PART ONE:  EXORDIUM.

 

 

 

1.  INTRODUCTION AND HISTORIOGRAPHY.

 

The Study of the Victorian Provincial Architect and Mallinson & Healey's Credentials as Good Subjects.

 

 

The study of Victorian architects, although an ever-growing field, is notable for its largely consistent model:  a résumé of the individual architect's ancestry is followed by a still briefer consideration of his education and training, and the rest of the work is devoted to a (usually chronological) review of his buildings, accompanied by a sometimes lengthy and inevitably speculative account of his artistic, philosophical and/or religious development which the writer considers underlay the changes in style and approach displayed in his oeuvre.  This is not an approach without justification:  indeed, when the principal or only surviving evidence for the architect's life and work is those buildings themselves, accompanied, no doubt, by an entirely random sample of extant plans, elevations, estimates, grant applications, bills, etc., it is difficult to see how it can be otherwise. Yet it leaves some fundamental questions unanswered: what were the practical obstacles the architect had to overcome in establishing himself in independent business;  how did he build up the kind of client base that could sustain him in bad times as well as good;  how was his typical working day comprised and what specific factors helped or hindered smooth working;  perhaps most importantly, what standard of living could he hope to enjoy from all the trouble and effort involved if all went well and how could he protect himself against the possibility that things might go badly?  It will be the examination of the life of the early Victorian provincial architect at this very basic level with which this thesis is principally concerned.  If other studies of Victorian architects can be considered to comprise the superstructure of the subject, the object of this study will be to provide some underpinning.

  

 

James Mallinson and Thomas Healey, whose careers will be examined here, were born and educated in the West Riding, Mallinson spent his entire working life there, and Healey lived away for just sixteen years altogether, while he was Head Clerk to Harvey Eginton in Worcester. The only buildings outside Yorkshire for which their partnership seems ever to have been responsible were the humble little church of St. James, Dale Head, unspecified cemetery buildings in Bacup and almshouses in Grindleton (all in Lancashire), and Shinfield parsonage, Wokingham (formerly part of Berkshire), but within the three Ridings of Yorkshire, and during the years from 1845 until Healey's premature death in 1862, the firm was responsible for over a hundred substantial new buildings, including at least fifty places of worship and about thirty each of schools and parsonages [1].  Since three-quarters of these were confined within the mediaeval parishes of Bradford and Halifax, the partners had a major impact on the built environment of those towns and their associated townships, which makes it all the more remarkable that references to them in the twentieth and twenty-first century literature on the region are so very slight.  Pevsner, indeed, made no mention of the practice in the introduction to his Yorkshire West Riding volume of The Buildings of England series (1967) [2], and Derek Linstrum afforded it just four passing references of barely half a dozen words each in the main text of his West Yorkshire Architects and Architecture (1978) [3], together with two-thirds of a column inch for Healey and about one and a half inches for Mallinson in the 'select biographical list of Yorkshire architects' which serves as an appendix.  Nonetheless, neither the quantity, nor even the quality, of the buildings erected is the full or even chief reason Mallinson and Healey provide such excellent subjects for the present study, for it is not difficult to find other neglected, provincial Victorian architectural firms in other parts of the country, of equal, or almost equal, worth.  Indeed, at the opposite end of the West Riding there was William, Thomas James, and Charles Burrows Flockton, father, son, and grandson (fl. 1830-1935), who together with their various partners, built several hundred buildings in Sheffield and its environs, and none of whose members Linstrum mentions at all [4]. Mallinson and Healey, have more to offer to the advancement of provincial architectural history because  their practice was a very active but stable one, comprising throughout its existence the same two men with never more than one or two assistants (in the latter case, Healey's two elder sons), thereby ensuring that all the work came directly from their heads and hands. Moreover, and perhaps most critically, the firm can boast, beside at least fifty extant buildings and a considerable volume of correspondence, plans and elevations, four day-books, covering the years 1854-57, in which are recorded every visit the partners made, every visitor they received, every letter they wrote, and exactly what they did and when, down to such minutiae as the times of trains caught or missed and the sums spent on candles or sealing wax.  The preservation of such detail makes it possible to address a range of issues that can only be inferred or surmised in the case of other practices elsewhere.

 

 

There is in addition the issue of the dates of the practice in relation to the Gothic Revival.  Pugin published Contrasts, which first set the ecclesiological cat amongst the architectural pigeons, in 1836 [5], and the formation of the Cambridge Camden Society (later the Ecclesiological Society) followed three years later;  Ruskin's Seven Lamps of Architecture appeared in 1849 [6], and it was this succession of events above all, that initiated the most contested phase of the Gothic Revival, which only began to lose some its heat from the early 1860s [7]  However, whereas Mallinson and Healey were at work throughout this period of maximum agitation, the more substantial studies of provincial Victorian architects carried out hitherto, tend to miss this chronological target to a greater or lesser degree, as in the case of Christopher Webster's book on Chantrell [8], which makes a limited but rare attempt to examine the nuts and bolts of the practice but which examines a time that is largely too early, and Geoff Brandwood's work on Sharpe, Paley and Austin [9], which discusses a period that is predominantly too late.  Mallinson and Healey's partnership, in contrast, was - in the entirely literal sense - central to the course of the Gothic Revival, which consequently has the potential to endow its study with additional significance.

 

 

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The Course and Historiography of the Gothic Revival to c. 1865.

 

For all the eclecticism of Victorian art and architecture, it is the Gothic Revival with which the stamp and fashion of the reign is most commonly associated.  Charles Locke Eastlake (1836-1906) wrote the first history of the movement while it was still very much in progress (1872) [10], but it was left to the young Kenneth Clark (1903-83), over half a century later, to be next to take up this, by then, unfashionable subject [11], and another decade passed before his namesake, Basil F.L. Clarke (1907-78) produced his 'lonely pioneering effort', Church Builders of the Nineteenth Century [12], which examined in detail for the first time, the most important architectural genre of the age, namely the four thousand or so, built or rebuilt Anglican churches that brought a little distinction to some of the burgeoning towns' dreary suburbs [13].  From that point onwards, falteringly at first but later with increasing frequency, books appeared on specific aspects of the style or its more significant proponents, although Nikolaus Pevsner (1902-83), who was seriously conflicted in his attitude to Victorian architecture in general, writing in 'Victorian Prolegomena' in 1963, was still unable to refrain from dismissing the Gothic Revival as 'aesthetically indefensible', damned by its willingness 'to produce what the prospective patrons wanted', and its unwillingness to embrace modernity in the form of iron and glass [14]  His grudging recognition of Sir George Gilbert Scott's Midland Grand Hotel beside St. Pancras Station, in The Buildings of England (1952) [15]. was undermined by his condemnation of it for hiding 'the engineer Barlow's train-shed which, with its 243 feet had the widest span ever up to that time achieved by man' [16], so it was probably little wonder the building was proposed for demolition four years later (by British Rail), and fortuitous that by this point, the waters of architectural fashion had crept back over the sands sufficiently for the building to be saved and awarded Grade 1 listed status under the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947 before the deed could be carried out. The first book of real substance celebrating one of the great Victorian ecclesiastical architects then followed after another four years, when Paul Thompson published his architectural biography of William Butterfield (1971) [17], who for many years past had been the most mocked of all the Revivalists, derided for his polychromatic 'holy zebra style' which now distinguishes him as one of the nineteenth century's most original architectural voices.  Anthony Quiney's book on John Loughborough Pearson then appeared in 1979 [18], and today, important biographies on some of the other important and influential nineteenth century architectural practices issue from the publishing houses at regular intervals and have included in the last fifteen years, books by William Whyte on Thomas Graham Jackson (2006) [19], Gill Hunter on William White (2010) [20], Michael Hall on George Frederick Bodley (2014) [21], and Geoff Brandwood on Temple Lushington Moore (2019) [22].

 

 

All these men apart from Chantrell, were metropolitan architects, however, and Chantrell was London-trained (in the office of John Soane) before recognising an opportunity in the rapidly growing manufacturing town of Leeds and moving there in 1819 to spend the most active part of his career within its purviews, not to return until 1847 [23].  It was to be expected that he would take with him a metropolitan mindset therefore, and something similar may have been true of Sharpe, Paley and Austin, partners in the firm of constantly shifting proprietorship in Lancaster (fl. 1835-1910):  Edmund Sharpe (1809-77) was educated at St. John's College, Cambridge, and had travelled extensively in Germany and France before opening his Lancaster office in 1835 [24];  Edward Graham Paley (1823-95) was the son of another St. John's alumnus and was himself educated in London until the age of fifteen [25];  and Hubert James Austin (1841-1915), though born in Darlington, received the most important part of his architectural training in Scott's London office in Spring Gardens, where he worked on his master's unsuccessful competition entry for the Law Courts and the designs for the Midland Grand Hotel [26].

 

 

Such men, therefore, were unlikely to be fully representative of architects who were born in the provinces, educated in the provinces, had not had the means to go on sketching tours on the Continent, and had spent their entire working lives in the provinces once their training was complete, and yet even for provincial architects defined in the widest sense, Chantrell and Sharpe, Paley & Austin excepted, the literature is largely confined to papers, articles in academic journals, single chapters in books, or, at best, short monographs, among the most substantial of which are the books by Anthony J. Pass on Thomas Worthington of Manchester [27] and by Brian E. Torode on John Middleton of Cheltenham [28], while the former include Brenda Poole's paper on John Colson of Winchester (1820-95) [29], and Canon Brian Carne's article on Thomas Fulljames of Gloucester (1808-64) [30].  Papers and articles are naturally constrained by space but so they are often also by limited research objectives and/or a serious lack of documentary evidence [31], which sometimes appears to reduce them to a gazetteer of buildings [32].  Yet, as previously suggested, some works on the major metropolitan men display the same tendency, notwithstanding the high-flown treatment that may accompany them.  'Architectural biography' in Andrew Saint's words, 'has favoured the imaginative approach because here the individualism natural to the purer arts finds its easiest outlet... [and] when imagination is accorded priority, what actually happens in the architectural process is frequently falsified' [33].  Some of the areas that deserve more detailed attention are set out below.

 

 

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 On Architectural Apprenticeships, c. 1820-50, and the Opportunities and Difficulties facing the Newly Trained, Provincial Architect.

 

Charles Dickens (1812-1870) penned by far the most familiar literary portrait of a 'corner-street' Victorian architect in his picaresque novel, Martin Chuzzlewit, in which one is introduced to Seth Pecksniff, 'Architect and Surveyor', who 'never designs or builds anything' but makes his money by 'ensnaring parents and guardians and pocketing premiums' [34].  Satire this may be, but satire depends for its effect on the mannered exaggeration of commonly acknowledged behaviour or characteristics, and many aspirants to the profession of limited means were doubtless articled to men in the early Victorian years in whom some of these traits were recognisable, as George Wightwick recounted from his own experience in an article in Bentley's Miscellany (1852) [35].  Indeed, the probably well-intentioned but largely talentless Walker Rawstorne, to whom James Mallinson was apprenticed, may have been another [36].

 

 

Moreover, money was inevitably critical in determining whom a pupil might reasonably expect for a master.  Apprenticeships did not come cheap.  Canon Brian Carne recorded that Thomas Fulljames's placement with Thomas Rickman in 1822 cost his uncle a premium of 200 guineas (i.e. a 'one-off' payment) plus £63 annually for Thomas's board and lodging [37], while Brian Torode's research into the life of John Middleton showed it was not only the income of a family that could determine a son's fortune but also his position within it [38].  This is reflected in the parallels that can be drawn between the experiences of Sir George Gilbert Scott and James Mallinson on the one hand, both of whom were third sons, and John Middleton and Thomas Healey on the other, who were only sons - or rather, in Healey's case, the only surviving son.  Scott's father, the Rev. Thomas Scott, was perpetual curate at Gawcott, Buckinghamshire [39], and likely to have been in receipt of a very meagre stipend that was never likely to allow him to send more than his eldest son to school and then on to Cambridge [40], and so when Scott - who had twelve siblings altogether and had been home-educated after a fashion - was fifteen, his uncle in London was tasked with seeking out an architect to whom he could be articled. 'It was a sine-quâ-non that he should be a religious man', Scott wrote, 'and it was necessary that his terms should be moderate' [41].  Scott was taken to London and placed with a Mr. James Edmeston.  Next morning he was invited out by Edmeston to see some of his mentor's works 'when - oh, horrors! the bubble burst, and the fond dream of my youthful imagination was realized in the form of a few second-rate brick houses, with cemented porticoes of two ungainly columns each!' [42].   In contrast, John Middleton, who was born in York, although orphaned at the age of fourteen (in 1834) after his father - a shopkeeper - and mother had died within eleven months of each other, was taken under the wing of an unmarried uncle, who became John's legal guardian, sent him first to a private school just behind his home, then between the ages of fifteen and eighteen, to York Collegiate School, where the fees were £10 per annum, and finally placed him in the office of James Piggott Pritchett (1789-1868), who, together with John Harper (1809-42), was responsible at the time for 'the best work [being carried out] in the city' [43].  By now, Middleton was able to pay the premium himself from a trust set up for him by his father, but although Torode does not say what that was, the fact that the trust was equal to the task was surely attributable to Middleton's fortuitous lack of siblings rather than the amount of money made from shopkeeping.

 

 

On the completion of his apprenticeship, a young man naturally aspired to establish himself in business.  '[A]t least till 1850', wrote Andrew Saint, 'there were still too few large buildings erected to keep a whole profession afloat upon design alone' [44.  It was thus very helpful to be based in a rapidly expanding town such as Halifax or Bradford and precisely how helpful emerges in this thesis in the contrast between the volume of business executed by Mallinson and Healey's partnership in the West Riding on the one hand with the unhurried existence of Harvey Eginton in Worcester on the other (chapter three).  It may also provide the explanation for Chantrell's decision to relocate to Leeds. Nevertheless, '[t]he bread and butter of very many Victorian architectural practices - and not just poor ones - still consisted of tasks today allotted to other professions: arranging leases, assessing rents, measuring property, taking out quantities and so forth... [albeit] as fast as they could afford to do so, architects shed these less congenial tasks' [45]. Their relative absence from an architect's portfolio might therefore be one way to measure his success, while another, applicable in this case to the viability of the profession as a whole, might be to investigate how many firms existed side-by-side within a geographical area and how many of them ultimately failed.  George Elwick listed only eight English architects in his Bankrupt Directory who were declared bankrupt between 1820 and 1843 [46], but since very few practitioners actually styled themselves as 'architects' in this period, that is not especially reassuring.  William White, in his directories of Leeds and the West Yorkshire clothing districts, recorded thirteen architects within the Riding in 1842 [47], but forty-five in 1854 (after allowing for fourteen duplications) [48], a difference that almost certainly owed more to a change of designation than a sudden influx of professional men, given that the exponential urban development of the region had been underway since at least 1820.  This is reinforced by Webster, who examined the number of self-declared architects in Leeds alone and found none in 1798, one in 1800 and again in 1809, four in 1814, six in 1822 and 1830, ten in 1837, eleven in 1843, thirteen in 1847, nineteen in 1851 and twenty-three in 1853 [49].  Part of this change can almost certainly be ascribed to men increasingly assuming the title of 'architect' after labouring for years in the building trades, as when Thomas Jackson, who appeared as plasterer in the 1793 directory (although he had already produced a few building designs), styled himself as architect in the directory for 1800, and William Lawrence, who was listed as a joiner and cabinet maker in 1798 and 1800, and as a raff merchant in 1807, made the same transition in 1809 [50].  Individuals such as these may have led K. Theodore Hoppen to underestimate when he wrote that 'in 1850 there may have been as few as 500 'proper' architects in the whole country' [51], although, of course, it depends on what is meant by 'proper'.  'Constantly in the nineteenth century,' wrote Priscilla Metcalf, 'there was this attitude of anyone-can-play' [52].

 

 

'What this meant [for the architect] in terms of income was sufficiency rather than wealth', wrote K. Theodore Hoppen, 'with [fees of] 5 per cent of total costs plus expenses becoming typical... [and] the profession [being] kept afloat... [by] the sheer quantity of building work undertaken' [53].   Of course every care taken to keep prices low, however essential in order to gain the contract, nevertheless had a deleterious effect on the architect's eventual commission.  This was summed up W.A. Pite's insightful phrase in his obituary for Sir Arthur Blomfield, written in 1899, when he spoke of the inevitable destiny of every architect who 'excelled in the charitable but unremunerative art of keeping down the cost' [54].  Average annual earnings are difficult to assess, in part because for most there was no such a thing as an average working year.  Nor is it any easier to identify a typical architect, for when one seeks to do so, the literature proves to be largely case specific. Thus for example, Thompson found that Butterfield's earnings reached a peak of 'roughly £2,200' p.a. in the late 1870s 'chiefly due to a few very large buildings, such as Keble College and Melbourne Cathedral [then under construction; but]... as these tailed away in the early 1880s his income dropped sharply to less than £1,000 a year' [55].   However, the largely unknown and infinitely inferior William Culshaw of Liverpool, accumulated a stupendous £120,000 during the course of his lifetime [56], notwithstanding that the Daily Post could write in his obituary, '[a]lthough Mr. Culshaw combined with his principal business of surveyor and valuer, the profession of architect, he did not shine in that capacity, preferring rather that work in which had special aptitude', and the Liverpool Mercury went further and said that 'he had little taste for architecture, and his practice... must be regarded as purely appurtenant to his employment as a surveyor' [57].

 

 

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On the Development of a Client Base.

 

What were the factors that determined business success however?  Clients were the first requisite, and the different 'categories' of men who might have needed an architect are examined in chapter five.  A provincial architect could not afford to ignore, much less alienate, any potential patron within his purview, and the importance of being well regarded by all men, or at least the great majority, can hardly be overstated.  Of course, once an architect had a small oeuvre of recognisably well-constructed local buildings to his name, attracting further business became easier.  For architects at an early stage, and in the absence of any generally recognised professional qualifications, membership of a professional organisation could be a satisfactory substitute.  Barrington Kaye was the first to examine in detail the rise of the architectural profession in Britain, its financial implications, and the part played by a recognised formal training and membership of an exclusive society [58]. The Institute of British Architects (later the Royal Institute of British Architects) was established in 1834, but many members of 'the old guard' never became reconciled to it since membership of a professional body seemed to them at odds with their position as artists.  Butterfield, for example, 'felt more at home as a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, to which he was elected in 1881' [59].  That was all very well for men of unchallengeable reputation, but lesser souls felt the need for official accreditation [60.  Another possibility was a record of an apprenticeship with a known and respected master, but in reality, not even an expensive pupillage was any firm guarantee of a new recruit's competency.  Indeed, two and a half decades before Martin Chuzzlewit was published, R. Sandeman had quipped, 'The Pupil to a Profession if he pays no Premium learns something, if a small Premium, a little, if a large Premium he learns nothing' [61].

 

 

Fortunately, for architects who did not attract sufficient business or who longed for greater financial security, there were other possibilities whereby one could make a living.  Thus Andrew Saint suggested that '[t]o be an estate surveyor to an extensive landlord or a district surveyor supervising local building standards was devoutly to be desired' [62], and this was underscored by John Corfield's investigations into the career of Thomas Smith of Hertford (1798-1875), who was appointed County Surveyor for Hertfordshire in 1837 on a stipend of £50 p.a., which rose in stages to £140 by 1868, where it remained until his death, and who, in 1847, took on the additional surveyorship for Bedfordshire, for an extra £80 p.a., and held that post until the combined workload overwhelmed him [63]. Similarly Brian Carne, for his part, recorded that Thomas Fulljames (1808-74) was appointed County Surveyor to Gloucestershire in 1831, aged just 23, at an annual salary of twenty guineas plus expenses [64], but was able to add the post of Diocesan Surveyor to his portfolio a year later while further supplementing his income by taking a succession of pupils, and Brenda Poole presented a variation on this increasingly familiar theme when she noted that after John Colson (1820-95) had completed his pupillage and spent barely two years altogether working in turn for T.H. Wyatt and Benjamin Ferrey, he entered into partnership with John Brown, County Surveyor of Norfolk and surveyor to Norwich Cathedral.  Poole queried Brown's motivation for accepting such an inexperienced partner, but provided the answer in the very same sentence: the premium was £1,000 [65].

 

 

Other architects made their way in the world by the sheer number of clients they served in one small job after another.  Thus Joseph Sharples found the success of William Culshaw (1807-74) and Henry Sumners (1825-95), arose from  the turning out of hundreds - indeed, thousands - of mundane domestic and industrial buildings, designed to a basic formula.  The pair developed the very helpful habit of writing their clients' names on their drawings, from which it is apparent that most of their commissions came from the 'mercantile elite', many of whom were related to one another [66], albeit that in the end, familial or business ties probably still 'counted for less than clients' direct knowledge of their work, with many no doubt making the safe choice of a firm whose buildings were familiar from neighbourhood examples' [67].

 

 

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On the Establishment of Efficient Work Routines.

 

A competitive business was also built on efficient work routines.  According to Barrington Kaye, an architect 'is required to survey land, to devise plans, elevations and sections for design and to draw them up, to estimate the cost of the works, to supervise their erection, and to draw up the necessary contracts between himself and his client', all of which activities, however, with the single exception of making designs for buildings, can be delegated, 'the surveying to a surveyor, the actual drawing out of the plans to a draughtsman, the estimation of costs to a quantity surveyor, the supervision of the erection of a building to a clerk-of-works, and the contractual side of his business to a lawyer or clerk' [68].  Indeed, what was true when Kaye was writing (1959), is usual practice today: thus the architect responsible for an initial concept, say for a small housing development, will commonly pass his (probably computer-generated) designs over to another professional to produce the working drawings and have little if any involvement in the project thereafter.

 

 

Mallinson and Healey, in contrast, were their own land and quantity surveyors, their own draftsmen, and frequently their own clerk-of-the-works.  Indeed, this was hardly surprising for as late as 1919, the Nottinghamshire architect, Harry Gill (1858-1925) could write, 'In the life of a provincial architect, a contract approaching £20,000 is an episode.  For the most part his time is spent on work which at pre-war rates would average rather under £1,000 than over that figure.  A clerk of works is a luxury, and, consequently, an architect has to pay frequent personal visits to the work in progress.' [69]

 

 

Mallinson also carried out quantity surveying on buildings designed by others, as he did in 1856 for Messrs. Pickard and Ogden, builders of Laisterdyke (Bradford), at Ilkley Hydropathic Establishment which the contractors had just completed to the designs of Cuthbert Broderick (1821-1905) [70], notwithstanding that I.B.A. rules forbade this [71].  Chapter six of this thesis will examine precisely what the partners were doing, day by day, in the mid-1850s - not 'in the round', not from the sunlit uplands of their retirement as they reminisced upon their life's work, but from eight o'clock in the morning until after ten o'clock at night, Monday to Saturday, fifty-two weeks a year, excluding only Christmas Day or whenever illness intervened.  Robert Kerr, writing in The Newleafe Discourses, pleaded in 1846 for the architect to 'be relieved from the inspection of sewers and cesspools and wells, and the shoring up of old houses, and the rating of dilapidations, and the ventilation of foul cellars, and the fitting up of stables, and the curing of smoky chimneys' [72], but there is nothing to indicate in the documentation that Mallinson and Healey cared very much what they did, for certainly some of the smallest jobs were done for the clients they knew best and who might have avoided asking the partners to undertake anything that could have been taken as a slight.

 

 

The breakdown of architectural contracts into individual workaday tasks has largely been neglected in the literature.  This even includes the written works of the protagonists themselves, foremost among which are Sir George Gilbert Scott's Personal and Professional Recollections, published posthumously in 1879, and Arthur Edmund Street's Memoir of George Edmund Street, published in 1888 [73], perhaps because men such as Scott and A.E. Street considered these details commonplace and not worth recording or perhaps because they preferred to cultivate the impression that far from having to grapple with the daily trials and tribulations of lesser mortals, a renowned metropolitan architect sprang to battle like Athena, prenatally equipped for every task.

 

 

Christopher Webster first considered Chantrell's office in Leeds in an article published by the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain in 1995 [74], and returned to the topic in his subsequent biography of this pioneering practitioner [75].  Chantrell's first pupil 'appears to have been... Healey', he wrote, who would have had ample opportunity to observe Chantrell’s habit 'scrupulously to… avoid… any activities such as building or dealing in materials which the more high-minded architects of the period saw as sullying the profession’s status'.  Webster's research suggests Chantrell's practice would have been considered a cut above Mallinson and Healey's however, since '[a]lmost every project beyond the minor ones... enjoyed the service of a clerk-of-the-works... [although] in most cases, their identity is unknown'.  Moreover, lest it be thought that Webster was making an unjustifiable assumption here, in fact he names three of them, including William Jordan, who oversaw the construction of St. Matthew's church, Holbeck, and was paid £224 for his trouble, a figure to compare with Chantrell's total commission on the job of just of £157!  (Webster concludes, not unreasonably at this price, that 'it is likely that many design decisions were delegated to [Jordan]'.)  Although only twelve miles by road from Bradford, such practice will be found a world away from Mallinson and Healey's usual minute personal oversight of any tolerably reachable job, and seems particularly extravagant when one considers Holbeck was scarcely two and a half miles from Chantrell's office in Saddle Yard, Briggate. Nor was Jordan a lone example.  Another clerk-of-the-works found by Webster to have been employed by Chantrell was a certain John Wade, to whom, along with his other duties, was delegated the task of drawing up the pew rent plan for Emmanuel church, Lockwood (Huddersfield), and who 'was paid a staggering £410' fifteen years later for his work at St. Paul's, Armitage Bridge. This suggests one of three possibilities: (i) that Leeds c. 1825-45 contained many more available men of talent than Halifax and Bradford in the fifteen years immediately following; or (ii) that Chantrell had a remarkably complaisant attitude towards his creations; or (iii) that Mallinson and Healey, in their turn, were unwilling or unable to forego the competitive edge that the engagement of such an expensive clerk-of-the-works necessarily entailed.  Indeed, perhaps a combination of all three factors were in play, albeit, as previously stated, Chantrell probably brought with him to Leeds, a metropolitan mindset.  Even so, it is a sharp warning that the results of historical research can be heavily skewed by the case study selected, and it highlights not only the care that is needed, but also the sheer difficulty of selecting a 'characteristic' example, if one hopes to extrapolate one's findings across a wider field.  This will be drawn out in the conclusions to this study for while the examination of a single architectural practice can illuminate the general conditions and constraints under and within which provincial architects laboured, the extent to which it can accommodate every individual's personal circumstances is obviously very limited.  It is not to be expected that all men will achieve the same fortune when not only their education and aptitudes, but also their starting points in life, differ very widely. 

 

 

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On the Access to Capital.

 

'Nineteenth century architecture', wrote J. Mordaunt Crook, 'richly repays analysis couched in economic, social and religious terms' [76], but if so, the financial analysis is definitely the poor relation for it has not received the attention paid to the other two.  To turn to K. Theodore Hoppen again,  '[a]rchitects needed very large sums of money in order to realise their ideas' [77], and 'this artistic singularity' led them to 'to see themselves and to be seen by others as belonging to a recognized profession' [78].  This was effected by a number of drivers, not least that the growing 'importance of being able to face commissioning committees of middle-class men primarily concerned with cost, obliged architects to increase their managerial skills' [79].

 

 

The building of a church involved the architect at all stages, for even at the outset, building committees were rarely capable of completing the elaborate returns grantors required, and if the application was to the Church Building Commission, then in M.H. Port's words, 'An unknown architect had [first]... to provide testimonials of his ability, besides presenting his plans to the several scrutinies the Board always demanded' [80].  He would have done so conscious of 'the effect of rejection of his design upon [his] reputation' [81].  The Incorporated Church Building Society (ICBS) was a still more difficult body to deal with, whose obstructiveness, intentional or otherwise, will emerge later on.  However, probably the most demanding bodies to whom one might apply were the Queen Anne's Bounty Office and the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, who together were the principal source of funding for the building of parsonages and who were studied exhaustively by G.F.A. Best in 1964 [82]. Their onerous requirements are set out below.  Yet problems with grantors were not the only difficulties an architect might encounter in the pursuit of the necessary capital, for if the cash ran out while construction was underway, a building could be left bereft of its principal intended adornment, to the long-term detriment of the architect's artistic reputation.  An example of this is illustrated by Anthony Quiney in his consideration of John Loughborough Pearson's plans for St. Peter's, Vauxhall, where the contrast between Pearson's original design [83] and the photograph of the church as built [84], is stark in the extreme.  Doubtless Pearson would have designed the building quite differently if he had known the true financial situation at the outset.  As it was, the failure to complete the work also led to a very poor return on his labour.  Quiney does not say how much the church was originally expected to cost but J. Mordaunt Crook has recorded that the tower and spire had been expected to rise to 220 feet [85], suggesting this would have been a building costing £25,000 at the minimum.  In fact, Quiney found the remnant that was built to have cost £8,003.7s.2d, on which Pearson's received a commission of just £400 [86].

 

 

That is 5% of £8,000 of course, and this brings this discussion back to Hoppen's comment that as architecture came to be regarded increasingly as a profession, so there came into being a recognised scale of fees. This is reinforced by Christopher Webster in his enlightening study of Robert Dennis Chantrell, through a letter he found, sent by Chantrell to Charles Winn of Nostell Priory in 1851 [87].  In it, Chantrell explained his methods of pricing and disclosed what he considered to be some of the elements of good practice.  It was usual, he said, to charge '5% on the amount of the tradesmen's' bills being all of new materials,' before adding a few words on how he calculated his expenses and going on to outline the reasonable expectations of the client, including '[i]f an order is given for the work to cost £700 and I design one to cost £1,500 I have no right to charge for the design'.  However, a transparent system of fees was only one of the new responsibilities Hoppen lays on the emerging architectural profession.  Architects had also an increasing duty to provide reliable estimates and to make every endeavour to control costs during the construction process itself.  Building committees 'abhorred unpleasant surprises' [88], which was one of the forces Akirah Satoh identified in bringing about 'the spread of the fixed price contract and [the rise of] the single contractor' [89].  Contracts 'by measure and value', which had been usual throughout the eighteenth century, now gave way to contracts 'by the lump', and for some building types (chiefly public and governmental works), multiple contracts with individual trades were being superseded by a single contract with a general builder, who might or might not subcontract the work in any department(s) he was unable to undertake himself.  These developments gave greater financial assurance to clients that there would not be any significant cost overruns and Satoh shows how, in turn, they abetted the competitive principle [90].

 

 

Clients usually (though not invariably - see chapter eight) expected architects to make every effort to keep prices low.  Local knowledge facilitated this.  What was a reasonable price to pay for skilled or unskilled labour in the immediate neighbourhood?  Where could suitable stone or timber be acquired at the cheapest possible price?  (which in the case of stone was often the same thing as knowing the location of the nearest reliable source).  The local architect would also be more likely to spot a tender submitted at an unrealistically low price, suggesting the contractor hoped to make it pay by shortcutting on the work.

 

 

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On the Display of Taste and Propriety under Budgetary Constraints.

 

Barrington Kaye drew a distinction between the 'artist-architect', unwilling to forsake his architectural vision even at the cost of losing his client, and the 'professional-architect', conscious he had to earn a living and, if necessary, prepared to follow his client's orders [91], and there was a degree to which this conflict was reflected in the contrast between the renowned nineteenth century metropolitan architect, exemplified, perhaps especially, by Butterfield, and his provincial cousins, although on which side of the dividing line Sir George Gilbert Scott might be deemed to have fallen after his surrender to Lord Palmerston in the battle over the Foreign Office, is perhaps a moot point.  Church builders, ecclesiastics and architectural dilettantes in mid-nineteenth century England often appear in the literature to have been preoccupied - obsessed even - with 'taste' and 'propriety', and these precepts were heavily implicated in the heated controversies that raged over style, with the Cambridge Camden Society and its periodical, The Ecclesiologist, aggressively promoting the superiority of the Flowing (Curvilinear) Decorated, fl. 1315-50 (particularly in its early days), as the physical representation of the acme of religious faith during the Middle Ages, and Ruskin, equally dogmatically, insisting that the only 'truthful' - and hence the only moral - style was the geometric of the Early English/Decorated transition, prevalent c. 1280-1315 [92].  To sail these waters successfully, the artist-architect needed first to establish himself as the arbiter of taste, from where, to quote the Hon. Sir Edmund Cust (1794-1878), he could 'assume... a claim to direct exclusively a mystery which not even one of his own craft, much less an amateur or one of the public [could] presume to gainsay or control' [93].  Yet if the provincial architect, by comparison, was considerably less likely to be able to establish such a position, his difficulties might sometimes have been eased by the reduced local cogency of these shifting credos in the first place, when clients were drawn from sequestered patrons in the shires or overburdened industrialists in bustling manufacturing towns [94].  Chapter nine of this thesis considers this issue, for whereas the assumption is generally made that as matters stood among the cognoscenti of the metropolis, so (perhaps after a short interval) they stood across the country as a whole, the example of Mallinson and Healey suggests this was not necessarily so.  Moreover, if geographical detachment alone did not provide sufficient opportunity for provincial architects in the industrial regions to take a rather more relaxed approach to the latest ecclesiological fads and fancies, there was often also - shocking though it is to tell - the effect of their, and their clients', inevitable social intercourse with Dissent.  This was not what the Camdenians anticipated or expected: '[i]n a world full of doubt, [the Ecclesiologists'] intolerance was their strength, and they knew it', wrote Kenneth Clark [95].  '[T]o think', J.M. Neale and Benjamin Webb had written eighty-five years earlier, 'that any Churchman should allow himself to build a conventicle, and even sometimes to prostitute the speaking architecture of the Church to the service of their bitterest enemies!' [96]

 

 

Nonetheless, when it came to propriety, the 'honesty' of structure and the avoidance of shams still carried significant clout, for whereas it might reasonably have been expected that a provincial architect's experience of grappling with an habitually tight budget would have been a sure incentive for him to indulge in architectural deceits of every conceivable kind, if only to conceal the poverty of his materials, it will be seen that Mallinson and Healey were largely blameless in this regard and only committed one regular deception, which was to stain Memel fir to appear as oak.  This was a commonplace: even Butterfield did it [97], and he did more besides.  Indeed, in the words of Paul Thompson, 'Daring and deceit reached their climax in Butterfield's roofs' [98], albeit that was in the form of their construction.

 

 

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Methodology and the Arrangement of this Research Project.

 

Historical methodology, according to Zeynap Celik and Diane Favro, 'is not an abstraction of method from content[, but rather] it is the content which gives form to [the] methodology' [99],  and the content driving the methodology of this thesis is to be found, first and foremost, in the study of the four surviving day-books.  Moreover, it is important to recognise that '[w]hile architectural historians... can do primary research on site, they must extend their explorations to locate information on contemporary usage, politics, economics, and cultural issues' [100], and this idea was taken up and developed by William Whyte, eighteen years later:

 

'An architectural historian may [should?] also investigate the process of design, of construction, and of use.  The evolution of a building from conception to habitation occurs in a number of overlapping stages.  In the first place, historians need to investigate the architect or architects of the building...  [I]t must [also] be remembered that an architect does not work on his... own... The impact of Christopher Wren's draftsmen on his work is well known.  The relationship between Victorian architects and their craftsmen was similarly seminal. To study one without the other would distort an understanding of both.  An architect also will have to respond to the demands of the client or clients.' [101]

 

 

This study, therefore, draws on the methods of the architectural historian but is also in many ways a business history.  My purpose is to understand how Mallinson and Healey operated as a business enterprise within the economic and religious parameters of the times.

 

 

Fig. 1 illustrates the first page of the 1854 day-book and exemplifies (albeit in atypically careful handwriting) the 1,239 similar pages that log the partners' activities over six days a week and fifty-two weeks a year, from Monday, 2nd January 1854 to Thursday, 31st December 1857.  Inevitably, some pages are more detailed than others, and while the page for Monday, 2nd January 1854 is of reasonably average length, others are longer and more compressed.  Making effective use of this information, however, was not a simple matter in carrying out this research and necessitated at the outset the very lengthy process of drawing up an extensive index of every place, person, job, or anything else of potential importance, always with the awareness that the index would drive the direction of the study thereafter, since items not included would be liable to be overlooked.  Nonetheless, with that qualification, once the index was completed, it then became possible to locate specific subjects quickly and easily, and feasible for the first time to draw out facts and figures for tabulation. A copy of the index has been deposited at the West Yorkshire Archive's Calderdale office, where these day-books are kept.

 

 

Other relevant documentation on Mallinson and Healey's practice is spread among the five offices of the West Yorkshire Archive Service, the North Riding and East Riding Record Offices, the R.I.B.A. Collection at the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the Church of England's two record offices at Lambeth Palace and Bermondsey, currently being relocated and absorbed into a new purpose-built archive at the former site.  The Lambeth Palace Library holds the records of the I.C.B.S., and the R.I.B.A. Collection at the Victoria & Albert Museum together with the W.Y.A.S. offices for Bradford and Calderdale (in Halifax) hold most of the surviving drawings, plans and elevations.

 

 

'Primary research on site', in this case the visiting of all Mallinson and Healey's extant churches, was made possible through the kind co-operation of the incumbents and churchwardens who opened normally locked buildings and allowed the writer time to inspect them.   Buildings are potentially the best source of information on style and construction, provided care is taken to distinguish and strip away in one's mind's eye any significant later additions and alterations, and in those (unfortunately) rare cases where a church has retained the majority of its original furnishings and/or something of its Victorian internal arrangements, they can also illustrate more forcefully than documentation, aspects of nineteenth century religiosity and social attitudes.  In this regard, it was extremely fortunate and wholly providential that the writer was able to visit the important and (at the time) excellently preserved church of Holy Innocents, Thornhill Lees, just a few weeks before it was closed and declared redundant.  Documents in record offices are generally conserved with the most fastidious care and attention;  buildings rarely enjoy remotely comparable protection, even when they have been awarded 'listed' status.  Finally in this regard, the author is conscious that any set of sources, however detailed and extensive, can be interpreted by different students in different ways and the author presents his exposition, fully aware that other approaches are possible, from which somewhat different conclusions might emerge.  The study of past lives, can never be exhaustive. 

 

 

This thesis is arranged in two parts, in which part one is largely descriptive and part two, essentially analytical, although clarification is necessary of the sense in which I use these terms.  Part one, which includes this introductory chapter, is descriptive insofar as it seeks to provide the 'what' of Mallinson and Healey's partnership, which is to say, the more readily demonstrable facts:  what was the geographical, religious and professional context in which their business was established (chapter two); what were the circumstances of the partners' upbringing, training, and business experience prior to 1845 and what was the nature of the work they subsequently undertook (chapter three); and - last but not least - what can be discovered about the level of success they achieved (chapter four)?  In furnishing the answers, chapter two also provides a brief exposition of the rôle of the various grant-awarding bodies on which the viability of the erection of many of the partners churches, parsonages and schools depended, and chapter four, which is the most speculative, endeavours to estimate Mallinson and Healey's average annual income and to draw out the standard of living they appear to have enjoyed.

 

 

Part two is essentially analytical in the sense that it attempts to address the 'how' of the partners' success by drawing deductions from the available evidence:  how do the partners appear to have developed a suitably wide-ranging client base in order to ensure they had a regular and sufficient supply of commissions (chapter five);  how did they organise their daily tasks to maximise working efficiency when they had often taken on more work than they could conveniently manage (chapter six);  how did they and their clients raise the necessary capital to pay for the construction of their buildings given that only a minority were paid for by single donors (chapter seven);  and how did they seek to facilitate the work by keeping costs to a reasonable minimum (chapter eight)?  That leaves the remaining three chapters of this thesis to examine the how and why of the more art-historical issues with which this thesis is necessarily concerned:  how far did the fierce, topical debate about architectural propriety and building style impinge upon architects in the manufacturing towns, and if there were differences between their experience and that of their confrères in the metropolis, then why (chapter nine);  how and why did the exigencies of provincial practice affect building construction (chapter ten);  and how and why was the partners' work able to satisfy client demands for originality when, at the same time, they displayed no very clear idiom of their own (chapter eleven)?   The thesis then concludes with an afterword and summary, the first part of which provides a brief account of James Mallinson's and Thomas Healey's sons' career after Thomas Healey's death.