Britain Passes Plate for Cathedrals : Religion: Millions of dollars are needed to repair damage caused by acid rain, natural decay and poor Victorian restoration work.

Brian Eacock shook his head as he clambered down from a scaffold stretching nearly to the vaulted ceiling of Worcester Cathedral.

“Another emergency,” said the cathedral’s clerk of works, his dark hair powdered with the dust of antique stone.

A worshiper happened to notice a stone working loose 70 feet above, but Eacock fixed it in time. “We were lucky. It could have dropped,” he said.

Another might drop tomorrow. The red sandstone cathedral, perched elegantly above the River Severn in western England, needs $20 million in repairs over the next 15 years, church officials say.

Worcester is not alone.

The Church of England has found that half of its 42 cathedrals will need at least $140 million by the year 2000 to repair damage caused by acid rain, natural decay and poor Victorian restoration work.

Famous edifices such as Canterbury or London’s St. Paul’s survive well. Those such as Worcester, Gloucester and Hereford, far off the beaten path in western England, are in pressing need.

Last summer, cathedral caretakers conceded that individual donations, marmalade sales and vicar’s teas cannot preserve the buildings. Banding together for the first time, they appealed to the government.

“Unless such assistance is given there is a real danger of our cathedral buildings and artifacts falling into a spiral of decay,” Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie wrote in August to then-Prime Minister Margaret M. Thatcher.

The government on Nov. 8 promised to make $23 million available over the next three years.

Eacock and his craftsmen, meanwhile, are planning how to bandage the Worcester Cathedral’s weak spots.

In the 11th Century, Bishop Wulstan began to erect the present church on the site of an earlier cathedral founded by Benedictine monks. Wulstan’s crypt has worn well, but the legacies of the Victorians haunt Eacock and his crew.

During massive restorations between 1855 and 1870, workers refaced 70% of Worcester with new stone and replaced crumbling gargoyles and statues inside and out. The square central tower was scraped down several inches to remove decay.

The work saved the great church, but “it’s a slightly mixed blessing,” said Worcester’s dean, the Very Rev. Robert Jeffery, a portly man with Ben Franklin glasses and tufts of untamed white hair.

“They were tempted to do only the things that showed, and they used some technologies which proved not to work.”

Some problems come from the natural decay of stone, slate, timber and lead, but the Victorians caused others by, for instance, refacing walls with poor quality stone, bound to the original walls with iron clamps that have rusted, expanded and burst the stone.

“Worcester’s been a holding operation for years,” Eacock said.

So far, a crisis appeal for $8 million has raised $7 million. A flying buttress has been rebuilt and workers have begun rebuilding the north porch. Each time scaffolding goes up, new problems are detected.

“We keep losing track of the program,” said Eacock, who has spent 22 years at Worcester. “We have a goal, then something else comes up.”

Victorian work is also a problem at Gloucester.

“What they chose just hasn’t stood the test of time,” said Dean Kenneth Jennings, who launched an appeal for $8 million in December, 1989.

Most cathedrals have been overhauled every 100 to 150 years, and all the major ones were restored between 1860 and 1880.

“It was a mixture of scholarship and need” that led to the enthusiastic and often good work, said Alan Rome, the architect at Salisbury. “The 19th Century was a period of the first appreciation of medieval architecture.”

Salisbury is in the fourth year of trying to raise $13 million to save its famous 404-foot-high, 14th-Century spire.

Cathedrals also incur wear and tear from busloads of visitors, many of whom drop pittances in donation boxes. Income from visitors to Worcester rose 15% in 1989, to an average of 44 cents apiece, Jeffery said.

“I always tell people, ‘Yes, come in, it’s free. You don’t have to pay,’ ” said John Lamplugh, chief administrator at Winchester in southern England. ‘ “But if you don’t do something, there won’t be anything here for your grandchildren.’ ”

England’s cathedrals, of which about 30 date from the Middle Ages, are mostly smaller than their French and German counterparts. They evolved, however, in highly individual ways: from the great early Gothic frontal screens of statuary at Wells, Salisbury and Lichfield to the elaborate fan vaults on the ceiling of Gloucester.

The cathedrals, some once very wealthy, lived off their endowments until 1840 when the Church of England distributed the savings among smaller churches. In return, cathedrals were given annual incomes which have been eaten away by inflation.

“By now, certainly, they bear little relation to the cost of running a cathedral,” said Dr. Richard Gem of the Cathedral Advisory Commission, a church body of 20 experts and church officials.

Ely Cathedral, for instance, receives $120,000 annually to cover all costs except the salaries of its dean and two canons, or sub-deans. By 1985, this did not even meet the cost of conducting services in the building famous for its unique octagonal central tower.

Ely began charging admission in 1986. No other cathedral has followed suit, though some make donations hard to avoid on entering.

The clergy at Lincoln tried to raise money by sending their copy of the 13th-Century Magna Charta to a world’s fair in Australia in 1988. The venture ended up costing the cathedral $112,000.

Attempts to raise $16 million for Hereford Cathedral caused a national uproar after Dean Peter Haynes and the chapter, the cathedral’s governing body, decided to try to sell its 13th-Century Mappa Mundi.

Taken aback by protests, the dean and chapter canceled plans to auction the map, which shows Jerusalem at the center of a flat world.

In October, a new “Care of Cathedrals” measure paved the way for state funding for the cathedrals.

It’s unclear how soon government money will be available, but the Very Rev. Wesley Carr, dean of Bristol, isn’t too worried.

“We at cathedrals don’t think in terms of five years, but in terms of 800 years,” he said.