Britain’s history is in safe hands
A new museum which shows how time stood still is a worthy winner of the Angel Heritage awards, finds Peter Stanford
‘Our lowest point was when we ran out of buckets to catch the water leaking through the roof.” David Humphries is recalling the peaks and troughs of his and his volunteers’ decade-long struggle to rescue the old Newman Brothers Coffin Works in Birmingham, and reopen it as the city’s newest – and now most popular – museum.
But Humphries and the dozen or so co-workers standing alongside him in the Palace Theatre in the West End of London are in no mood for dwelling on the downsides of their extraordinary endeavours. “Just because we’re from a coffin works, we’re not morbid,” laughs his colleague Suzanne Carter.
They have every reason to be on a high, because their conservation project has just won the accolade of the “People’s Favourite”, voted for by
Daily Telegraph readers, in the annual Angel Awards, which celebrate the unsung heroes of the heritage world.
The Newman Brothers Coffin Works had been producing coffin fittings – handles, plaques and other ornamental iron and brass decorations, including those for the funeral of Sir Winston Churchill – for a century before shutting up shop in 1998. “It was as if they just walked out one evening and turned the key,” recalls Elizabeth Perkins, a former director of the Birmingham Conservation Trust who is now chairman of the trustee board that runs the restored works. There were old-fashioned manual typewriters, Bakelite telephones, and even handbags and coats left behind by the largely female workforce.
“It was like the Marie Celeste,” Perkins says, “a throwback to an earlier age, and told such an important story about our industrial past and particularly the role of women in it. We just knew we couldn’t let it be turned into another block of flats.”
The annual Angel Awards, organised by Historic England, funded by Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s foundation and sponsored by The
Daily Telegraph, also recognised some other remarkable individuals who have dedicated years to saving and restoring historic sites against all the odds. None more so than 85-yearold Harry Barker, who was in the front row to see his ancient local church, St Mary’s, in Forncett St Mary in south Norfolk, presented with its prize for Best Rescue or Repair of a Historic Place of Worship by singer Connie Fisher, the face of TV’s Songs of
Praise.
A master carpenter, like his father before him, Harry was rehoused in Forncett St Mary in 2009, when his own home developed structural problems. “I’d had it with life,” he recalls. “My wife had died of cancer. I’d smashed my ribs in an accident. My house was falling down and finally I’d had a stroke. I was ready to die.”
Then one of the team responsible for restoring St Mary’s, which is mentioned in the Domesday Book, knocked on Harry’s door, having heard about his skills as a carpenter. In his youth, Harry built an entire puppet theatre for the children of Norwich in another redundant church building.
“I told him I was too old and that, after my stroke, there was nothing useful I could do any more, but he persuaded me to come along and see the church. I’ve been a churchgoer all my life. It was certainly a real mess”.
St Mary’s had been redundant since the 1980s and had suffered at the hands of vandals. “I kept telling him I just wasn’t capable of doing anything to help. My hands were working but my brain was shot. Then I spotted a piece of architrave that had been put on wrong. ‘I’ll sort that out for you,” I said.”
And while Harry was doing that small job, he noticed some panels in an old oak door that needed replacing. “‘I could probably manage that,’ I thought, and after that… well, it saved my life.”
Soon Harry found himself at the heart of this ambitious project, building a new altar and altar rail in oak, laying and insulating the new floor and – his most eye-catching triumph – restoring and repairing the medieval lych gate.
It was, he says, as if he came back to life along with the church. “The more I got involved, the better I felt,” says Harry. “It gave me a reason to get up and get out of the house in the morning.” As an advertisement for the benefits of volunteering, it would be hard to better.
And it is personal stories like Harry’s, remarked Dame Esther Rantzen, presenting another of the Angel Awards, that makes her so keen to celebrate the achievement of volunteers in restoration projects around the country in “[making] sure future generations will be able to know how people before them have lived”.