of plaster. They are also used generally as spacers and intermediate wall fixings etc - to attach curtain poles to etc.

The kind of battens you describe are probably the type you still find as the older equivalent of the "Stud" in traditional plaster and lathe walls (woven spruce strips over a crude "batten" studwork onto which plaster was applied - I believe the lathes were often split with a hatchet as needed - maybe the battens you describe are the source timber for that ). I've only ever known battens as a term primarily in the building/plastering trade

glynster, A Darby.
Now there's a blast from the past, a Darby, Haven't seen one of those in a while, not down here in sunny Devon,anyway.
For premixed (bagged) plasters like carlite our plasterers use WERKRITE feather edged straight edges, I still have my set.
For sand and cement render we use a straight length of bevelled or feather edged skirting, as the abrasive sand wears the alloy quite rapidly.
I don't see you're location, are Darbies still popular at you're locale?
Regards Rodders