Swordsmith

Pressed Steel Manufacturer John Woodman Higgins of Worcester, Mass, has one thing in common with Shakespeare's Claudio: each would walk ten miles afoot to see good armor. For John Woodman Higgins, who manufactured tin hats for the A. E. F. during the War, is an enthusiastic collector of ancient armor, has a private museum next to his stamping mill to inspire his workmen. With a lumberman, an elderly metallurgist, a surgeon and a number of museum curators he left Manhattan one evening last week, crossed the Queensborough Bridge to a spick & span brick blacksmith shop in a frowsy section of Long Island City. They were trailed by a carload of reporters, for the word had gone out that the elderly gentlemen, members of the Armor & Arms Club of New York, were about to forge a 16th Century rapier with all the ancient rites and traditions.

The Armor & Arms Club's first president in 1921 was the late Bashford Dean, arms curator of the Metropolitan Museum. Now numbering 50 men, probably its best known member is Telegraph Tycoon Clarence Hungerford Mackay who owns one of the finest private collections of armor in the world. The members are scholars who have written learned papers on almost everything from Japanese sword-guards to lobster-tailed helmets.

Kenneth Lynch, little more than 30, host and protagonist of last week's ceremony, is proud to be called a blacksmith, but within the past five years he has become one of the best known producers of handwrought metal work in the country, decorating dozens of hotels, churches, country houses, with screens, grilles, gateways, lanterns. Swords and armor are his hobby; in a few respects his reference library is supposed to equal that of the Metropolitan Museum. Not until last August did he have a shop he considered fit to invite his fellow members to, but the spotless, simple grey building to which the armor collectors went last week seemed like a sort of New Deal blacksmith's heaven. There are showers and a roof where his 35 craftsmen and associates can take sun baths. Light pours in during the day and not far from the roaring furnaces and clanging anvils stand vases of cut flowers.

Among relics new and old the armor collectors gathered last week, munching chicken sandwiches and sipping highballs, watched Kenneth Lynch in a dinner-jacket and his craftsmen in leather aprons finish the sword on which they had been working for three days. Moving from one anvil to another (each with a different ring), Kenneth Lynch saw that the blade was drawn, beveled, tempered, burnished; the quillons bent and chased to form a swept hilt and the grip wrapped with steel wire.

An ardent music lover, Blacksmith Lynch was also hard at work on another sword to present to Tenor Lauritz Melchior for his 100th performance as Siegfried this week.

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