What is your version of hell?
Before I read "The Winchester Diver", mine was something like: splitting a cab with Vince from Sham-WOW! in peak constuction season during a Barry Manilow-a-thon radio broadcast.
William Walker, aka the Winchester Diver, was the last hope of a desperate engineer, to save a 12th century cathedral from sinking into a prehistoric bog. Turns out the medieval builders had placed the footings of the gigantic stone church over a thick layer of peat. This caused the church to settle and crack immediatley after it was built. In fact, the cathedral was renovated in 1403 to fix the resulting cracks (and upgrade it to the outrageous Perpendicular style), however the settlement continued, and in 1903, jeopardized the safety of Winchesterites ...especially sinners looking for forgiveness. The vaulted stone ceilngs were pushing the fragile walls outwards and enormous cracks placed the cathedral on the verge of collapse.
No problemo, said the engineers, we'll just dig underneath the fat, fragile limestone walls and underpin a new foundation. This is when they discovered the peat, and suddenly the fragility of the church made sense. Then they stuck a shovel in the peat and all hell broke loose.
Peat is ancient bog vegetation that is compressed to such an extent that is pretty much waterproof. In fact, the water table trapped beneath the peat is also under pressure, and when workers penetrated this tightly woven layer, water exploded into the excavation faster than pumps could remove it. In fact, attempts to pump the water actually reduced the surrounding soil's capacity to support the masonry, and the operation was halted. The engineer was desperate.
Commercial diving was relatively new in 1903. Divers hired to repair wharfs and recover sunken cargo wore thick suits, enormous brass helmets and heavy lead boots. Air was supplied from above through awkward, heavy hoses, manually pumped by a mimum-wage labourer turning a crank. Despite the crude and cumbersome technology of early divers, engineers thought a diver was the solution.
Enter William Walker, an energetic and dedicated all-purpose diver. While his training working in deep, dark, cold waters of shipyards certainly prepared him for underwater work, I doubt that Walker ever thought he'd become world-renowned as a cathedral restoration icon.
The plan was simple....after shoring the enorous walls and buttresses of the tall cathedral walls, workers would excavate a narrow and deep trench underneath the thick stone walls, below the footing and gravel until they reached the peat layer. They would then erect timber supports and remove as much peat as possible until the chamber filled with water. Walker would then submerge himself in up to twenty feet of ice cold peat soup-water in complete darkness. Armed with a pick and shovel, he would remove the peat in the recumbent position until the gravel was reached. Workers would then lower bags of dry cement into the hole and Walker would arrange them to form a noble new footing, then lance the bags. Grout was then pumped through a hose which Walker would use to seal the bags into one monolithic footing. Once the cement set up and the water source sealed, the water was pumped out and masons would lay 24" cast stones and corbelled brick up to the old Norman foundations.
Now, this sounds simple enough, if you can somehow get over the fact that this is absolutely insane. I would classify my own claustrophobia as mild to moderate and I have laid and repaired stonework in some pretty tight and somewhat questionable places, however I suspect I would lose my mind after the first eight minutes of this operation. Walker worked by FEEL with NO GLOVES. The ice-cold spring water would have been numbing. The diver worked in 100% blackness, yet somehow impressed the engineer with his precision and speed. Walker spent six years underpinning the cathedral, working six hours a day, six days a week, and bicycling home every Saturday several hours to see his family.
If I was Walker, there's a good chance I'd use that day-off to drink as much lighter fluid as possible just to balance the sheer insanity accumulated over the week.
These are the guys who become Spider Man villians....those scientists or inventors who were mocked by society for their off-beat theories and banished to create some doomsday weapon that could lift Manhattan Island a thousand feet in the sky unless J. Jonah Jameson admits he was wrong and "Insane Scientist with Green Skin" was right AND the mayor of New York leaves two million dollars, in two untraceable one-million dollar bills, resting on a parapet (without a paperweight) at the top of the Chrysler Building.
You know...those guys.
But he did it. Somehow he shrugged off the fact that he could die at any second, wether by collapse of a billion tons of limestone, or a mudslide, or drowning, or lighter fluid poisoning, and just "got 'er done". Even after his trusty labourer once walked away from the air pump, leaving him to breathe his own halitosis for ten minutes in complete blackness, Walker continued to get back in that hole and finish the endless task of saving the enormous building.
So why did he do it? What made him perservere? Was it an admiration of heritage stone buildings? Was it dedication to his craft? Was it the love of a woman? You could spend years trying to solve this puzzle.
The answer is this: William Walker went down in that hole every day, in fridgid darkness, carrying over 24,000 bags of cement because of two things.
First, he had a HUGE moustache. Gay bikers would murder an entire maternity ward to have a moustache like Walker's. It was thick and black, parted in the middle and combed politely to either side, sweeping down his cheeks and lifting lightly to a sharpened point, like two fox pups, obviously in love, slow dancing to Stairway to Heaven at the prom. It was a beautiful moustache. It must have filled the entire brass diving helmet. In fact, even if the subteranian trenches were lit with the intensity of a thousand suns, I doubt Walker would have been able to see past the facial hair packed inside that metal globe. I suspect Walker looked forward to spending time alone with this moustache, as any man would. The conversations they must've had!
Walker: "Well, I'd better take a breath and lift this bag of cement then put it over there"
Moustache: "That is a solid idea Will. You're fucking brilliant!"
Walker: "....you really think so?"
Moustache: "Absolutely. You're the man! Wooooooo!"
Walker: "...I wish my wife would see it that way."
Moustache: "Forget her, Will. Where was she last week when we couldn't find the pick...remember that? It was dark...and cold....the pick was missing? Remember that? ...and we didn't know where it was? ...Where was she then? ...Who found the pick Will...who? It was YOU and ME man....it's always been YOU and ME"
Walker: "....yeah!! ..high five!"
The other reason William Walker was able to get back into that hole is that he smoked a pipe. And not just any pipe. Walker had one of those irresistable Sherlock Holmes pipes that cantilevers perfectly off the lip and follows the jaw stylishly off to one side ...and makes you hold it gently between your thumb and forefinger to lift it briefly from your mouth and say "Preposterous!" or "Egad!"
Imagine the exotic spicy smoke that was allowed to filter through his nose and fill that moustache. I'll bet that after coffee break, Walkers enormous moustache held four hours of sweet pipe flavour that fuelled him to push on.
"Wholly shit man....it's really dark....I'm gonna fucking snap!!! .....wait.. is that......cloudberry?? Why, that's delicious. That's freakin' FANTASTIC!!! Hey...I'd better get back to work!!"
I think if men were still allowed to smoke pipes like Walker's, there would be less crime. Think about it. I checked the police files for 1903 and there were litterally no records for any Internet related underage pornography rings. None. And why? Pipes. Big honkin pipes. Made from endangered elephant tusks. ...oh, and Boler hats too. It would be like: "Hey Lenny....wanna go knock over some garbage cans?" ..and Lenny would pause and say: "....Preposterous!"
So let's all raise a glass to William Walker, the most excellent Winchester Diver,
....who risked life and limb to save a cathedral
....who showed us to take pride in our work
....who demonstrated the very essence of patience
....who illustrated that the day ends at 5pm but the project can last years
....who reminds us that in the absence of such comforts as light and warmth, we must focus on the goal
....who we must allow ourselves to admire and draw inspiration from
....who added a new chapter to Winchester cathedral and the craft of stonemasonry
....who had a wicked moustache.
In conclusion, I would like to upgrade my personal definition of hell to include "wearing lead boots in a gigantic leather suit with a massive brass sphere on my head, in ice cold pitch darkness, underwater, carrying bags of cement, forever, with a billion tons of incredibly fragile stone over my head, breathing through tube supplied by a moron turning a crank. Oh...and the ShamWow! guy....he's just annoying. JS
The Wellington Diver was written by Ian Henderson and John Crook, Henderson and Stirk Publishers, 1984, 130pp ....a good read!
