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The men who saved the Minster
The Sunday of July 8, 1984 was uncannily hot and still over much of Northern Europe. Temperatures in Berlin reached 100 degrees and Yorkshire also wilted under a harsh sun that seemed more Sicily than Scarborough.
As Dave Silverside made his way through the airless streets of York that evening, the heat had barely relented. He was heading for work at the fire station in Clifford Street that faces Clifford's Tower. The 32 year-old leading fire fighter was on Red Watch and due to begin a 14-hour shift at six – a stint which was to be followed by his day off.
Those first hours of Dave's Sunday evening shift were busy dealing with minor incidents and a methanol tanker on the railway sidings at Hob Moor. After each turn-out, they returned to replenish and clean the fire engines.
Red Watch comprised 18 men although about 14 were on duty. At midnight they were stood down, at around the time a big electrical storm passed over the city. Some of the men had a cup of tea, some went to watch the telly. Dave Silverside got his head down and went to sleep.
Some time after 2am he was woken by another alarm. The men leapt over to the three poles that slid them down to their waiting engines. They were responding to an auto alarm, an AFA, from York Minster – something they had turned out for many, many times before.
First out of the doors in the lead machine was Peter Wright, the station officer in charge, a very experienced man who had followed his father into a fireman's career at Clifford Street.
He thought it was going to be a false alarm at the Minster once again. His driver shot down Coney Street, past the Mansion House and through Lendal. Turning right into Museum Street, Peter noticed something odd. It appeared to be misty. "I said to the driver, 'Take it steady, we didn't expect mist'."
Facing them, 300 yards ahead, was the great bulk of the west front of the Minster. From this position, the south transept in summertime is obscured by an avenue of trees in Duncombe Place. Within seconds, however, the bigger picture became clearer. What they had encountered in the speeding fire engine was not mist but smoke. "We could see flames coming out of the Minster roof. That shook us out of our complacency."
Dave Silverside, in charge of the second appliance, was hard on Peter's heels. Dave, sitting up front, spent the two-minute journey fastening up his tunic and donning his helmet, 'wet-legs' and boots. The rest of his crew sat in the back without leggings or helmets, anticipating another routine check-out and a swift return to base.
"As soon as we came round the corner I thought, 'Oops it's not a false alarm'," recalls Dave. "I shouted into the back, 'You'd better get dressed lads! – it's not an AFA'."
Peter Wright pulled up outside the main entrance and with a runner dashed inside, encountering "hot embers falling like rain."
Dave Silverside was despatched to locate the seat of the fire. "In the south transept, burning brands were coming down from the roof. I ran up a narrow winding stone staircase. It took me about a minute and a half. It was dark, although I had a torch, and I could see the flickering of the flames.
"As I climbed up, I was thinking, 'I hope nothing comes flying down here' because there was nowhere for me to go, it was so narrow. It was impossible to drag a hose up there.
"There was a door that opened towards me so it was very tight. It led to a roof space where I could see the fire. I went straight back down to report what I'd seen." Peter Wright immediately called for another 10 fire engines.
"The first man to get a hose on to the fire was called Chris Stark who had gone up a different set of stairs to me," says Dave. The Minster was fitted with 'dry risers' – in effect, fixed hoses running up the wall to which the firemen's hoses were attached at the bottom. It took 15 minutes for them to be charged with water and functioning.
The difficulty lay in the construction of the roof of the south transept. In AD 1220 it had been something of an experiment for its medieval builders. What you saw from below was a vaulted roof supported by an oak ribs joined at key intersections by carved oak bosses. On to this lattice was laid the rest of the timber roof. Above this structure was empty space and then came a row of immense 'A' frames forming a separate pitched roof which kept out the weather.
Close-boarded and lead-covered, this roof was naturally designed to repel water. So at the start, the fire needed fighting inside if possible.
"The Minster's quite a complicated place, so I went round with the
Minster policerman and asked him to unlock lots of doors because we didn't want any men trapped inside," says Dave. "I believe it was his first night on duty alone."
As the fire took hold, the struggle was to contain it to the south transept. If it penetrated the adjoining central tower the consequences did not bear thinking about. This structure is 60 metres high
and if that space was set alight, the result would the biggest chimney
fire anyone had ever seen. No-one could have hoped to extinguish that
until large parts of the biggest gothic cathedral north of the Alps had been made a blackened ruin.
It was to be a night of heroism in which, miraculously, no-one was hurt. Especially when the roof plunged to the ground at about 4am. "When the roof collapsed, I was higher up," says Peter Wright. "It was like a domino effect as the A frames came down. I saw a fireman spread-eagled on the parapet with a leg either side as the roof lifted up. As it did so, other firemen found themselves lifted up and then
put back down on the ledge where they were standing.
"There was no wind that night so the smoke went straight up – and that helped the firemen."
He also remembers strange coincidences. "It's the church of St Peter and I'm a Peter. The first senior officer to arrive was Peter, the first back-up crew was commanded by a Peter and the only person to suffer an injury – he got something in his eye – was a Peter. "On the left as you go into the south transept there was a big crucifix on the wall. I thought it was unusual for all that weight of timber to come down from the roof and miss the crucifix."
Molten lead dripped on to Dave Silverside and some of the other men, but they did not even notice until it was all over and they saw how it had burned permanently into their tunics.
The message "fire surrounded" went out at 5.05am. By that time, you could barely move for fire engines. "I think there were 40 engines by the end," says Peter. "There was another serious fire that night on the Moors, so it was a big joint operation. We went back to Clifford Street at about 9.45am – we hadn't seen each other all night so it was good to chat."
Firemen were on duty inside the Minster for another full day, watching in case of further outbreaks and helping to start clearing the charred wreckage covering the floor of the south transept.
"It wasn't until the following morning that we saw how narrow the roof ledges were in the Minster and I thought, 'Was I daft enough to run along that?' says Peter Wright. "It was the adrenaline that kept you going."
The Minster authorities later honoured the fire-fighters with the award of the Cross of St William. Each man is allowed to bring one home when he retires.
Geoff Brayshaw turned up for work
that Monday morning at 7.45, 15 minutes early.
"I thought it was a joke when heard it on the news. It said the the Minster had been burnt and I I thought, 'What's burnt'? Then I looked up at the south transept and there was nothing there."
He was only in his twenties but Geoff had already been a Minster joiner for 12 years as part of their team of about half a dozen. After leaving school at 15, he was selected as an apprentice by the Dean and Chapter after they asked the local technical college to send along some of the likely lads on their building course.
"I'd repaired a lot of roof timber by then, but nothing on this scale. We had a blank canvas to work from. No-one had done anything like that since the 1220s. In charge of us we had a very knowledgeable and clever man called Bill Clay."
The vaulting had been kept in place by 68 carved bosses. After the whole thing crashed down, only six were any good and the oak they were made from had become a much scarcer commodity in the 700 years or more since the originals had been made.
"To make one like that you needed a piece of oak one metre square – you hadn't a cat in hell's chance of finding that in the numbers required. It was a similar thing with the ribs. You don't find oak of that length these days."
All the charred wood and debris was removed from the south transept floor to a builders' yard in Foss Islands Road where, as each skip arrived, the timber was laid out in such a way as to understand how it looked in situ. A lack of photographs showing how the roof had looked hampered this process.
Different methods of re-building were considered. Finally, they chose the one closest to the original. "Luckily, they went for it and we got stuck in," says Geoff, who is now the foreman joiner. A scaffolding was erected under the void in the south transept and on the plywood floor built across it was drawn the outline of the vaulted roof to be constructed above.
The replacement oak was laminated and glued and the fact that the ribs formed from it were in straight lines caused something of a headache. The medieval joiners worked with timber that was never straight and they had to fudge the proportions a bit to make things fit. "How they did it, who can say?" says Geoff. "But their things were never quite in line."
The biggest difference between then and now was the filling of the spaces between the ribs. Wood gave way to fire-resistant extruded metal sheeting which has two-inch thick fire-resistant plaster on either side. The space above the vaulted roof up to the pitched roof was divided into three separate fire-proofed compartments and there were other innovations such as trapdoors fastened by bolts designed to spring free in the event of a fire to allow access. In fact, the whole Minster became an object lesson in how to protect a building of this size and age from fire.
The whole roof was made and fitted within nine months.The restoration
was finished a year ahead of schedule, in July 1988.
The fire brigade report into the cause of the 1984 fire concluded it was "80 per cent possible" that the fire had been caused by atmospheric electrical
activity, with a 10 per cent possibility of arson, and a 10 per cent possibility of an electrical fault.
Dave Silverside says: "Up where the fire started, I could see a copper lightning conductor one and a half inches wide by a quarter inch deep that ran down the side of the building. I was surprised lightning could have caused that fire."
The winding steps he ran up on the fateful night are also those which Minster visitors climb if they are planning to go to the top of the central tower. So there was the opportunity for someone, accidentally or on purpose, to start a fire. But no evidence of arson was found. And in that area that weekend there had been no maintenance work – a previous cause of accidental fire.
Red Watch and other firemen will be at a "bring your own lunch" picnic after a service next Thursday at York Minster at 12.30pm to commemorate the anniversary and celebrate the Minster's survival and restoration. The service is open at all.
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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