It is with a heavy heart and great sadness that we announce the passing of our friend and colleague Mike Batters following a short but courageous battle with cancer.
Mike was a founding member of the Recclesia team having been with us since inception in 2009, but my father and I had worked with him for almost a decade at Linley Stained Glass prior to then. Mike led our glazing and metalwork conservation and installation team throughout that time and remained involved with everything we were doing despite his illness through 2018.
Mike took the lead on all Recclesia’s flagship stained glass and metalwork projects. At Manchester Town Hall he led the site team through an epic project to remove, conserve and reinstate over four hundred stained glass windows. At St Monica Trust in Bristol Mike oversaw the removal and repair of three thousand leaded lights and bronze frames, a project that we worked on for almost three years. Mike also worked on a number of smaller but very complex glass projects too, and was instrumental in the rescue of the John Hutton glass from Bucklersbury House in Walbrook, London, as well as the nerve-wracking re-glazing of Paxton’s Fernery at Tatton Park, completed from above in a cherry picker with our hearts in our mouths. It didn’t seem to matter what project you presented Mike with, he took everything in his stride and always, but always, got the job done.
Mike was known throughout the company for his electric sense of humour and his merciless honesty about the world around him. Whether he was convincing an apprentice about his stint in the Swiss Navy patrolling the shores of Switzerland, or reeling off nonsense Welsh phrases which turned out to be place names, working with Mike was always entertaining.
I owe a great deal of the company’s success to Mike, his innovation, his creativity and his well-known ability to have a project finished in his mind before anyone else had even thought about how to start it. For that and more I give him my unreserved thanks.
Matt Batters, Mike’s son, was his father’s apprentice at Recclesia and remains in post to practice the skills and knowledge passed on to him. Mike is survived by his wife Emma and his five children. His funeral will be held at St Michael’s Church in Abergele on 16th January 2019.
We all owe Mike our thanks in one way or another, nobody more than I owe him thanks myself. So as Mike himself would have said; Dwygyfylchi mate. Thank you Mike.
Jamie Moore
Recclesia, Chester, 2019