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'The architects are Messrs. Mallinson and Healey of Bradford and Halifax, and the edifice will no doubt be such as will give architectural beauty - 'a joy forever' - even to the forbidding neighbourhood of Low Moor: for no gentlemen in this part of the country have done more than they to add grace and beauty to the landscapes in their district by ecclesiastical architecture in its simplicity and purity.'

James Mallinson was born on the 18th February 1818, the third son and child of Hugh Mallinson (b. 1776/7?), landlord of the Wellington Hotel, Brighouse, and Ann Avison (born 1790), who were married in St. John's church, Halifax, on the 6th May, 1810. The couple had four children: John (born 2nd December, 1812), who eventually succeeded as landlord at the Wellington Hotel in turn to both his father and mother; William (born 17th December, 1815); James, the future architect, baptized at St.-Anne's-in-the-Grove, Southowram, on the 15th March, 1818; and another Hugh (born 18th February, 1821) [1]. The only clue to James Mallinson’s education and professional training is to be found in a bald statement of his father’s death in the local newspaper for 27th July 1839, suggesting the son was already better known to the readership than the father: 'On Monday last, aged 62, Mr. Hugh Mallinson, of Brighouse, of consumption, and father of Mr. Mallinson, late with Mr. Rawsthorne, architect of Bradford' [2].

This can only have been Walker Rawstorne (d. 1867), who was in practice in Halifax Road, Bradford, in 1835 [3] and at North Parade in 1844 [4], and who regularly seems to have had an 'h' unwantedly inserted in his name [5]. Rawstorne designed or enlarged at least nine churches in West Yorkshire, including St. James’s, Manchester Road, Bradford (1836) [6], where Mallinson and Healey later built a school, and St. Paul’s, Buttershaw (1838) [7], St. Mary’s, Burley-in-Wharfedale (1841) [8], and St. Luke’s, Eccleshill (1842) [9], for which the partners later built parsonages. Rawstorne’s only recorded church built outside the county, at Burnley in Lancashire, illustrated to perfection his seriously outmoded style, for although not designed until 1846, it was planned like an eighteenth century 'preaching house' of the type Pugin and the Ecclesiologists had spent the previous decade railing against, comprising a simple square for the nave and no chancel save only for a shallow, lens-like recess housing the altar table at the east end [10]. This was, admittedly, seven years after Mallinson had left Rawstorne’s office and the only churches known to have taken shape on the drawing board during the period of his apprenticeship were St. James’s, Manchester Road, St. Paul’s, Buttershaw, and possibly the unexecuted reconstruction of the parish church of St. Andrew’s, Keighley. Mallinson’s age on departure (if he left in 1839, he was twenty-one or nearly so) suggests he served seven years with Rawstorne, for it was usual for pupils to enter apprenticeships at the age of fourteen or fifteen: Robert Dennis Chantrell was fourteen when he was articled to Sir John Soane in 1807 [11], as was John Loughborough Pearson when he was apprenticed to Ignatius Bonomi in 1831 [12].

Rawstorne was first engaged by the building committee at Keighley on 22nd April 1839 and given the brief of improving the church and increasing the accommodation. The Incorporated Church Building Society offered a conditional grant of £400 towards the reconstruction but J.H. Good criticised the proposed form of the roof, declaring the rafters and purlins to be too far apart and demanding amendments and the resubmission of the plans. This may have been prophetic of the problems Mallinson would have a few years later at Holy Trinity, Queen’s Head. Rawstorne made the required changes, but then the building committee decided the contractor’s estimate for executing the work (of £3,500) revealed the improvidence of the entire scheme in view of the mere 430 extra seats expected to be created, and gave the job to Chantrell. Webster’s observations on Rawstorne’s plans and drawings are that they 'reveal an old-fashioned design: the inelegant elevations emphasise the two-storey nature of the interior [resulting from the addition of galleries], there are huge transepts and a shallow chancel.' [13] However, this is mild criticism beside Pevsner’s censure of Rawstorne’s churches at Manchester Road and St. Jude Street, Manningham (both still standing when the West Riding volume of The Buildings of England was first published in 1959), and even allowing for Pevsner’s usual fastidiousness, it is evident Rawstorne’s office was far from the ideal training ground for a prospective church architect destined to pursue his career during the most earnest and contested phase of the Gothic Revival.

Mallinson made the decision, on leaving Rawstorne’s office, to establish his own independent business in his native town of Brighouse. The population of Hipperholme-cum-Brighouse was only 5,411 in 1841, and that of Rastrick, on the opposite bank of the River Calder, just 3,459, but there were no other self-declared architects in either and only one other land surveyor [14], and Mallinson may have considered his best prospects lay among people he knew. His first recorded job, in August 1840, saw Mallinson, 'Architect and Land Surveyor', working as a letting agent [15], but his apparent indecision about his most appropriate career description and/or direction is suggested in his next appearance in the press, in December the same year, when he styled himself simply as a 'land surveyor' in an advertisement drawing attention to a mill site he had surveyed and divided into lots in readiness for an auction [16]. However, by 16th October 1841 he was an 'Architect and Land Surveyor' again, albeit only in a similar notice relating to another estate [17].

This was also the time when Mallinson received a formative lesson likely to have deterred him from taking part in architectural competitions in future years. A correspondence reproduced between Mallinson and other interested parties describes how he along with eleven others, entered a competition to design the pump room at High Harrogate in June 1841, only to find that upon seeing Mallinson's competition entry set out on display, one of the other candidates, apparently known locally and favoured by some of the adjudicators, promptly added the central feature of Mallinson's design (a dome) to his own work and resubmitted it, whereupon it was duly chosen [18]. Thereafter neither Mallinson's indignant remonstrances, nor the letters from his few supporters on the committee, succeeded in overturning this overtly corrupt decision and Mallinson had eventually to content himself with publishing the exchange of letters, together with the names of the committee members who were for and against the decision, along with their occupations, in order, perhaps, to show that he was supported by the local incumbent, a magistrate, the proprietor of the Cheltenham pump room, a 'gentleman', a wine merchant and an innkeeper, and opposed by a wine merchant, four innkeepers, a milkman, a plumber, a baker, a druggist, a porter, and a coach-builder.

Fortunately Mallinson’s first big break came soon after this debacle, probably through his connection with Rawstorne, when in 1842 he received the commission to design a new church at Queen’s Head [19], a bleak hilltop settlement a thousand feet above sea level, where John Foster (1799-1878) had established a worsted business now expanding rapidly under the style of Black Dyke Mills [20]. The building (fig. 3a(i)) would eventually be paid for by a combination of grants from the Church Building Commission, the Ripon Diocesan Church Building Society and the ICBS, and 'the exertions of several resident gentlemen', among whom 'Mr. [John] Foster... deserve[d] especial mention' [21]. Industrialist and architect would have met, if not before, during the planning and construction of the building [22], and as discussed below, the Foster family would subsequently rank among Mallinson’s most loyal clients (and specifically Mallinson’s, rather than Mallinson and Healey’s), engaging him on work at Black Dyke Mill, c. 1850, on Harrowins House and its stables and porter’s lodge, built for John’s eldest son, William, in 1853, ’54 and ’55 respectively, on Sandbed workers’ cottages in 1853, on Northowram Hall, rebuilt for a younger son, Abraham Briggs Foster, in 1862, and possibly in 1865, three years after Thomas Healey’s death, helping to secure Mallinson’s appointment on Queensbury National School [23].

Mallinson’s drawings for Holy Trinity church, Queen’s Head, appear not to have survived, but the lengthy specification is extant and describes in detail the work of the excavators and masons, carpenters, plasterer, plumber and glazier, and painter, before concluding with a list of conditions [24]. The document was copied out in the large, firm hand of Mr. B(?) Clarke, Mallinson’s assistant, and still Mallinson and Healey’s only regular employee over a decade later before he eventually left for Newcastle in March 1856 [ 25]. The church was raised from start to finish inside a year but the consecration was delayed until 29th August, 1845. It was:

'...built in the style which prevailed in the 13th century, generally termed early English [sic], and consists of a nave and aisles, chancel, north porch, sacristy or vestry, and tower at the west end. The nave and aisles have open boarded roofs of lofty pitch, consisting of trusses filled with tracery over each pillar of the nave: the entire timbers are exposed to view, after the ancient method, and are stained of a dark hue; the roof of the chancel is vaulted. The interior length of the church is 84 feet, and the width 48 feet 6 inches.' [26]

Only a part of this building survives to the present day for the chancel and vestry were enlarged by Thomas Henry and Francis Healey in 1885 and the tower was found to be in a dangerous state in 1906, necessitating dismantling and rebuilding (in a different position), having been judged 'to have been somewhat faulty in construction when [first] erected' [ 27]. This leaves Mallinson's nave and independently-gabled aisles available for inspection (fig. 3a(ii)). The piers supporting the six-bay arcades appear too slender for their height and the impression of flimsy construction is exacerbated by the roofs, which are framed with tie beams supporting king posts and five pairs of queen posts of inadequate scantlings, rising to principal rafters without collars and just a single pair of purlins to prevent transverse movement, halfway up the pitch. It certainly looks insubstantial, even though it has stood the test of time, but the original workmanship was undoubtedly substandard for the Rev. John Carter Hyatt complained in his appeal for help in building a parsonage that 'for many years before my appointment as Curate in 1858 the Church had become perfectly useless, for the rain penetrated its roof, and the floor rotted, so that not only was there no congregation,... but the fabric of the Church itself was unfit for decent performance of Divine Worship' [28]. Possibly this was a conscious exaggeration in a letter aimed at eliciting sympathy, but it was a poor commendation of a building completed only fourteen years before.

the present-day interior looking east, showing the proportions of the nave arcades and the form of the roof.

Perhaps the building's failings, therefore, were the result of inadequate oversight of the workmen as construction proceeded, or perhaps they were the result of accepting too low a tender from a carpenter or tiler who then skimped the job to avoid working at a loss [29]. The system of contracting in gross also made it essential that the architect drew 'up the specification... to cover every part of the design and all contingencies, complete with working drawings, and clear of ambiguities before operations were begun' [30], and although Mallinson's specification seems fairly comprehensive, a lack of experience could have left omissions here. The run-off of rainwater, however, was to be ensured by making the fall of the gutters 'not less than one inch and a half in every ten feet'. The building's specification lays out that the roofs were to be covered with:

'[the] very best Northowram river Grey Slates upon Laths of good red wood Deal, 22 out of a Plank, nailed to Spars with wrought Iron Nails soaked hot in oil. The Slates are to have 3 ins. lap at the Eaves and 2 ins. at Ridges, the intermediate courses diminishing gradually upwards and hung with Oak pegs... The Ridges to be covered with good sound Ridge Stones worked truly to the Pitch of the Roofs according to Drawings to be given hereafter, and laid cement [sic], well jointed and put together in a satisfactory manner.'

Fortunately Mallinson received three other significant commissions before any shortcomings at Holy Trinity had had time to show up, namely for a new church at Wyke and for National Schools at Manningham [31] and Elland. Mallinson was working on the designs for St. Mary’s, Wyke, in 1844 but progress appears to have been slow. The site was a long time in preparation as 'its stability [was] endangered by the mines which have already been opened or may be opened near it' [32], but Mallinson seems to have been partly responsible for the delay himself for a letter to the ICBS from the incumbent, the Rev. William Houlbrook, in January 1845, complained of Mallinson’s failure to complete the work promptly and apologised for his own miscalculation of the church’s expected accommodation [33]. J.H. Good, in his reply, did not respond to either of these points directly but stated that before any grant could be awarded, (i) the plans would have to be amended to increase the thickness of the clerestory walls and (ii) an additional drawing would have to be submitted to his office showing the proposed construction of the aisle roofs on a scale of half an inch to the foot. This was possibly no more than his customary display of awkwardness but Mallinson may also have been struggling a little. He was contemporaneously drawing up plans and elevations for Elland National School, the original set of which in neat Tudor style, are signed and dated March 1845 (fig. 3b(i)) [34], yet neither this nor the church appears to have been completed until after Mallinson formed his partnership with Thomas Healey in June or July since a second set of drawings of the school also exists, dated August 1845 and signed by Mallinson and Healey (fig. 3b(ii)) [35]. Additions included a bell-côte over the cross-gabled central bay, a decorative chimney stack at the southwest angle, a fan-light above the door, and a dripstone over the three-light transomed upper window, to say nothing of a datum line. It is, of course, impossible to tell whether these alterations were designed by Healey or represented second thoughts by Mallinson but the second set certainly shows greater refinement.

(i) left, signed James Mallinson, March 1845 and (ii) right, signed Mallinson and Healey, August 1845.

St. Mary’s, Wyke was not finally complete until 1847. Again, it is difficult to rule out a possible contribution from Healey but whatever the true situation, the building is a definite advance on Holy Trinity, Queen’s Head. The proportions are better: the nave is not as tall and the piers of the four-bay arcades are broader in relation to their height. As for the nave roof, although there is an affinity with Holy Trinity, it betokens greater stability due to the inclusion of two pairs of purlins, ⅓ and ⅔ of the way up the pitch, and collar beams connecting the lower purlins instead of tie beams crossing between the wall plates, lifting the support higher towards the ridge. Moreover, also at Wyke, the structural challenge has now been met of surmounting the tower with a spire and an aesthetically successful one at that. The church consists of a three-bay chancel with a N. organ chamber and vestry and a small S. chapel, a five-bay nave with lean-to aisles and a N. porch, and a southwest tower and short broach spire occupying the westernmost bay of the S. aisle (figs. 3c(i) & 3c(ii)).

(i) left, the church from the southwest; and (ii) right, the interior view looking west,

On 10th May, 1845, James Mallinson married Mary Waddington, the youngest of three daughters of Samuel Waddington, landlord of the Black Swan, at St. Martin's, Brighouse [36]. Probably he expected shortly to have a family [37], and he would doubtless have reflected on the pressures he was experiencing, his income, and his prospects for the future. This may have appeared the time to expand his business. By some means or other, he evidently knew of another Yorkshireman who needed to advance himself and who for the past sixteen years had been helping to design churches in Worcestershire.

Thomas Healey was born in 1809 and it is important to recognise how early in the history of the Gothic Revival this actually was. Arguably the three greatest leaders of the movement, Sir George Gilbert Scott, Augustus Pugin and William Butterfield, were born in 1811, 1812 and 1814 respectively, and it was Butterfield, Healey’s junior by five years, who wrote in an autobiographical note many years later:

'[My] choice of a vocation in life was made before any accurate and detailed study of church architecture had been made. There were then, in fact, no practicing church architects of any repute, except Pugin, who was beginning work - Rickman's catalogued examination of English churches was a useful pioneer but no more.' [38].

This is of relevance in another respect also, for Butterfield and Healey's paths ran together for a while in the late 1830s. Unsurprisingly, Healey's early life and training passed with little notice, but a few bare facts have been handed down [38]. Thomas Healey was the only one of four children born to Thomas Healey Senior (b. 1771) and Martha, his wife (b. 1765), to survive into adulthood. Both parents came from Flockton, between Huddersfield and Wakefield, while his future wife, Elizabeth Bedford, would come from neighbouring Emley. Thomas and Elizabeth produced four sons and one daughter - Thomas Henry (b. 1839) and Francis (b. 1840), who would continue their father's practice after his early death, Edward (b. 1842), Alfred (b. 1844), and Elizabeth (b. 1846). Thomas Healey Senior's occupation is unrecorded but he seems to have been a man of reasonable means, for it appears he was a governor (along with Thomas Bedford, Elizabeth’s father) of the Classical and Commercial Academy, Wakefield [39] and he was able to afford a pupillage for his son in Chantrell’s prestigious office in Leeds when Healey was in his mid teens [40].

Chantrell had moved from London upon receiving his articles and set up business in Leeds in 1819, where not only was he perfectly placed to play a significant rôle at the heart of a rapidly developing manufacturing town, but, as it transpired (surprisingly after his Classical training with Sir John Soane) to fashion himself as a leader in what Webster calls 'the slow drift towards Gothic' taking place over the next couple of decades. Webster considers that surviving Gothic drawings suggest Healey accompanied his master on tours to Gothic churches across Yorkshire as the latter sought to make up the deficiencies in his own professional training [41].

Healey received his articles in 1829 at the age of twenty and followed Chantrell's example by moving almost immediately - in his case, to Worcester. His new master was his exact contemporary, Harvey Eginton (1809-49), described by Gordon Barnes as 'the only worthwhile architect practicing in the city at that time' and one of eleven men appointed by the ICBS in 1848 to sit on their Architects' Committee of expert advisors, and here Healey remained for a full sixteen years in the subordinate position of head clerk [42]. It seems a long while, but there is no evidence to suggest that Healey had a thrusting nature and he may have enjoyed the professional camaraderie, not only with Eginton, but also with the even younger men who occasionally took up posts in the office, among whom were Frederick Preedy (1820-98), the later glass painter who worked for Eginton from 1835 until the latter's premature death [43], and William Butterfield (1814-1900), who spent about eighteen months there, 1838-9, after completing his pupillage with E.L. Blackburne, the architect of Clement's Inn. Paul Thompson describes the time following Butterfield's departure from Blackburne's office as 'the most useful part of his education... The name of his Worcester principal is unknown, but there was only one church architect of any reputation working in the town at that time - Harvey Eginton.' [44]. Eginton, in Thompson's view, 'was an unusually serious and competent gothic [sic] designer [for this date, whose] details were remarkably careful'. However, of equal or greater importance were the opportunities the position gave Butterfield to spend 'in the company of a sympathetic head clerk of archaeological tastes [my italics],... measur[ing] and draw[ing] the cathedral and examin[ing] the [other] buildings of the county', although one imagines the benefits flowed both ways [45]. Butterfield was renowned in later life for reserve and abstemiousness, but he can reasonably have been expected to have been an inspiring and merry fellow traveller for Healey in this early period, and Healey, for his part, would doubtless have had some valuable professional experiences to share.

Harvey Eginton's career is even less well chronicled than most in this period, but about seventeen churches can be ascribed to his practice, either in whole or in part, plus one unexecuted design and seven restorations. Unfortunately it is impossible to divine the extent to which Healey, although in no way unequal to Eginton in either training or age, might have influenced these buildings - all the plans and elevations are signed by Eginton alone - but, at the very least, he would have been immersed in them as they passed through the office, and he was probably called upon to make visits to the sites to monitor building progress. Designs vary widely and there are a few failures: St. Philip & St. James's, Whittington (Worcestershire) (1840), for example, is not a happy invention with its hungry, free-standing western bell-turret, topped by a bell-stage too narrow for the bell-openings and surmounted by a Lilliputian spire. However, the majority are remarkable for their date. St. Michael & All Angels', Broadway (also Worcestershire) (1839), built two years before Sir George Gilbert Scott’s first surviving church of St. George, Camberwell, is a proud Gothic building in First Pointed (Early English) style, with a tall W. tower rising to double-lancet bell-openings and crocketed pinnacles at the angles, surmounting square bases with blank trefoiled arches on the outer faces. All Saints’, Broseley (Shropshire) (1842) is nobler still, this time designed in Third Pointed (Perpendicular) style: the tower rises in four stages supported by angle buttresses terminating in pinnacles, the bell-stage has a pair of two-light, transomed bell-openings in each wall and openwork battlements above, and the rest of this all-embattled church comprises a five-bay aisled nave, a two-storey S. porch adjoining the second bay from the east (sic), and a short chancel with a southwest vestry. Internally, the tall nave arcades are supported on compound piers with shafts to north and south rising up between pairs of two-light clerestory windows positioned over the spandrels, to give the appearance of supporting the wall posts of the nave roof. This is all very impressive so early in the Revival and shows that Eginton, and probably also Healey, had visited, examined and understood the design principles behind a wide range of mediaeval churches, notwithstanding their youth and limited experience.

Mallinson and Healey formed their partnership in the summer of 1845 [46]. The precise date can be determined within a narrow range for the terminus ante quem is some time in August, as indicated by the revised drawings for Elland National School, signed by both partners, referred to above, and the terminus post quem is the 21st June, when a sale by auction was announced, to take place 'on Friday next, the 27th day of June, 1845, beginning at ten o'clock in the morning', of 'household furniture, elegant chimney glass and effects, the property of Mr. Thomas Healey, at Dwelling House, College Churchyard, Worcester, who is removing [i.e. not yet removed] to a distance' [47]. Healey must surely have been ready for a new challenge, but he may besides have needed more money, for he now had four sons. His move to Bradford would have taken him nearer his own family and his wife’s, and that may have added to the attraction.

How was this partnership destined to work in practice? In the first place, surprisingly enough, Healey still appears to have taken the secondary place, in spite of his nine years seniority and greater and better professional experience. Mallinson’s name preceded Healey’s in the title of the firm and Mallinson was based at what was, in effect, 'head office', where the day books were kept and the practice’s only assistant, Mr. Clarke, was based. The address was 15, Mount Street (later, Balmoral Place), Halifax; Healey’s office address in Bradford was 64, Tyrell Street, which is today one of the more impressive streets in the city's former Victorian business district, a few minutes walk from Interchange Station.

Secondly, it is evident that the partners were perfectly willing from the outset to embrace a very eclectic range of projects, including some only loosely connected with architecture at all, and although the construction of churches - then generally regarded as the most elevated building genre - occupied the largest proportion of their time, they obviously considered themselves under no constraints, unlike their London confrères, to eschew either secular work or work for the Nonconformists. Indeed, the extremely varied nature of their undertakings is evident from the first entries in the 1854 day-book covering the first week of January of that year when Mallinson was engaged preparing a rateable value for the railway in Dewsbury, appearing in Wakefield as a witness in a compensation case arising over the value of land compulsorily purchased by the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway Company in Elland (which necessitated an overnight stay), and acting as 'umpire' in an unexplained dispute between Watson, Perkins & Co., stained glass manufacturers of Dunfermline, and a Mr. D. Denton, examined at The New Inn, Halifax. He also inspected plasterwork recently completed at Zion Methodist Chapel, Halifax, and prepared bills for the plastering of cottages in Luddendenfoot. Meanwhile Healey made three inspection visits to view on-going construction work at Manchester Road Schools, Bradford, another to inspect a potential site for a 'hydropathic establishment' in Ilkley, where he also examined the church roof (and which also required an overnight stay), and a fifth to Burley-in-Wharfedale parsonage, where building operations had been suspended due to frost. In between, he continued to draw up designs for a new parsonage at Copley (Sowerby Bridge), a new school at Boroughbridge, and a cross for the church at Cundall. The division between the partners’ work is impossible to draw precisely, but while Mallinson and Healey can be seen to have shared inspection visits to construction sites more or less equally, it is clear Healey spent more time designing and drawing in the office and Mallinson, more out and about, liaising with clients and the general public, conducting surveys and making valuations, and providing expert testimony in land and building disputes.

It was an arrangement that obviously worked well if the sheer volume of the partners’ achievement is accepted as an indicator. Diagram 3(a) below shows the numbers of on-going building projects recorded in the surviving day-books, of sufficient significance to be referenced on ten or more pages (days). The columns marked 'other' (shaded purple) aggregate the partners’ industrial and domestic work and include three miscellaneous commissions - viz. the construction of a building society lodge, the re-paving of Mill Lane, Brighouse, and the partial rebuilding and re-ordering of three contiguous shops in Old Market, Halifax. Mallinson’s work as a surveyor, valuer, etc., is not included.

Diagram III(a): histogram showing the number of projects undertaken by Mallinson and Healey

on which one of the partners spent at least part of ten separate working days.

Tables 3a(i) & 3a(ii) are therefore drawn up to take this last into account also, by tallying the days every single task is mentioned, once again grouping work by building type but now adding in Mallinson’s surveying, valuing and legal commitments in row 12. The figures are converted into percentages in columns 3 & 4, where those in blue include Mallinson’s surveying and legal work and those in black do not. Commissions classified merely as 'places of worship' in the histogram are subdivided in the tables into Anglican churches, Dissenting chapels and miscellaneous cemetery buildings, while the former 'other' category is split between industrial buildings, shops, other commercial buildings, private houses and workers’ housing. Conducting the exercise for 1854 and 1857 enables some limited assessment to be made of the respective results’ potential variability. It is important to stress, of course, that the numbers of references to work expended on different building types are not necessarily proportionate to the amount of time these genres occupied.

Jobs by type	Refs.	%	adj.
Churches	426	32.9	30.5
Nonconformist chapels	95	7.3	6.7
Cemetery buildings	167	12.9	12.0
Parsonages	225	17.4	16.1
Schools	145	11.2	10.4
Industrial buildings	122	9.4	8.7
Shops	16	1.2	1.1
Other commercial buildings	6	0.5	0.5
Private houses	15	1.2	1.1
Workers’ houses	53	4.1	3.8
Miscellaneous	23	1.8	1.7
Non-attributable work			7.3
	1,293	99.9	99.9

Jobs by type	Refs.	%	adj.
Churches	533	39.3	38.5
Nonconformist chapels	21	1.5	1.5
Cemetery buildings	25	1.8	1.9
Parsonages	80	5.9	5.8
Schools	269	19.9	19.4
Industrial buildings	134	9.9	9.7
Shops	156	11.5	11.3
Other commercial buildings	6	0.4	0.4
Private houses	66	4.9	4.8
Workers’ houses	7	0.5	0.5
Miscellaneous	58	4.3	4.2
Non-attributable work			2.1
	1,355	99.9	100.1

In fact, although a comparison between the tables reveals many differences, they are nevertheless relatively modest when the effect a single job could make is considered. Thus the large drop in the number of references to cemetery buildings in 1857 compared to 1854 was due solely to the completion of work at Haley Hill, and the corresponding increase in references to shops was entirely the result of a single commission from Peter Thompson to alter three shops in Halifax, previously mentioned. For similar reasons there are smaller but noticeable changes in the figures for Nonconformist chapels, private houses and workers’ cottages. As for the balance between parsonages and schools, although this can be seen to have more than reversed in 1857, together the two building types comprised 26.5% of the references in 1854 and a comparable 25.2% in 1857. Also in 1857, Mallinson was evidently less involved in surveying or acting in arbitration disputes, which was probably due to happenstance rather than policy. The 4.2% of references to miscellaneous activities in 1857 picks up the increasing amount of time spent on the design of church furniture by Healey, which probably reflects what was then the growing belief that architects should assume the responsibility for the furnishings and fittings of their churches as well as their form and structure.

Finally, table 3b goes back to the information used in the histogram (i.e. the tally of work undertaken by the firm across all four years, 1854-7, subject to the condition that tasks are mentioned on ten or more pages of the day-books), but this time, classifies projects by where they were executed.

Table 3b: Tally of the tasks undertaken by the partners 1854-7, on which, as a minimum,

Jobs by place	Refs.	%	adj.
Boroughbridge	135	3.1	3.0
Bradford parish	972	22.0	21.0
Cleckheaton	24	0.5	0.5
Dewsbury	511	11.6	11.1
Halifax parish (inc. Brighouse)	1,969	44.6	42.8
Hornsea	192	4.4	4.2
Keighley	47	1.1	1.1
Leeds	315	7.1	6.8
Stockport	32	0.7	0.7
Stockton-on-Tees	69	1.6	1.5
Wakefield	147	3.3	3.2
Non-attributable work			4.5
	4,413	100.0	100.2

The high proportion of the work shown to have been carried out in Halifax parish is largely a reflection of the parish’s size. More interesting, perhaps, than the concentration of work around Bradford and Halifax are the smaller clusters elsewhere (as also seen plotted on the contemporary map below) - for example, around Boroughbridge in the northeast, along the general line of the Calder Valley from Dewsbury to South Ossett (a distance of about 3 miles trending southeast), and (beyond the boundaries of the map) in a little triangle on the Holderness coast, between Hornsea and Mappleton (2½ miles), running inland as far as Withernwick. These suggest common sources emanating from particular individuals who either recommended the partners to friends or relations, or who had personal experience of their work before moving further afield. An example of the first kind appears to have been the Rev. James Palmes, incumbent of Weeton, for whom Mallinson and Healey built Weeton school and teacher’s house in 1855-6 at the charge of Lord Harewood [48], and who was also the younger brother of the Rev. William Lindsey Palmes, rector of Hornsea and Rural Dean of North Holderness [49]. The most outstanding example of the second kind was the Rev. Benjamin Bayfield, who moved from Ripponden to Shinfield (Wokingham, formerly part of Berkshire) in 1847, and who asked Mallinson and Healey to design a new vicarage for him immediately on, or even before, his arrival [50]. Another was the Rev. William Randall, for whom the partners built All Saints’ church, Richmond Hill, Leeds, during his incumbency in 1848-50. By 1857 Randall had taken up the living of Heaton Reddish in Stockport and in December of that year he wrote to the Reverend George Ainslie, the newly appointed secretary at the ICBS, supporting his building committee’s choice of Mallinson and Healey as architects for their proposed new church, declaring that 'the same architects built a church for me six years ago in Leeds, larger and for less money, and there is not a flaw in it to this day'. In fact, notwithstanding that Thomas Healey spent the best part of a fortnight working on the plans and specification [51], the church was never built as the parish proved unable to raise the necessary funds, but the process whereby a provincial architectural practice might spread its agency, is illustrated nonetheless.

Map III(b), of West Yorkshire, c. 1850, showing the positions and dates of churches (white squares), parsonages (blue squares) and schools (green squares), designed by Mallinson and Healey.

Personal contacts, therefore, were probably the chief geographical determinant of the partners' places of operation, but another that should, perhaps, not be ignored was the relative accessibility of the villages and townships as the railway network expanded. In 1845 the only completed lines likely to have been much help to the partners would have been the Manchester and Leeds Railway, which approached Leeds very circuitously along the Calder valley via Sowerby Bridge, North Dean (Greetland), Brighouse, Wakefield and Normanton, and its short (1¾ mile) extension from North Dean to Shaw Syke Station, Halifax (since demolished). The first line to reach Bradford was opened in 1846 when the Leeds and Bradford Railway completed another contour-hugging line, this time following the Aire Valley and Bradford Dale from Leeds via Kirkstall, Shipley and Manningham, to terminate at Bradford Midland (now Forster Square) station. For the next four years, the only way to travel from Halifax to Bradford by train, for anyone actually attempting such a thing, would have been along the almost impossibly convoluted route south to North Dean, east and northwest to Wakefield and Leeds, and finally west-northwest and south to Shipley and Bradford. The direct Lancashire and Yorkshire line from Halifax to Bradford, which was far more challenging to construct, opened as far as Low Moor in 1848, before reaching Bradford two years later. This route terminated at Bradford Exchange station (now Bradford Interchange), uphill and 300 yards south of Bradford Midland Station, thereby leaving Bradford without a through line, a handicap from which it suffers to this day. The line from Low Moor to Mirfield for connections to Wakefield, opened in 1848, and the line from Leeds to Bradford via Pudsey was completed in 1854 and terminated at a third station, Bradford Adolphus Street (demolished), until 1867, when the line was extended to Bradford Exchange. Finally during these years, a more direct route from Bradford to Wakefield via Gildersome and Ardsley was opened in 1857 [52]. All these lines except the last, exist to the present day, but many intermediate stations have vanished.

Mapping this developing network on to Mallinson and Healey's list of works therefore, provides another possible explanation for the relative lack of commissions undertaken in the early years of the partnership, and of those undertaken in the period 1845-50, apart from the three that were far away (Llandeilo, Shinfield and Danby, where neither Mallinson nor Healey may ever have set foot), only Mytholmroyd would have required a difficult journey for Healey, though not for Mallinson. Indeed, the chief transport problem during these years for the partners was probably travelling from one of their offices to the other.

The prospects for Mallinson and Healey's partnership in the early Victorian West Riding were set fair by the complementary nature of their skills and personalities. Mallinson’s indifferent vocational training and lack of professional experience was offset by Healey’s apprenticeship with the foremost Gothic Revivalist in northern England in the third and fourth decades of the nineteenth century, and his subsequent rôle as head clerk in an archaeologically advanced church building firm in Worcester, while what may have been in Healey, the impediment of a retiring nature, was compensated by a gregarious partner who was always ready to deliver a speech when one was required or to take the chair at a meeting. Moreover, both partners had worked with or trained under architects whom the Church Building Commission and the Incorporated Church Building Society considered acceptable, whatever posterity’s judgement of Walker Rawstorne may subsequently have been, which facilitated access to a specialist line of business, somewhat akin to a protected professional order, where local competition was thin and the potential rewards, more assured. How profitable was this business model therefore and what level of income did it generate for the partners in the years ahead?