In his garden shed, Tim Wheeldon’s hands trace the well-worn handles of his father’s old tools, their surfaces stamped with his name and the wooden grips stained with years of hard use.
He uses his father's old lathe and as he leans on his old bench, the scent of the freshly cut wood is another vivid reminder of childhood days spent watching him making children’s toys, pieces of furniture and little storage boxes.
The calm of the workshop is a long way from the high-pressure of Tim’s career as a consultant NHS psychiatrist in Edinburgh.
For around 20 years, he absorbed the increasing stresses of a stretched system, took on board the troubles of his patients, fellow professionals and feared for the creaking organisation around him.
As the stresses became too much, they took a toll on his health and Tim decided to step away.
But retiring aged 55 brought its own challenges: how to fill his days, would he miss his colleagues and patients?
And what might bring him a new sense of purpose?
He would not be the only one to leave a highly demanding career in healthcare, finance or business wondering what retirement might hold, only to find the answers in an old toolbox.
In a quiet corner of East Lothian between Haddington and Gifford, surrounded by farmers’ fields and just off a B road, The Chippendale School of Furniture is as far removed from the bustle of high stakes healthcare decisions, multi-million pounds business deals and intense workplace stress as possible.
Its typical students arrive from around the world to learn how to design, make and restore modern and traditional furniture, often with intentions to launch professional careers.
Yet in recent years it’s become a haven for people like Tim, sliding into retirement after long, high-pressure careers, or who are quitting the rat race in search of new purpose and a creativity.
There have been high-flying investment bankers leaving behind million pounds plus salaries, former pilots, IT professionals at the peak of their careers, well-paid oil and gas workers, top level accountants and senior doctors, all seeking a new start.
Instead of balance sheets, deadlines and deals would be mallets and chisels and a new language to learn of dovetail and mitered butt joints, flutes, jigsaws, crossgrain and crosscuts.
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The school marks its 40th anniversary this year, with the bulk of its past students typically young men and women planning to learn the skills for a professional career in furniture making.
But according to the school’s director, Tom Fraser, there has been a recent surge in demand from newly retired professionals seeking to stay active and engaged in a new phase of their lives by learning how to work with their hands.
That, along with record numbers of middle-aged students – often inspired by the impact of the pandemic to leave the pressures of the corporate world for a more creative one - led to the school recently introducing new, shorter courses.
Lasting from a single weekend to ten weeks during which students can make anything from a spoon to a mid-century coffee table, they have been snapped up. Half the places have been taken by retired professionals.
“Many of our students are retirees looking for something that will give them satisfaction and allow them to be creative,” says Tom, whose father, Anslem, founded the school in 1985.
“People are living longer. You retire at 65 and you can have another three decades of activity ahead, which is the length of many typical careers.
“A lot of people are getting to the end of their careers and thinking ‘what next?’.”
Career high-flyers can find the transition to retirement particularly tricky, he adds.
“Some people retire at the top of their business managing teams of 50 people every day they are in very demanding roles and then suddenly there’s nothing.
“Retiring is quite scary for people used to that high level of brain work in their job,” he adds.
“There are students who come having had desk-based jobs and have this intention of finding something that will give them more satisfaction, that’s more creative than they’ve had at work.
“Some come from design backgrounds, such as architects and graphic designers, and are frustrated at being a cog in a much bigger machine.”
Many have reached the peak in their careers yet are total beginners when it comes to using woodworking tools – the kind that their fathers and grandfathers would have been only too familiar with.
Indeed, often they have inherited tools from family members, but need guidance from tutors to help identify what they are and how to use them properly.
By the time they leave, however, they are said to be brimming with confidence, creativity ignited and with a list of projects they plan to conquer.
It’s more than just keeping busy during retirement, adds Tom, who took over running the school six years ago.
“Woodworking is good for the mind, there’s a therapeutic side, it’s problem solving, you are making something that’s never been made before and no one else has made.
“It’s about thinking carefully about what the next step is going to be, planning several steps ahead, working out problems.
“There’s nothing better than designing and making something with your own hands, taking it from start to finish.”
It’s physical too, he adds: “People who have been sitting at a desk for their whole career, are now standing at bench, moving and lifting.”
And for many it’s a tangible link with their past: “A common thing we hear is people who have inherited their father’s or grandfather’s tool chest, they’re going through it and wondering if they can get tools tuned up and working again, or even wondering what the tools are for.
“It’s that sentimental value of it; the feeling that being able to make something from wood is in the blood.”
For Tim, the quiet rhythm of sawing and planing, using his father’s tools was also a way to heal and reconnect with the tangible world.
"It took me a year to raise interest in anything because I was so burned out," he says.
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“I’m a passionate believer in the NHS and trying to help people, and a lot of my career was incredibly enjoyable. But in the last few years it had got more and more stressful: usual NHS, more and more to do with less and less resources.
“As a consultant trying to support your team, you end up as a buffer for a lot of anxiety and stress when things go wrong.
“It was very tough towards the end.”
Tim was part of a multi-discipline team that included other doctors, senior nurses and psychologists. Leaving that world behind put him in unchartered waters.
“I wondered how it would feel not being part of that,” he says. “I got very fond of our patients: you see some for decades and unfortunately if they have inheritable conditions, you see their children too.
“I wasn’t sure how retirement would be. But at the end, it was such a relief to stop and not carry all that responsibility.”
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His father and grandfather were both highly skilled woodworkers. Having inherited his father’s tools – complete with his name stamped on them – Tim felt it was time to find out how to use them properly.
He embarked on a one-month course at the school, made three-legged bar stools for his kitchen, repaired an old box his father had made him as a child to store his Lego and made a copy of it to keep his cufflinks in.
“Psychiatry is a very cerebral pursuit,” he adds. “You’re spending time trying to understand what is happening to other people but you don’t have a physical product at the end.
“It’s nice to be able to engage creativity, use different skills and at the end there’s a thing useful. It’s nice to leave something.”
London-based Dr. Paul Nunn spent decades as a public health professional with the World Health Organization coordinating global tuberculosis control programmes.
By 2021 and heading into his 70s, he too had grown weary of his demanding consultancy work and decided to retire completely.
“I was giving countries advice on how to run public health programmes, principally TB.
“But that became difficult with Covid. I did a few remote reviews and sessions but it doesn’t really work. I struggled for a bit but my heart was not in it.
“I thought I have to do it now or I’ll be dead.”
He retired, signed up for a 10-week course at the school and found a new creative outlet.
His first project was making a mallet, within days he had made a coffee table, then another table and a bathroom cabinet made from ash.
He’s now built a workshop in his garden where he crafts self-designed pieces that he designs himself, among them a workbench made using salvaged teak.
“I wake up in the morning with a purpose,” he says. “I know there’s a project that will result in something really nice.
“I left school nearly 55 years ago and there have been quite a few developments in terms of new machines to make life easier, new technology for pinning things together, mechanical planers, new glues - hundreds of different types of glues!
“It’s like a job.”
The skills he’s learned are also providing precious equilibrium after a career devoted to trying to make the world a little bit better.
“We are living in a horrible world, and it looks like it will get distinctly harder in near future” he says.
“To have social project and or creative project and producing something beautiful does something to redress the balance.”
