Heritage skills policies should be set in stone (From Craven Herald)

Heritage skills policies should be set in stone

11:08am Saturday 16th August 2008 in Dales Folk By John Sheard

Huge swathes of this country are in a state of near nervous breakdown over the failures of our educational system. It has become the nation's favourite blame game, with the teachers blaming the politicians, the politicians blaming parents, and parents blaming everyone but themselves.

Here, in Craven, we are particularly lucky with our schools - unless, of course, you are Left-leaning and want to scrap our two superb grammars - but in other parts there are still millions of children leaving school barely able to read and write, never mind do sums without a calculator.

At the same time, there is a critical shortage of skilled men and women capable of laying a line of bricks or electrically wiring a house - a situation which will get worse when all our skilled Polish workers go home because their economy is now in much better shape than ours.

This is why a relatively new venture by Craven College is so important to those who appreciate the unique building styles of the Yorkshire Dales and why men like Kevin Lambert can, fingers crossed, take us back to the future - and save what is precious before it is too late.

Kevin, from Lothersdale, is a stone mason, the son, grandson and great grandson of Nelson stone masons, once the cream of the construction industry who built much of the North Country with their bare hands from rock quarried from the Pennine hills.

But halfway through his apprenticeship 40 years ago, his stone mason employers shut up shop and his articles were taken over by a building firm that turned him into a bricklayer. That might sound like a sad story but, in fact, it turned out to be a great advantage to the young lad - he left school at 14 - because it gave him an over-arching knowledge of the construction industry.

"There were 200 employees at the new firm and just me and my dad were stone masons," he says at the college's Centre for Construction and Heritage Skills. "It meant when the company picked up contracts to repair or renovate stone buildings - and there are thousands of them in the Pennines - dad and I got the job."

For a time, though, the stonework faded into the background. He met and later married his Dutch wife, Humbertina, on a walking holiday in southern England - both are keen ramblers - just as Margaret Thatcher was pushing up interest rates to 15 per cent to tackle rampant inflation.

The construction industry collapsed (why am I getting an overwhelming feeling of déjà vu?) so off he went to Holland where he could earn much higher pay ... as a brickie. But they came back to settle, first in Skipton and then in their 300-year-old converted farmhouse in Lothersdale, and things began to look up. In particular, there was a growing demand for stone masons.

The craft had teetered on the verge of extinction, but stone buildings like the town halls in Skipton and Settle needed urgent repairs so Kevin joined Craven District Council's building department - now hived off - using his joint skills: one of his jobs was to rebuild 50 council house chimneys.

After that, with demand growing fast for his masonry skills, he launched out on his own, as well as re-building their farmhouse with its 10 acres of grazing where he keeps rare breeds of cattle, sheep and poultry.

The latest twist in a long and busy career came three years ago when Craven College decided that dying heritage skills not only needed reviving, but also offered good jobs for youngsters who might prefer to work outdoors with their hands rather than sit in a stuffy office in front of a computer screen. Kevin went back to college two years ago and qualified as a heritage lecturer.

"There is a lot of talk these days about youngsters not being interested in trade and craft skills, but that is just not true given one essential ingredient," he says. "You must focus their minds to get them interested and then they can become totally passionate about the work.

"We have plenty to do because, thankfully, there is a growing interest in the heritage movement from Government. Modern policy is to refurbish old buildings rather than pull them down. We are advising on a big project in Colne to restore a church, a mill and no fewer than 700 mill cottages which the local council had planned to demolish and replace with new.

"We worked out that you could restore an old cottage for £30,000 - much less than building new - and there are huge environmental savings. You use the same stone, rather than demolish and transport it to a dump somewhere, and then bring in all the new materials: in transport costs and CO2 emissions alone, that is a huge saving."

Congratulations to Craven College and people like Kevin Lambert for recognising the simple fact of life that some people are better working with their hands than sitting in an office.

Such thinking might also have saved us from the ravages of the 1960s, when millions of perfectly sound cottages were bulldozed to make way for the council estates which today disfigure many of our towns and cities.