Photographs of York Minster fire taken by retired publican Barry Grayson

BARRY Grayson had no idea, when he went to bed late on the evening of Sunday July 8, 1984, that the night ahead was going to be one of the most memorable of his life.

It was unbearably hot and muggy. But the landlord of the York Arms in High Petergate managed to drop off to sleep.

He was shaken awake by his wife Marie some time later. It was the early hours of Monday morning and it was obvious something was happening.

He poked his head out of the bedroom window and craned his neck to look along Petergate towards St Michael-le-Belfry church. He couldn’t see the Minster from where he was: but he could hear what sounded like a radio transmitter crackling, and someone answering. A car drove up, and he recognised a policeman he knew. Barry decided to ask him what was happening.

“I dressed, ran down the stairs, and went out. And as I went across the road to where the car was, I looked left.”

It was one of those moments in life that are etched into your mind forever, says Barry, now 82 and living in The Groves. Tongues of flame were leaping high from the roof of York Minster, lighting up the night sky.

“And I just thought: Oh, my God!” Barry recalls.

This photograph by Barry Grayson shows the roof ablaze

That was his first thought. His next thought was to get his camera.

He rushed home, grabbed his camera, and then spent the rest of the night observing and photographing firefighters’ desperate efforts to save one of Europe’s finest religious buildings.

It was a strange night, Barry says. In all, 114 firefighters and ten officers from 12 of North Yorkshire’s 21 fire stations were involved in fighting the fire. Yet the fire crews arrived almost silently, without sirens.

“They didn’t want to have a huge crowd,” Barry says. But of course word of mouth spread, so that by dawn, there was quite a collection of spectators watching from beside St Michael-le-Belfry.

There was a real spirit of the blitz about that night, Barry recalls. The woman who ran the Mason’s lodge with her husband trundled out a tea trolley to dish out cups of tea to the parched firefighters. Other onlookers arrived with buckets and spades, keen to help.

With his camera, he stood out. Someone asked him what he thought he was doing taking photographs. “They said: ‘How dare you get a record of our beloved Minster burning’,” he says. “I said: ‘This is history. It needs to be recorded’.”

Barry stayed there, watching and photographing all night and deep into the following morning.

 Barry Grayson with his album of photographs showing the fire and aftermath at York Minster in 1984.

We publish a selection of his photographs on these pages today. Barring one which was made into a postcard, they have never been seen in print before.

One of his photographs shows three tiny figures high up on the south transept as the flames leaped around them: firefighters who had been battling the flames from above.

In this photograph, the three tiny figures are firemen fighting the fire

Another memorable photo shows two firefighters in the grey light of drawn, their faces drawn with fatigue. One is sipping a cup of tea. The other just looks shattered. They had done a full shift on duty the day before, before being called out to tackle the fire, Barry says. “So they’d have been on duty for about 18 hours. They just looked drained.”

 In this photograph taken by Barry Grayson, two firemen show the strain of their long night fighting the fire at York Minster in 1984

As dawn came, Barry could see right into the Minster through the west doors. “It was completely full of smoke.” Then, when the sun rose, shafts of light speared down through the ruined roof and through the Rose Window. “They cut through the smoke. It was quite something.”

By 5.24 am, the firefighters had the fire under control. The minster had been badly damaged – the cost of repairs was later estimated at £1 million – but it had been saved.

Later that day, with the fire extinguished and scaffolding already being put up inside the great cathedral, Barry to sneaked into the Minster with his camera. It was in a shocking state, he recalls: daylight coming through the roof, great charred timbers tumbled everywhere.

The carved wooden figure of the Virgin Mary standing among the rubble. A crack running from beneath her eye looked like a tear, says Barry Grayson

In the midst of it all was a statue of the Virgin Mary made of unseasoned wood. He couldn’t get close because of the heat, but when he saw it later he could see that it had started to crack across the face from the heat. The crack went from one eye right down the face. “It looked like a tear,” he says. And yet apart from that, he says, the statue was undamaged.

“The complete roof had come in, and she was literally underneath it,” he says. “But she wasn’t scorched at all.”