Caroline Anstruther – Alec Miller’s first woodworking teacher
by Barbara Alderton
With his bag of tools in one hand and a bag of clothes in the other, Alec Miller later said of his arrival in Chipping Campden that he had “walked up Campden’s one, long street entranced and happy – a mile long street with hardly a mean house, and with many of great beauty and richness. It was, after Glasgow and Scotch village architecture, as foreign as Cathay and as romantic as the architecture of fairy-tale illustrations. In a word, it all seemed unbelievable! Was I in the twentieth century, or the sixteenth? ”
Chipping Campden was Alec’s home for the next 37 years.
![Alec Miller](https://courtbarn.org.uk/app/uploads/2021/04/alec-miller-1.jpg)
A master carver and sculpture, Alec was born in 1879 to strict, Baptist parents who struggled to make ends meet in the dark, narrow confines of a Glaswegian tenement.
His father, a cabinet-maker, determined to give his seven children a better future, enrolled the twelve year old Alec in a seven year woodcarving apprenticeship run by philanthropist, Miss Caroline Anstruther (later Mrs Mackay). She, like other followers of the Arts & Crafts movement, believed art and especially craft, could counteract society’s ills.
![Alec Miller](https://courtbarn.org.uk/app/uploads/2021/04/Alec-Miller-2-227x300.jpg)
With Caroline’s support Alec learned figurative and ornamental woodcarving. She encouraged him to read, take drawing classes at Glasgow School of Art and fortuitously introduced him to C R Ashbee at the point when his Guild was moving to Chipping Campden.
Want to learn more?
These books are available in the Court Barn Museum shop:
Alec Miller: Carver Guildsman Sculptor – Graham Peel
Alec Miller: Guildsman and Sculptor in Chipping Campden – Jane Wilgress
You may also be interested in Jane Ashbee A Comrade Wife and Invisible women