Island Life Magazine Ltd October/November 2007 | Page 34

life

FEATURE

Photo:
Stonemason Dave Hailstone
pictured making a Label Stone
for a window surround for St
Thomas's Church, Newport.

Making their mark
on history
By June Elford

A two-man stonemason team based near Newport have had a hand in the restoration of most
of the Island’s churches. June Elford meets them, and finds their skills and techniques have
not changed since the building of some of the Island’s most important stone buildings
Do you ever look at a building and wonder
at the genius of its creator? Why was it
built? What purpose did it serve? Who
was the stonemason? When I went to
meet two stonemasons I found that
sometimes even before the first stone
was laid, the story had already begun.
Dave Hailstone and Dave Crouch
run Wight Stonemasonry Limited at
Dinglers Farm on the Yarmouth Road
outside Newport. Their business card
says “Architectural and monumental
stonemasons” and I discovered this
meant that besides carving gravestones
and inscriptions, they are also banker
masons who specialise in carving
stones into geometrical shapes and fixer
masons who fix stones on to buildings.
This sorted out we went inside their
workshop where huge blocks of stone
were stored ready for cutting. The floor
was coated with a fine white dust and on
the benches I saw an amazing assortment
of tools. The two Daves were working
on pillars to replace the old ones at the
cemetery gates in Carisbrooke. “If a

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Norman stonemason walked in here today,”
Dave Crouch told me as I admired the
trefoil design they’d carved on the stone,
“he’d recognise our tools. Today we use
the same ones and process those Norman
stonemasons used in the 12th century.”
Their chisels are made of steel and come
in a variety of sizes and shapes and lying
alongside the mallets similar to those used
by medieval stonemasons, there was a
plastic one for use in wet weather. Power
tools save time – I saw one that looked like
a gigantic dentist’s drill – but these require
as much skill to handle as the other tools.
Dave Crouch said that when St. Thomas’s
church in Newport produced an advent
calendar last year to raise funds for the
church’s refurbishment, he found they
had worked on nearly all the churches in
the pictures, like St. George’s in Arreton
where they were involved with the Burma
window. They also spent two weeks
setting out the tracery for a window in
St. Thomas’s before they started on the
complicated job of replacing the original
70 stones from Caen with new Bath stone

cut in accurate geometrical shapes.
The two Daves are proud to be Isle of
Wight born and bred. Dave Hailstone
started his career as a stonemason
working on Department of Environment
sites and it was the DOE who sent him
to a building craft and training school in
London. Dave Crouch’s family lived in
Carisbrooke Castle where his father, Peter,
was a stonemason and Dave followed in his
footsteps, training at Weymouth College to
get his City and Guilds in stonemasonry.
A stonemason in the Middle Ages earned
the name ‘freemason’ if he was a highly
skilled stonemason employed as a ‘free’
agent to build castles and churches
in England and as the work was often
dangerous, the masons formed lodges
to take ca re of any injured members
or their widows and orphans.The term
freemason is not used in modern day
stonemasonry but at the Freemasons’
Lodge in Newport, you’ll see the badge of
the United Grand Lodge of England, an
open compass across a square, carved
into the building’s wall in Lugley Street.

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