Robert 'Mouseman' Thompson

4th September 2021

Add a piece of traditional British furniture history to your home with an 8-foot oak refectory table, eight oak dining chairs and a sideboard from the Robert ‘Mouseman’ Thompson workshop - three highlights from our Antiques and Collectables auction on 11th September, lots 424, 425 and 425A.

Robert Thompson was born in Kilburn, Yorkshire in 1876, the son of a carpenter and stonemason who took up the family business when his father died in 1895. From producing furniture for locals, he moved on to ecclesiastical commissions, embracing traditional construction methods rather than modern tools, and influenced by the Gothic style and the Medieval Age - in line with the Arts & Crafts movement of the time.
It was in the mid-1920s that he began to sign his furniture with the now iconic mouse carving, the story being that one of Thompson’s craftsmen remarked that “we all as poor as church mice”. The mouse was registered as a trademark in 1931, and the family firm Robert Thompson’s Craftsmen Ltd, still based in Kilburn, uses the same traditional techniques and the mouse trademark to this day.