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From careful removal to delicate recolouring, restoring ancient glass to past glories is a delicate business
In time, says Steve Clare, it becomes "a complete bloody obsession". You can see why: this is a thoroughly complex business. You have to understand, first, just how a nine-metre squared window fits into a building and what's holding it there. You'll need a knowledge of glass itself, how it was made, why it needs work now.
An artistic sensibility, to grasp the creative intent of the original artist and the forms he used – that goes without saying. As does a meticulous mind (a large window can be made up of tens of thousands of pieces, and a mile or two of lead) and a steady hand: you wouldn't want to shatter a 600-year-old saint's head, would you?
In short, you need most of the same skills as the person who made the thing in the first place, and then a few more. "It's not for everyone," concedes Clare. "But glass is just delicious. Some of this medieval stuff, it's extraordinary. It actually gains through the textures it acquires. And of course, they're major works of art."
The initial steps are preparatory: you examine the glass in situ, draw up a detailed condition report and take a lot of photos. You decide what you're going to do on the basis (the Victorians were, regrettably, rather more cavalier) of the less the better. Then you take the window out and examine its fixings: what's the mortar like, is the ironwork, or ferramenta, in good nick?
Then it's back to the workshop, where you photograph the whole window again against a light panel; make a series of rubbings on which you'll place the pieces when the work is being reassembled; and – gulp – dismantle it. Next you clean and conserve, using fluids, scalpels and brushes, often under a microscope. You may need to touch a piece up with a special paint, stain or enamel, whose precise colours and properties you will have tested in advance many times, and fire it in the kiln.
For the releading, you use an oyster knife (as in a knife for opening oysters) with a lump of lead on the handle: the blade eases the glass into the extruded H of the lead, the handle hammers in farrier's nails that hold the whole assembly temporarily in place as you progress. You may not need as much lead; these days you can sometimes use resin to stick broken glass previously repaired with leading. The lead itself is soft and easy to cut to length with a sharpened palette knife, and glass, once hazardously snapped and "nibbled" with a tool called a grozing iron, is cut these days with a state-of-the-art tungsten-tipped wheel.
We've been making stained glass for 1,000 years, and using it more or less extensively to decorate our cathedrals, churches and (if we were fortunate) our homes since the Middle Ages, peaking in Victorian times. We've been restoring it since the 17th century; stained glass conservation has long been a craft in its own right.
At the moment, Clare and his half-dozen staff are working mainly on some remarkable 15th-century windows from St Winnow's church near Lostwithiel in Cornwall; some of the glass is badly corroded, partly by salty sea air, but the lines that compose the faces of the Virgin Mary, of St Michael, and, beneath them, of the work's donors, are of quite startling purity.
There are, says Clare, no more than a few hundred stained glass conservers at work in Britain today; several major cathedrals have workshops, and a handful of small firms – including Clare's, Holy Well Glass – work independently for churches, cathedrals, stately homes and the likes of the National Trust and English Heritage. It's a profession as vulnerable as the glass it works with.
Bodies such as the new National Skills Academy may help, but for the moment "training is a mess" Clare says. "One qualification we spent time and effort designing has just been dropped, and another is supposedly coming. There are probably 15 people across Britain waiting to start, but it's an uphill struggle. It's a shame. These are skills that will die unless they're passed on."
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