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LONDON — For years the Haworth Parish Church in Yorkshire has withstood every onslaught, from the driving Pennines rain to thousands of tourists wanting to visit the final resting place of Charlotte and Emily Bronte. But one thing it couldn’t survive: The metal thieves who repeatedly stripped its roof in the night.
This week the church is surrounded by scaffolding, as a $2-million renovation begins with workmen removing Westmoreland slate tiles from the roof. They don’t have to remove the lead flashing and gutters, because those were taken by thieves in three daring raids over the past two years. With the lead gone, the rain poured in and the church began to rot from inside.
The Haworth Church, formally called St. Michael and All Angels, is particularly high-profile, but it’s merely an emblem of a much wider problem sweeping Britain during a time of rising metal theft. In a country so rich in heritage, how do you keep robbers from stealing history?
In the case of Haworth Church, the answer is typically Yorkshire (that is, blunt and succinct). “We’re installing a roof alarm,” says rector Peter Mayo-Smith, who has witnessed over the past two years the destruction of paintings and woodwork in his church as the elements took their toll. In some ways, he counts himself lucky. In a nearby diocese, the priest opened the doors of his church to find the brass lectern stolen.
Thieves have also stripped metal from the Sunday school classroom established by Patrick Bronte, Charlotte and Emily’s rector father, and from the parsonage where the family lived, which is now a famous tourist site. Not far away, the house of Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, a similar shrine for culture pilgrims, was also trashed by metal thieves.
If nicking metal from places of worship seems low, consider some of the other items taken recently, including hospital generators, war memorials, wrought-iron railings from graveyards and, in one particularly gruesome case, a brass plaque commemorating the deaths of two children killed by an IRA bomb.
“It makes me sad more than anything,” says Rev. Mayo-Smith. “There’s a lack of thought and compassion from these people toward their fellow neighbour. It says something about our culture which is rather unfortunate.”
Metal theft is thought to cost the British economy $1.2-billion each year, and it affects most people as a transport headache: In just three months last summer, 2,000 trains were cancelled because of copper-cable thefts. Network Rail, which oversees Britain’s rail infrastructure, spent $60-million replacing stolen metal over the past three years. Trains on the London Underground are regularly delayed after thieves’ late-night pillaging.
In order to tackle the problem, the British government has moved to cancel cash payments at scrap yards, and a private members’ bill currently moving through Parliament would further restrict scrap transactions, requiring tougher licensing rules for dealers and for sellers to provide ID.
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