James Leonard's name belongs to the Lamstak, the cast aluminium and moulded plywood chair that went into Britain's rebuilt schools and then into New South Wales ones, and we have a set of those as well. This is the other kind, and it is the rarer survivor by a long way, because the plywood chairs were built to outlast the children sitting on them and duly did, while an upholstered chair in a school hall wears through and sags and gets skipped.

These four were not skipped, and that is most of why they are here. The cloth and the frame paint are both original, which on a school chair means it never went back through a works depot to be made good. Turn one around and the evidence is on the back of the rest, a row of domed studs holding the covering down, every one of them set about sixty years ago and not touched since.