York blacksmith Don Barker to feature in BBC's Mastercrafts series

POT-HOLED back roads lead to Don Barker’s forge and the sat nav doesn’t offer much help. Over the phone, Don says to look for a white house with iron gates. “Made by you?” I ask, “Well, yes… but we’ve lived here for 34 years and it wasn’t until six months ago that I finally got round to it. Bit like a cobbler’s shoes, you might say.”

It’s a frosty morning; the car suggests minus-one but it feels colder.

Fortunately, Don’s directions to the warmth of his forge, near Wigginton, are as good as you might expect from someone who pays attention to detail for a living. Inside, the roaring coke fire offers welcome refuge. Don’s smile is equally inviting and with a wave he calls out, “Be with you in a minute,” before turning to select one of his time-served hammers.

Flying sparks cast a sunburst glow across his face as time and again he beats a steel bar against the anvil. It cools rapidly and becomes difficult to work, so he puts the bar back into the intense heat of the fire. It’s burning at about 1200 degrees and beads of sweat gather on his furrowed brow.

Don’s lips are pursed; he is summoning all the concentration he can muster because it can still go horribly wrong – even for a master blacksmith.

“Sorry about that, but you can’t leave metal in the fire or it will burn and that’ll ruin it. Cup of tea?”

Don may be working on a humble poker, but he can turn his hand to anything. He has made gas lights and restored the railings at Westminster Abbey as well as bronze lamps and handrails for the Queen Mother’s memorial in London. But he nearly missed out on his vocation. While blacksmithing in his family dates back to the 18th century, it died out during the 1930s, when his grandfather decided that his sons should take a safer career path as teachers.

However, the idea of standing in front of a classroom wasn’t for Don, so he became an engineer. Finally, his natural calling won through when, aged 38, he did the right thing and restored the family tradition.

He says: “Basically, I taught myself, but I did have some training on power hammers and things like that. My grandfather was the village blacksmith in Hutton Buscel, near Scarborough, and I’ve still got his shoeing anvil and some tools.

“In this job, managing the fire is the important thing. Generally the hotter the metal, the easier it is to work. But having said that, you don’t always want it mega-hot, because you want to see what you are doing more with delicate work, so we do that at a lower temperature.

“And we never say it’s 900 degrees or it’s 1100 degrees; we always say its cherry red or its sparkling white, or bright yellow, or dull orange; that’s the way we work. You can forge at any of those colours it all depends on what you are trying to do.

“It takes a while to get the hang of it and some people never do; but you learn to manage metal by working it in the fire until you can see that it is right.”

Forging means the metal has been hammered – either by hand or with a power hammer for larger pieces.

“They are easier so we use one whenever we can and leave the hand hammer for more delicate work. Some people refuse to have a power hammer in their shops, but I’m not the sort of person who struggles – nor am I pretentious about old-fashioned techniques.

“I believe the craft should move with the times. If all those guys 200 years ago had known about power hammers they’d have given their right arms to have one. Blacksmithing has to move with the times, it does… or you get sunk.”

But Don still uses an array of hand hammers with prefixes such as texturing, ball-faced and leafing. An example of his work with the latter is the water leaves which adorn the old station entrance in York’s Toft Green.

He is also working on gates at All Saints Church, in North Street, and has just finished the new sign for Fairfax House. But his most prestigious job in the city was the millennium gates at Rowntree Park. Forged from stainless steel, they are the largest he has made.

He doesn’t only work on upmarket projects. “I suppose the weirdest thing I’ve done was the coffin for the Dracula exhibition in Whitby,” he says. “As you come in through the door, the lid goes up and he rises out of the coffin. Then somebody cuts his head off and he sinks back down before the lid shuts.” Ironically, Don has finally taken up teaching and youngsters in deprived inner city areas now benefit from his formidable skills during craft lessons.

“It’s very satisfying; I took one class and these two lads were naturals, really good they were, and they asked if they could stay on for the next lesson. So I said, ‘I don’t know, you’ll have to talk to your teacher’.

“Well they came back and afterwards the teacher asked ‘are you okay with these two kids out here with you?’ I said ‘yes they’re brilliant’. ‘Oh’ she said ‘they’re the two worst kids in the school’.

“But they had obviously found a niche; something they were good at but weren’t allowed to do it at school, because these days all the wood and metalwork courses have been binned. It makes me really angry.”

Don’s handiwork is set to become famous when this month he will feature in an episode of Monty Don’s TV series Mastercrafts. He also works at a 16th century forge in Lincolnshire which has an original brick hearth that certainly impressed the production team.

“The director came in and said ‘blimey the props guys have done a fantastic job of this’. So I said, ‘hang on a minute, this is all real, it’s nothing to do with your props guys’. They couldn’t believe it.”