Steve in my office doesn't waste his spare time. He likes to fiddle about on his infernal computer, and send e-mails about our company to all and sundry. One of these reached John Burton, architect to Westminster Abbey only minutes after he had initiated the search to find a blacksmith to repair the hinges on a gate to the tomb of Henry V. The grille, one of the earliest works in iron to survive in Britain, was commissioned in 1425, from the smith Roger Johnson.
To quote Gilbert Scott 'if we compare it to the grille of Queen Eleanor's tomb, we find we have left art and arrived at mere architecture' , and Ffoulkes, 'The architectural treatment of iron most certainly offends one of the essential laws of good craftsmanship.' Less critically, Starkie Gardner says 'Of English work of the fifteenth century, one of the best of the 'joiners' grilles closes the chantry of Henry V in Westminster Abbey, and was made by Roger Johnson of London, between 1425 and 1431, the agreement still being extant. It exactly resembles some of the fourteenth century joinery …. since all the details, including the massive timber framing, are reproduced in iron by a combination of smiths' work with the use of pierced sheet iron.
The gate had been hanging at a crazy angle for as long as anyone can remember. Of three hinges, two were missing. Someone had had a go at drilling and tapping two holes near one of the hinges, but must have given up after breaking a drill.
The original hinges had been fixed with rectangular blind rivets, the frame bar having been closed around the rivet. Of six rivets needing replacement, one had pulled out and the rest were broken off flush with the frame.
The brief was to do an 'appropriate' repair, which I took to mean to replace the missing parts as near as possible to the originals. The chosen method was to drill and chisel out the stubs of the old rivets, and bond in new, soft puddled iron rivets, and hope glue would resist the rivet being smacked up with a big hammer.
I made the new hinge parts from eighteenth century charcoal iron, recovered from spare bits of the gates of Grimsthorpe Castle, this in preference to puddled iron, as it is harder, the better able to resist wear.
The pintle was forged in one piece, first as a tee, by punching and splitting, then swaging the journal and last forging the square corner. Rivet holes were then punched and drifted. The socket was cut hot from 3/16 charcoal plate, rolled up and forge welded. The rivet holes were cut out hot with a sharp chisel, the bottom one on a mandrel.
The gate was brought back to our workshop in Yorkshire to fit the missing pintle and test the method. What a privilege to have that in the shop! I was apprehensive about rivetting on to the frame on site, not least because heavy blows would be needed, and the grille didn't look all that secure in its arch. In the event it was o.k., but the job took some time as we had to keep stopping for prayers, and when the guided tours came to talk about Edward the Confessor, who was lying, in his tomb, ten feet away.
Despite the noise, we didn't awaken any of the residents, and left them in peace for another six hundred years.
It was a dream come true to be working in the Abbey, right next to the Eleanor grille, but strangely enough we never did get that gate to close, as it turned out to be ½" wider than its opening. Perhaps Roger Johnson knows why.
