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The future of craftsmen is set in stone
In York, the best show in town next week takes you behind the scenes to reveal history in the making – and it's free. Michael Hickling previews an open day at the Minster's stoneyard.
Caught in the midday sun streaming through the windows, the material Geoff Butler is working on looks so creamy, and the stylised leaves he is fashioning have such fluency, they might have been shaped with a spoon.
Such apparent ease is deceptive. It takes a long time to learn to carve limestone like this, in Geoff's case a working lifetime.
His workshop is a place to take the long view of history. The floor underfoot crunches with chippings that are ground down to mingle with the dust that hangs in the shafts of sunlight. It brings to mind the dust of men who have stood here, patiently working in stone with much the same tools for more than 1,000 years.
The first stonemasons came onto this site about 630AD, although what they built was destroyed. The present Minster was for many generations of York citizens no more than a work-in-progress on the skyline. It was not finally ready and consecrated until 1472.
Today, Geoff Butler is the foreman carver in the stonemason's yard. He seems to have inherited not so much a tradition as a family story. Geoff knows exactly where he stands in succession to foremen going back to the 1870s whose names and quirks are still remembered. Geoff absorbed these stories from the man who trained him and who in turn was passing on the oral history from the men who taught him.
The lump of rock into which Geoff is carving a sequence of stylised leaves in the Perpendicular style is a repair job. In Minster terms, the worn-out bit is quite modern.
It's a section made by 19th century stonemasons after the fire – not the celebrated 1984 midsummer lightning strike, but the 1829 arson attack by an extremist Methodist called Jonathan Martin. Geoff's discussion of his work-in-progress reveals what continuity means in this line of work. The block in front of him is supported from a steel beam by chains attached to the stone through a device inserted in a hole drilled in the back.
This is called a "lewis" and Geoff casually mentions that his is not much altered from a medieval one. He goes on to outline the very slight differences between this and the type used by the Greek and Roman stonemasons of antiquity.
A time-travelling stonemason could walk in here and pick up where he left off, so little have the essentials of the skill changed. One thing, however, would baffle him. It's standing on the floor and although covered in dust, is clearly a 21st century interloper. It's a large amplifier for an electric guitar or bass.
The carvers' job is done in the shop. A team of fixers made up of masons fits their work in place in the Minster. The one presently being renewed will depict people in a theme. Medieval themed figurative work is often seen in misericords – the turn-up seats in choir-stalls. The chosen theme this time will be ailments – people with toothache, man with a crutch that sort of thing. Has anyone suggested bringing it into the modern day by inserting a zimmer frame, or something on those lines?
"No-one has a desire to bring this up-to-date," says Geoff flatly. "We have critics who'd latch on to that and say we were running away with ourselves. We prefer to do it in the original style. That's what draws us to it in the first place."
One of the modernising changes he regrets are the gargoyles – the monstrous and misshapen creations that were the means for draining off the rainwater. They were made redundant by the 19th century installation of fall-pipes. The bizarre figures their chisels carve today are officially grotesques.
The magnesian limestone they use comes from Tadcaster. "The stone is very close-grained – you can get details in it," says Geoff. "It varies from soft to quite hard, so one piece of work might take a fortnight longer than another."
He prefers to use a home-made mallet made from holly wood. He doesn't think his predecessors would be too keen on the ones you can buy these days with a plastic head. "You get quite a bit of bounce from them." He picks up a medieval axe – used in the days before gothic arches. It has been re-introduced over here by a French master mason in charge of Gloucester cathedral which uses French stone. "You can get stuck in with that," Geoff says appreciatively. "It's good for setting out."
He has been foreman since 1984. He's a local man from Acomb and he's been here 43 years – an entire working life apart from three years with another firm in a similar job. He began in 1962 restoring what remained of St Martin-le-Grand church in Coney Street after the Luftwaffe's Baedecker raid 20 years earlier. His tutor at night school put a word in for him at the Minster stoneyard.
"It was very Dickensian when I started here. Everything was like a battleship grey colour. They had archaic machinery – and it was great because of that. Then Bernard Feilden, the surveyor of the Minster fabric, said we had to modernise. So we bought a second-hand saw. It was 40 years old."
The carver in those days was George Huby, who with the rest of the stonemasons' team of 40 years ago looks out impassively from a group photo pinned to the wall.
"George had terrible arthritis but he taught me wood carving and how to make my own chisels. He came from Roundhay in Leeds every day. Carving is what a lot of masons aspire to, it's an extra dimension to your work. You never stop learning. We all learn off each other – we all are doing grotesques a different way."
Today, as in the past, the carvers' work is anonymous which does not mean it lacks individuality. With foliage, Geoff's eye can detect what has been made by the same hand. He recognises a distinctive crease mark that one medieval mason used to make.
One or two things have altered between then and now in working conditions. According to the Minster's Rules For Masons dated 1370, the men are instructed to "be each day by morning at work, in the lodge which is set aside for the use of the masons at work, within the close beside the church, as early as they may see properly in the daylight to be able to work. They shall stand there truly working all the rest of the day, as long as they can see clearly..."
Today about 150 tonnes of stone goes through the stoneyard each year. The most desirable quality to look for is a guaranteed bed height – the height between faults in the limestone. A limestone seam runs from Tadcaster down through Sherburn as far as Doncaster, although the stone has been sourced from various places in the Minster's history. At one time it came by water from Huddlestone quarry near Sherburn, via Bishop's Dyke, to the swing bridge at Cawood and then up the Ouse.
How long will this new stuff in the workshop last once it's installed? "A hundred years? Our old foreman reckoned 200 years. When I started and made my first trip up the West Front, I could see towards Leeman Road and there was a pall of smoke and steam from the marshalling yard coming towards the Minster.
"The West End of the Minster was black in those days. Some of the problems we've had since might have been to do with the cleaning of it. Jets of water were used and a lot of the grit and grime was allowed to run down. It was a learning period."
Stephen Mills, the superintendent of works, is another local man who started at the bottom. He was an apprentice electrician who later moved to pastures new. He was on the point of going to Kuwait when another Minster opportunity came up and thought he'd come back for a few months. It was 1968 and a huge project was underway just to keep the Minster up – the central tower had been found to be rotating and sinking. Stephen was in the top job by the time they had to man the pumps for the 1984 fire.
Lightning was identified as the probable cause although he doesn't think it was a direct strike. It's more likely the atmospheric conditions caused a build-up of energy which resulted in something like St Elmo's fire which you see on on ships.
In the aftermath Stephen had 76 people – painters, plumbers, brickies, lots of carpenters. Currently he has 47 men and women in the team, two of them electricians. He points out St Paul's cathedral has seven.
"Cathedrals never get finished, we're just looking after it for a while," he says. "Interest took off after the fire, people woke up about the heritage." How does he find the stonemasons and carvers to do the work? "Recruitment by word of mouth is the most productive way. Journeymen tend to just roll up out of the night.
"It's great to have different nationalities in the workshops. Sometimes we get carvers who have made mid-life changes of career. There's no ageism here."
At least four apprentices will learn their craft on the East Front. The great East Window has bellied and bowed and is leaning out by one yard. Since it started going that way when they were building the Minster, and that's how they are going to put it back, out of plumb.
By ordinary building standards it's an immense job, but it's by no means the biggest here. The West Front took 15 years. Locals came to think the scaffolding was part of the permanent look.
In York, along with all cathedral towns, they found the effective training of young craftsmen becoming problematic. Colleges can only offer a system of NVQ levels, one to three, which do not provide the degree of specialist expertise required. To teach that would bore or baffle the mixed bunch of students who take these courses, most of whom will not need it for modern building work.
So a new scheme has been devised. It's a Cathedral Workshop Fellowship qualification which has just found a sponsor in Prince Charles. "It's our own curriculum and these will be the best qualified apprentices in Europe, possibly the world," says Stephen. They will follow a four-year course covering carving, masonry, setting out, architecture, and conservation studies with exchanges and short courses as part of the mix.
"We will all be helping each other, although we already do that. Durham cathedral for example has very little carving, so they send people to York to learn it. You can earn better money making stone fireplaces, but once you've got a portfolio with York Minster in it, you've cracked it."
In many respects the work he is superintending has a better chance of lasting than many of his predecessors'. They were fairly rough-and-ready in medieval York and lashed up all sorts of dirty and dodgy structures, lean-tos, shed and shops against the Minster. There were shops in the nave. These were swept away but the pollution brought on by industrialisation was far worse.
A coal and gas plant stood to the east of the Minster and to the west was one of the country's busiest railway stations and marshalling yards whose soot combined with all the domestic coal fires roaring away. All gone now, along with with the black sulphates which combined with rainwater created sulphuric acid which destroyed the limestone.
"As a child I remember York as a smoky and nasty environment," says Stephen.
"That has changed so much, although in the Vale of York the air is never particularly brilliant. Another thing that has helped is the pedestrianisation of Deansgate which has cut down a lot of vibration from traffic."
For future protection of the Minster's exterior they are researching the methods of the old stonemasons. Egg whites are the most intriguing. Where did all those hens come from and doesn't modern technology offer a better alternative?
"I'm happy to trial a new product. It might be okay for 10 years, then you might find that half an inch of stone has dropped off. Asking the rep to come back in 100 years after we've trialled it properly isn't going to go down well."
The stoneyard backs onto a pub, which brings up another tradition – that historically stonemasons liked a drink. Those rules for stonemasons of 1370 which seem so explicit in laying down the law for working hours seem to get vaguer when it comes to this issue: "...in the afternoon they may drink in the lodge, and for their drinking time between Michaelmas and Lent they shall not leave their work for longer time that the time of half a mileway." (about 10 minutes). "They shall not sleep after noon at any time except between St Elenmas (probably May 3) and Lammas" (August 1).
Sociability in today's stoneyard seems to have picked up now that they have Australian, German, French, and American masons, two of them women. Theirs is an international language with an annual gathering in Freiburg in Germany, although next year it's in Trondheim in Norway.
At York, it was the German stonemasons who introduced a chisel-throwing competition which sounds like a version of quoits. The pub landlord got invited and the girl from the coffee bar. This comradeliness and sense of fellowship also explains the presence of that dusty amplifier in the workshop (and a set of drums stashed away in a store cupboard).
"Among younger masons, carving and rock'n'roll tend to go together and most play an instrument of one sort or another," says Geoff Butler. "It's very sociable, in fact at the moment it's about the best I've known it."
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Saturday 11 February 2012
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