Norman Yates’s upholstery workshop was situated in the first cottage you encounter on The Green South since he first opened it on Armistice Day 1986.
He remained there until his retirement in May 2022 and his shop has now been converted into a residential house.
He was born in Crowmarsh in December 1946 in one of the coldest winters in living memory. He had three older sisters and was the son of Reg Yates, the village blacksmith. Their cottage had no electricity when he was a boy and he remembers going up the stairs to bed by the light of a candle.
In 1958 the family moved to the newly built village of Berinsfield that had just been constructed on the old wartime air base. He later moved to Wallingford where he started his own family and lives there to this day. At school he discovered he had severe dyslexia which, at the time, was not something the teachers recognized so he was always put in the lowest class.
Customers may have wondered why he got them to write down their address on a piece of paper which he pinned to his overcrowded notice board or, as he called it, “his organised chaos”. If he needed an address from a customer over the phone he would ask them for directions and sketched out a map, unbeknown to them, as they talked.
He started an apprenticeship at the Lupton Morton furniture factory in Wallingford which was making stylish furniture in the 1960’s. As part of his apprenticeship he would go once a week to High Wycombe, the chair making capital of England. He went by bus to Henley, then changed for High Wycombe, arriving late but in time for a brew. After a lunch break and one
more brew it was time for an early start to get back home. He admits he didn’t learn much furniture making there.
When the factory closed he went to work for an upholsterer in Reading and then decided to start up on his own, firstly working from home in Wallingford and then in Warborough, starting work every morning at 8 o’clock.
He nearly died when he had a major heart attack and is now fitted with a pacemaker. He is eternally grateful for the treatment he received at the John Radcliffe Hospital and is rightly proud of the fact that, as he received 6 pints of blood from them, he has now donated 87 pints back.
Many of the Midsomer Murders films have featured his shop and when the tours of groupies used to visit the village he welcomed them into his packed little front room and told them of his experiences with the stars. The charity tin was always full when they left.
To watch him at work fixing a tapestry cover on an antique, somewhat distressed looking, chair was to watch a true craftsman at work. Sadly another craft, in our throw-away society, that is in decline.
Now retired, Norman would like to thank all his customers who have, over many years, brought in furniture of all sorts and sizes to be given a thorough, but sympathetic, refurbishment and new life breathed into them. Hopefully many houses in Oxfordshire and beyond will have evidence of Norman’s skills lasting for many years to come.
Contributor – Ray Thackrah