9.  'ARCHITECTURAL PROPRIETY'.

'After the High Sheriff had opened proceedings, the Rev. Mr. Stanton read a paper...  He observed that the study of Church Architecture might now fairly be ranked among the popular, he might almost say fashionable, pursuits of the day.  Architectural Charts, beautifully executed and illustrated, showing at a glance the different periods and peculiarities of style belonging to each period, had been published in abundance and were in the hands of many.  Technical terms had become 'household words'.  'Mullions and transoms, spandrels and soffits, piscina and sedilia' glided with ease and grace from female lips that would have astounded the last generation.'

                                                    Berrow's Worcester Journal, Saturday, 28th July 1855.

General Remarks.

Architectural propriety in the design of churches was a subject of fierce debate in the middle years of the nineteenth century, never far removed from the hint of a suggestion that to deviate from the widely accepted path was indicative of a failure of an individual's moral compass.  Most of the great and the good who patronised national church building campaigns at the time, being anxious to appear neither perverse nor ignorant, took care to avoid stylistic faux pas that might attract opprobrium or ridicule, and the fears of the patrons were shared by their architects, who were content to be known for their earnest and sincere interest in matters of such deep and Christian concern.  A majority of these men, like their clients, were drawn from the Church of England's Anglo-Catholic wing, while those of more detached view, like John Loughborough Pearson, saw very little reason to make a show of the fact.   Architects working in London, with clients scattered across the country, rarely found it disadvantageous to be identified with the Ecclesiastical (formerly Cambridge Camden) Society, even after the steady drip of converts to Rome initiated by John Henry Newman, had begun to take its toll.  But what was happening in the provinces in these years?  Was the situation there, as the literature often seems to assume, merely an imitation of the position in the metropolis, if sometimes rather a pale one?  Before examining Mallinson and Healey's experience, it is useful to reflect on the changing attitudes to 'correct' style that were being played out in the highly contested 1840s and '50s.

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Thomas Rickman and After.

When Mallinson and Healey formed their partnership in 1845, the development of architectural style in mediaeval England had only quite recently come to be understood.  In 1817, Thomas Rickman (1776-1841) set out a scheme that divided the late Middle Ages into three broad stylistic periods for which he coined the terms 'Early English', 'Decorated' and 'Perpendicular', and to which, rather confusingly, he assigned four principal styles, namely the 'lancet' style of c.1190-1280, the 'geometric' style of c. 1275-1320, the 'flowing' or 'curvilinear' style (characterized by the appearance of the ogee arch) of c. 1315-1360, and the 'rectilinear' style that arose after the Black Death and continued in no conspicuous direction for over a century and a half, before finally metamorphosing into the Tudor style during the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII.  The geometric style, thus defined, straddled the Early English/Decorated transition, and its ambivalent position gave later writers scope to put their own stamp on Rickman's system, with most nineteenth century authors choosing to consider the geometric as the initial manifestation of the Decorated period and most mid to late twentieth century authors, following Pevsner's example, to treat it as the closing phase of the Early English.  This system, with its clear and precise taxonomy, was further developed by William Whewell (1794-1866) and others, as intellectual figures in nineteenth century England sought to advance what Carla Yanni has described as the 'scientization' of architectural history, based on firm empirical foundations rather than the fanciful theorising of earlier generations [1].

Helpfully in this regard, and notwithstanding its ambiguities, it quickly became apparent that Rickman's model mirrored its subject astonishingly well [2].   Its unfortunate corollary was that its very simplicity and chronological straightforwardness seemed to beg for an explanation, of which the most obvious was to fancy one saw within it, not the vagaries of passing fashion or slowly emerging evidence of plodding technological advance, but an heroically achieved ascent to some pinnacle of perfection, followed by degenerate decline, in which architecture reflected a parallel rise and fall in private morals and religious piety.  On the location of the acme, however, there was rather less agreement, with The Ecclesiologist arguing in 1846 in almost mind-numbing detail that it had been reached with the flowing (curvilinear) Decorated style [3], and Ruskin counter-arguing with equal vigour in the 1850s and ’60s, that it had passed a few decades earlier with the 'surrender of [the] integrity' [4] of the geometric.  Yet both were united in the view that the rectilinear Perpendicular style was a horrible, debased thing, notwithstanding such chef-d'oeuvres as King's College Chapel, and contemporary church architects were wise to keep apace with these shifting attitudes if they wished to capitalise on the concomitant opportunities.  As Chris Miele has written, 'Before... 1834, the care of ancient fabrics was not as a rule entrusted to architects but rather to local builders or craftsmen, usually instructed by the churchwarden.  By staking a claim on architectural history, professional architects showed sound business sense, putting themselves in a position to capitalise on a boom in the building market' [5].

Table 9 shows the predominant styles of Mallinson and Healey’s churches, assessed according to Rickman’s system.  Although there is no wholly consistent pattern, all the churches in lancet style were designed before 1852 and all those in flowing or curvilinear style, with one exception, during the period 1848 and 1855, while the geometric style was employed throughout the partnership and, again with that single exception, exclusively from 1856.  In general terms, these three phases of the partners’ work might be loosely regarded as periods when ease of design and cheapness were considered to be paramount (the years of the lancet style), when the edicts of the Cambridge Camden Society held sway (the years of the curvilinear style), and after Ruskin’s dogmas had virtually swept all before them [6]. The employment of these styles by Mallinson and Healey will now be examined in turn.

Table 9:  Mallinson and Healey’s Church Designs, Classified by Style.

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Lancet Style.

Mallinson adopted this style at the outset of his career for Holy Trinity, Queen’s Head, and then, more successfully, at Wyke, and Healey used it for the first two churches he designed after entering into partnership, namely St. John the Evangelist’s, Baildon, and St. Paul’s, Manningham, discussed in chapter 5. 'First Pointed' work developed a reputation following the publication of Pugin’s Contrasts, for being the cheap and nasty style, due in large part to the scorn Pugin poured on the stark, emaciated creations of some of the Commissioners’ architects [7], of which H. & H.W. Inwood’s grey-brick church of St. Mary’s, Somers Town (St. Pancras) (1822-7), is a striking example [8].  In fact, churches in this style were not demonstrably cheaper than many of those in the Second Pointed form being erected elsewhere around the same time since other factors invariably outweighed any savings made, in particular on window tracery.  Indeed, St. Mary’s, Somers Town - the exterior of which is severe to the point of pitilessness - cost £13,629 and accommodated 1,915 adults and children, at the distinctly high price of £7.2s.4d per sitting.  Nor, indeed, were Mallinson and Healey’s churches in this style any cheaper than what would later prove to be the average for the partnership:  St. Mary’s, Wyke, cost £4.6s.8d per sitting (table 8b), Holy Trinity, Queen’s Head, £3.4s.10d, St. John the Evangelist’s, Baildon, £3.11s.5d, and St. Paul’s, Manningham, £5 [9].  The predominance of the style in the early years of the Gothic Revival, therefore, must have had some other raison d’être than a belief in its economy and may have arisen in part from the fondness shown for it by a few of the very first men to receive commissions under the 1818 parliamentary grant - Rickman especially.

Healey certainly made no discernible attempt to keep costs to a minimum in his designs for St. Paul’s church, Manningham [10], as witnessed by the inclusion of the excellent stone capitals to the internal window shafts in the N. aisle (and which presumably once existed in the S. aisle also), featuring leaves, carved heads and pecking birds, in imitation of Early English stiff leaf (figs. 5d(ii)-5d(iii)).  Outside, conventional stiff leaf decorates the capitals of the four orders of shafts on either side of the S. porch outer doorway, and the arch above carries an elaborate series of keeled rolls and a line of dog-tooth moulding.  However, the true measure of the church is to be seen in the view down St. Paul’s Road, where the building, dead centre at the end of the cul-de-sac, with its cruciform plan, equal-length transepts and elegant spire, presents a prospect in almost perfect symmetry (fig. 5d(i)).  The broach spire is taller and slenderer than Mallinson’s equivalent at Wyke (fig. 3c(i)), which was built for a similar sum, and, indeed, there is much about St. Paul’s that might have made it a highly successful model to re-use with variations elsewhere, had not client demand or, more probably, Healey’s preferences or proclivities changed for some reason, for one thing that is certain is that he never attempted anything similar again. 

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Curvilinear Style.

The precepts of the Cambridge Camden Society were set out in The Ecclesiologist, in occasional publications such as A Few Words to Church Builders, published in 1841, and in J.M. Neale and Benjamin Webb’s extended introduction to their translation of Rationale Divinorum Officiorum by Guillaume Durand.  Taking root in the ground Pugin was busily tilling, the authors’ influence soon outgrew even their dogmatism.  'A Catholick architect must be a Catholick in heart', they declared:

'In ancient times, the finest buildings were designed by the holiest Bishops... Now, allowing the respect which attaches itself to the profession of a modern architect...  none would assert that they, as a body, make it a matter of devotion and prayer.' [11]

This was the source of everything that was wrong.  The contemplative life of the mediaeval church builder who had no thought of recompense had been supplanted by architects vying for position in the busy world of commerce.  Even the most basic standards were failing to be met:

'We surely ought to look at least for Church-membership from one who ventures to design a church... The church architect must... forego all lucrative undertakings, if they may not be carried through with those principles which he believes necessary for every good building… Even in church-building itself, he must see many an unworthy rival preferred to him, who will condescend to pander to the whims and comfort of a Church-committee.' [12]

The architect’s understanding of his discipline was also important although the writer seems to have been confused as to whether he was advocating originality or conformity:

'...if architecture... is a branch of poesy, if the poet’s mind is to have any individuality, he must design in one style, and one style only.  For the Anglican architect, it will be necessary to know enough of the earlier styles to be able to restore the deeply interesting churches, which they have left us as precious heirlooms: but for his own style, he should choose the glorious architecture of the fourteenth century.' [13]

This was ambiguous but any contemporary architect worth his salt would have recognised at once that it was the early fourteenth century, flowing Decorated style that was intended.  Indeed, further on in their introduction, Neale and Webb were more specific: 

'[T]he Decorated style may be indeed the finest development of Christian architecture which the world has yet seen… [N]o other period can be chosen at which all conditions of beauty, of detail, of general effect, of truthfulness, of reality are so fully answered as this… [T]he decline of Christian art… may be traced from this very period.'  [14]

This became the new orthodoxy that swept across England over the next decade and a half, and was carried even as far as America and Australia.  High Anglicans, in particular, accepted these tenets almost as if they were Holy Scripture itself;  latitudinarians were less passionate but generally assented at least to the basic principles.  Nonetheless, it would be wrong to consider this new dispensation as something imposed by Churchmen upon reluctant architects, desirous of keeping to their conservative ways, for often the architects were more enthusiastic than their clients about these matters, who might sometimes have needed a degree of gentle persuasion that this was the way to go.     

Mallinson and Healey, of course, were unquestionably good Churchmen, and Healey’s grandson, Francis H. Healey, believed, albeit erroneously, his grandfather had been a member of the Cambridge Camden Society [15].  Healey designed eight churches in out-and-out curvilinear style, and six or seven more with strong affinities to it.  Most members of the former, purer group were relatively small buildings however:  (i) St. Alban’s, Withernwick, had no tower and only a very modest lean-to S. aisle adjoining the nave eaves, leaving no space for a clerestory; (ii) St. Matthew’s, Bankfoot, had a similar aisle each side but no tower; (iii) St Mary & All Angels, Cundall (fig. 9a(i)), and (iv) All Saints’, Mappleton, had towers but no aisles; (v) Christ Church, Mount, Pellon, had a southwest tower doubling as a porch but originally had only a modest lean-to S. aisle; and (vi) St. James’s, Boroughbridge, and (vii) the demolished St. Mary’s, Laisterdyke, had aisles and a tower, but were otherwise among the partners’ most pared-back designs, leaving only (viii) the demolished St. Andrew’s, Listerhills, that seems to have had pretensions to any grandeur.  Focusing on those features of the surviving buildings which are most closely identified with the curvilinear, it is inevitably window tracery that establishes the church’s style first, and here it is not only the use of the ogee arch that is diagnostic but also the manner in which every window differs from its neighbours, as illustrated at St. Mary & All Angels’, Cundall (figs. 9a(ii)-9a(iv)).  All these designs have mediaeval precedent although it is always very difficult to find an exact model for any window in particular.

Figs. 9a(i) - 9a(iv), St. Mary & All Saints', Cundall:

(i) above, the church from the south;

(ii) - (iv) below, the two S. windows to the nave and the westernmost S. window to the chancel.

The obvious question that next arises is whether these forms did actually meet the approval of the Camdenians.  An 'official' judgement on an individual building was sometimes passed in the 'New Churches' article in The Ecclesiologist, thought usually to have been written by  A.J. Beresford Hope, although of the six churches by Mallinson and Healey that came under Hope’s critical eye, the only one in unambiguous curvilinear style was St. Matthew’s, Bankfoot (figs. 9b(i) - 9b(iii)) [16], and on this occasion the writer contented himself with a matter-of-fact architectural description save for some minor criticisms of the placing of the encaustic tiles in the sanctuary and the position of the Decalogue boards.  However, since some parts of the article had been copied word-for-word from a longer report in The Bradford Observer [17], intriguingly headed 'From a Correspondent' and written in a manner at once more authoritative and less deferential than the paper’s usual reportage, it seems quite possible that this was written by Hope also, who might have attended the consecration service the day before.  This report passes a number of minor judgements on various aspects of the building, the majority favourable, a few mildly critical, after first making it clear that the writer knew his architectural history by describing the style of the church as 'the flowing DECORATED, which...  was first introduced during the reign of Edward I but... was brought into general use... in the reign of his successors, Edward II and III'.  Two and a half thousand words later, it arrives at this happy conclusion:

'The architects were Messrs. Mallinson and Healey, Bradford, Yorkshire, of whose skill and taste in church design the present edifice is substantial proof.  Taken altogether, this is a correct specimen of what a village church should be: on the one hand, wanting nothing of that decent ornament which befits the house of prayer, nor on the other, overdone in any of those accessories which mark the distinction between the humbler and the more costly building. Here is everything to assist, nothing to distract devotion; much to help to solemnize, without anything to divide the thoughts of the earnest worshipper.  Long may its walls hear the voice of a faithful minister, setting forth the word of life...' [18] 

Figs. 9b(i) - 9b(iii),  St. Matthew's, Bankfoot:

(i) above, the church from the south;  and (ii) - (iii) below, two N. windows.

This was Mallinson and Healey’s reward for staying true to the Ecclesiologists.  They were rarely this kind even to much grander buildings.  St. Michael’s, Mytholmroyd (fig. 9c) - which was reviewed in 1848 and was halfway between flowing and geometric in style - was 'a very creditable production' however, which the writer was 'glad to find a very decided improvement upon two churches by these architects that came before us last year.'  (At this date, these can only have been St. John the Evangelist’s, Baildon, St. Paul’s, Manningham, or St. John the Baptist’s, Clayton.) 'They have now adopted Middle-Pointed' [19].  Yet this proved a transient victory for the Society and The Ecclesiologist was much less satisfied four months later when reviewing the partners’ newly completed church of St. Thomas the Apostle, Heptonstall, while nevertheless having the courtesy to absolve the architects:

'We must however express our regret that the Third Pointed style has been adopted and that the service should not be performed in the chancel.  We understand that the architects exhibited another design in Middle-Pointed, which was not accepted.'  [20]

Figs. 9c, St. Michael & All Angels', Mytholmroyd.

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Geometric Style.

John Ruskin made the first of two professional visits to Bradford on 1st March, 1859, when he was asked to deliver the inaugural lecture to the Bradford School of Design [21], and it is likely Healey was in the audience.  Ruskin’s influence on Victorian building can be traced back at least a decade earlier to the publication of The Seven Lamps of Architecture and it was subsequently reinforced by the appearance of The Stones of Venice, which was issued in three volumes during the years 1851-53.  Ruskin made many long, specious arguments in the former work especially, but all were directed essentially to the same end, namely the promotion of Ruskin’s favoured Venetian Gothic as the beau idéal for ecclesiastical architecture in the rapidly urbanizing towns and cities of Britain.  With this end in view, he sought to give each and every argument he made the force of moral rectitude, not only to appeal to the artist but also to solicit the conscience.  This was nowhere more evident than in 'The Lamp of Truth', where Ruskin railed against shams of all kinds. This resulted, in particular, in some especially curious and tendentious paragraphs in which he declared that as stone-work is, by its very nature, 'stiff, and unyielding' (Ruskin’s italics), the plastic tracery forms of the flowing Decorated style 'sacrificed a great principle of truth; it sacrificed the expression of the qualities of the material' [22] and this was both artistically ruinous and (which was much the same thing for Ruskin) morally corrupting.

All this was aimed at one principal target, which was the ogee arch.  Venetian Gothic was most closely related to the north European geometric.  For architects and their clients who accepted the general thrust of Ruskin’s reasoning, it was a simple matter to turn back three or four decades to the style that had prevailed in England at the very beginning of the fourteenth century.  Indeed, it was arguably simpler and less expensive for besides confining the apertures in the heads of traceried windows largely to trefoils, quatrefoils and cinquefoils, etc., it was usual in this style for all windows in an elevation either to be identical to one another or to use two designs alternately.  Besides, geometric style had been used on many occasions from the very beginning of the Gothic Revival so that which was being urged was not the adoption of a wholly new style so much as the abandonment of its competitors.  This is borne out by the list of Mallinson and Healey’s churches in table 9, with one or two exceptions.  The newly accepted modes may be illustrated by the S. elevations of the little church of St. Mary’s. Westow, the designs for the restoration of which Healey completed by July 1862 [23], and of the more significant, contemporary, St. Mark’s, Dewsbury (fig. 9d), which, as mentioned in chapter 7, was only finally consecrated in 1865.

Fig. 9d,  St. Mark's, Dewsbury:  

the S. aisle and clerestory.

This was not the only form of supposed architectural deceit against which Ruskin set his sights in this essay however.  Another bête noir was any building material used to imitate something else: 'Touching the false representation of material, the question is infinitely more simple, and the law more sweeping: all such imitations are utterly base and inadmissible' [24].  Yet Mallinson and Healey routinely stained Memel timber to look like oak [25], both before and after the publication of The Seven Lamps, and this practice does not seem to have troubled the normally easily offended Cambridge Camden Society, as witnessed, for example, by their mention of it, without comment, in their critique of Mallinson and Healey’s rebuilding of St. John the Evangelist’s, Baildon [26].  Indeed, the Incorporated Church Building Society seems to have been more exercised about this sort of thing than the Ecclesiologists, as when they refused to sanction the use of plaster to imitate stone at Thornaby-on-Tees in 1857 (chapter seven).

The other essay from The Seven Lamps that did most to alter the visible form of ecclesiastical architecture during the High Victorian period (approximately 1855-70) was probably 'The Lamp of Power', and here Ruskin was driven by his admiration of such chunky, cumbersome piles as the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, which he endeavoured to associate with the prophecies of the Book of Revelation: 'and [the angel] measured the city with the reed... The length and the breadth and the height of it are equal' [277].

This formed the basis of Ruskin’s privileging of mass over line and of what, for a later age, would characterize Ruskinian architecture above everything else:

'[T]he square and circle are pre-eminently the areas of power among those bounded by purely straight or curved lines; and these, with their relative solids, the cube and sphere, and relative solids of progression.., the square and cylindrical column, are the elements of utmost power in all architectural arrangements.' [28]

Fig. 9e,  St. Stephen's, Bowling: 

the church from the southwest.

This and the avoidance of buttressing was what ultimately led to many High Victorian churches appearing as if they were constructed from a set of children’s geometric building blocks.  Mallinson and Healey’s work illustrates this best at St. Stephen’s, Bowling (fig. 9e), and St. John’s, Welburn (figs. 9f(i) - 9f(ii)), both of which were designed in 1859.  Both look as if they have been created from the juxtaposition of a collection of cuboids and triangular prisms with the addition of a pyramid sliced off at the angles to provide the helm roof of St. Stephen’s tower, and a tall, slim, octagonal pyramid to form the spire at St. John’s.  Interest is created in both designs by the deliberate asymmetry of the elevations while unity is preserved by the steep, 60^° pitch of their roofs - to the nave,  dormers, tower and gables round the semi-octagonal apse at Bowling, and to the nave, chancel, transepts and vestry at Welburn.  St. John’s is especially successful:  the grouping of masses is highly effective, and the vestry in the re-entrant between the chancel and the S. transept (which in many churches appears as a necessary but unfortunate appendage), is integrated into the composition to admirable effect.  St. Stephen’s, in contrast, is downright idiosyncratic or, in the words of Peter Leach in The Buildings of England, '[a]n unexpected lurch into roguishness' [29].   As originally planned, the church had no transepts [30], and there appears to be no information as to who was responsible for their addition, although obvious candidates are Healey’s sons.  Even without these, however, the church is surely the most perversely original in all Healey’s oeuvre and a clear demonstration of his utter determination never to repeat himself.

Figs. 9f(i) - 9f(ii),  St. John's, Welburn: 

(i) left, from the southwest; and  (ii) right, from the northeast.

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Other Styles.

Healey used the rectilinear Perpendicular style twice - once at St. Peter’s, Thorner, and once at St. Thomas the Apostle’s, Heptonstall.  However at Thorner, Healey was tasked with restoring and enlarging a pre-existing fifteenth century building, where the obvious method of proceeding was to stay true to such work as he was able to salvage. Thus he opened up the tower (which had been partitioned off for use as a fuel store), made good the damage to the nave, and constructed a totally new chancel and chapels where there seem to have been no chapels before [31].  Some of the supermullioned window tracery in the segmental-pointed nave windows, survived, and could be re-used or, where necessary, renewed in the same style, while the chapels and the chancel E. wall gave Healey scope to show he was perfectly capable of designing excellent windows in this modality on the very rare occasion he was called upon to do so.

This leaves just St. Thomas the Apostle’s, Hepstonstall, to act as a real demonstration model of what Healey could achieve in Third Pointed style and here he had the advantage of a generous budget.  The church today is impossible to photograph as a unit due to the proximity of trees on all sides, and it is unrewarding to view internally since it was stripped bare of all its historic context during reordering in 1963-4 in what The Buildings of England refers to very mildly as 'a controversial act' [32].  Nevertheless, a simple description of the church reveals its ambition.  It is embattled in all parts and consists of a three-bay chancel with two-bay chapels, a six-bay aisled nave with N. & S. porches, and a tall, angle-buttressed W. tower rising in three stages to openwork battlements and crocketed pinnacles at the angles (fig. 9g(i)). The windows are  two-centred with fine supermullioned tracery except in the clerestory where they are four-centred and divided from one another by buttresses rising to crocketed pinnacles (fig. 9g(ii)), and the proud porches have similar diagonal buttresses, gargoyles at the angles, and ogee dripstones above the outer doorways (fig. 9g(iii)), of which there are more over the tower bell-openings.  Inside, the aisle arcades, chapel arcades and chancel arch are formed of arches of two orders bearing a double wave moulding springing from tall piers composed of four shafts separated by hollows.  All parts are crisply cut in fine, grey, Carboniferous sandstone, and the sheer dimensions of the building - in particular, its height - add to its grandeur.

Figs. 9g(i) - 9g(ii),  St. Thomas the Apostle's, Heptonstall:

(i) left, the tower from the northwest;

and (iii) below, the S. porch.

A much sharper proof of the partners’ complaisant temperament, however, was demonstrated by their willingness to design places of worship in classical style for Nonconformists and here the day-books suggest that Mallinson may sometimes have taken rather more of a hand in this work, albeit that the major contribution to their design seems still to have come from Healey.  Unfortunately, the only chapels built or enlarged by the partners, for which there is any surviving evidence of their appearance, are the two that are extant, namely the former Scottish Presbyterian Church in Bradford and the erstwhile Bridge End Independent Chapel, Rastrick, the second of which has miraculously survived without the benefit of listed building protection.  St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Chapel was placed on the corner between two roads and has variously been described, rather confusingly, as standing in Infirmary Street and Westgate.  Moreover it is wrongly attributed on the Historic Buildings website to the firm of Andrews and Delauney [33], although it is correctly ascribed in The Buildings of England [34].  In fact, this is a fine building by Mallinson and Healey in Roman Tuscan distyle in antis, with a plain tympanum, a lunette over the central doorway, and a large round-headed window deeply recessed on either side.  The cornice which fell and killed three workmen while the building was under construction in 1848, has an overhang of about a metre and is deep as well as broad.  There are clear similarities here to the later (1856), two-storeyed Bridge End Congregational Chapel, Rastrick (figs. 6b(i) - 6b(ii)), which again has a three-bay front with a large surmounting tympanum facing the road, but here the columns between the bays have been reduced to shallow pilasters and, by way of compensation, the tympanum bears the carving of a large laurel wreath and rests, not on a large plain cornice but on a corbel table supported by consoles.  Although neither building is the most expensive or elaborate of its kind, there is nothing deficient here, and Mallinson and Healey successfully demonstrated that they could work in any style with no loss of facility.

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Reception.

'To be acclaimed a successful architect in Ecclesiological circles', wrote Christopher Webster, 'was rather like belonging to an exclusive club whose members looked down with a mixture of pity and disdain on those who aspired to join but lacked the necessary credentials' [35]. However, if the principal developments in Mallinson and Healey’s ecclesiastical designs reflected their concern to conform with the requirements of club membership, it did not necessarily follow that they were made in response to local demand, and here, when the surviving correspondence between Mallinson and Healey and their clients is examined, aside from the rejection by the building committee at Heptonstall of Healey’s Second Pointed design in favour of an unfashionable Perpendicular one, the only example where style appears even to have been mentioned, occurs in the letter from Thomas Healey to Sir Francis Sharp Powell, previously quoted (chapter seven), where Healey wrote, 'We of course calculated on making Horton church thoroughly truthful and substantial as the first essential' [36], and where the word 'truthful' must surely have been employed for its Ruskinian associations.  Yet although Powell may have been au fait with Ruskin’s opinions and known to be so by Healey, he was no unquestioning follower of the latest fads and fancies, as Henry Hulbert makes clear in his memoir of his uncle:

'[Sir Francis] objected to any innovations in the Church services, whether Ritualistic or Evangelistic. On this account he was always glad to return to the dignified Cathedral services at All Saints’ after the many changes and chances which befell him at the London churches which he attended.' [37]

This leaves the local and regional press to explore but this turns out to be singularly unenlightening also as their reporters, anxious, no doubt, not to alienate readers, made it their habit to be delighted by everything.  The praise given to St. John the Baptist’s church, Clayton, by The Bradford Observer - and this in its report of the ceremony for the laying of the foundation stone, before any part of the building had been raised above ground level - was discussed in the preface.  The Halifax Guardian was still more effusive in its report on the consecration of St. Michael’s, Mytholmroyd, the previous year ('We may with truth apply to the church and parish... the scriptural phrase "beautiful for situation" ') [38], and romantic descriptions such as this are repeated time and again.  There is no mention at all of style in the report on St. Michael’s, albeit this is still rather early in date.  Reference has already been made to the article on St. Matthew’s, Bankfoot, of December 1849, possibly written by A.J. Beresford Hope.  Its companion church of St. Michael and All Angels’, Shelf, of similar plan but different design, elicited this comment in The Morning Post, the following June, although the writer still declined to risk a personal judgement:

'The style of architecture adopted in the erection of this church is Early Geometric Decorated, which prevailed from 1270-1330.  Its details are essentially distinct from the Flowing Decorated adopted in the church of St. Matthew, Bankfoot, which we described in the month of December last.  Those who desire a knowledge of the distinction between these two portions of one general style will find a visit to these churches of far more service than a lengthened description.' [39]

However, The Morning Post was another London publication of course, and there is still little or nothing in the local press of the West Riding to indicate that its reporters knew or cared about such niceties. Rather their reporters were anxious to name all the clergy, ladies and gentlemen that they 'noticed' at these ceremonies, probably in the hope of selling each a newspaper, and then to flatter the preacher with a verbatim report of his 'excellent' sermon, which was listened to with 'the deepest attention' [40], before concluding with a detailed but matter-of-fact description of the church (a 'naming of parts', with each part given its precise dimensions) of such a nature as to avoid all controversy.  This continues throughout the 1850s and it is only at last in 1860, when confronted with Healey’s rather extraordinary St. Stephen’s, Bowling, that the reporter for The Bradford Observer felt brave enough to venture a few tentative opinions of his own, with the clear implication he did not like it:

'In many respects, this church is peculiar in its outward appearance, having something of a continental character about it, but at the same time, blending the useful with the ornamental.  The interior effect we think much superior to the exterior...' [41].

However, the newspaper’s reporter seemed no better informed about architectural style in general, than those who came before him, having erroneously described the 'geometric decorated' as the style 'which prevailed about A.D.1360' [42].  This is hardly commensurate with a climate in which church architecture was a burning issue of controversy and debate - a time when '[m]ullions and transoms, spandrels and soffits, piscina and sedilia glided with ease and grace from female lips'.

_{*     *     *     *     *     *     *}

Conclusion.

Mallinson and Healey’s designs for new churches reflected, at least in broad outline, the general twists and turns in ecclesiological thinking that occurred at the national level during the seventeen years of their partnership.  If the relationship was rather a loose one, however, this was due to the fact that interest in artistic and religious niceties among their clientele was often distinctly slight for not only was the West Riding relatively isolated from the rest of the country by geography, economic conditions and the preponderance of Dissent, but also few of the partners’ commissions were undertaken for men with either the leisure or inclination to trouble themselves with fashionable esoteric mysteries.  It was the comparative freedom this gave Mallinson and Healey that presented them with the opportunity to range their business widely, largely free from censure if and when they breached the latest conventions in taste or propriety, even to the extent of enabling them to work from time to time for the Nonconformists, albeit that this was also only possible because the partners themselves were local men who - relative to the times in which they lived - shared the same ecumenical and liberal attitudes.  

NOTES:

1. Carla Yanni, 'On Nature and Nomenclature - William Whewell and the Production of Architectural Knowledge in Early Victorian Britain' (Architectural History, 40, 1997, pp. 204-221).

2. It is, indeed, in spite of various suggestions down the years of ways to modify or replace it, still essentially the system used by architectural historians today.

3. The flowing Decorated style was The Ecclesiologist's 'Late Middle-Pointed', which 'is comparatively the most perfect style with which we are acquainted'.   ('The Ecclesiologist in Reply to Mr. E.A. Freeman',  The Ecclesiologist,  New Series, 2 (June 1846), pp. 217-249,  and especially p. 235.)

4. 'The Lamp of Truth', para. xxviii. (Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture.)

5. Chris Miele, ' 'Their interest and habit' - professionalism and the restoration of mediaeval churches, 1837-77'  in The Victorian Church, ed. Chris Brooks & Andrew Saint, pp.151-172 (pp. 154 & 156).

6. See, for example, Clark, The Gothic Revival, chs. 7, 8 & 10, or Stefan  Muthesius, The High Victorian Movement in Architecture, 1850-1870 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,1976), chs. 1 & 2.

7. This was made explicit by A.J. Beresford Hope  in The English Cathedral of  the Nineteenth Century  (London: John Murray, 1861), p. 35, when he wrote,  'the lancet style enjoyed extensive popularity with the fabricators of cheap churches on account of the happy reputation it enjoyed of surviving more starvation than any other.  It was emphatically the cheap style, and in the hands into which it fell it as often emphatically proved to be the nasty one'.

8. Port, Six Hundred New Churches, p. 328.

9. Holy Trinity, Queen’s Head, had accommodation for 802 people (Port, Six Hundred New Churches, p. 345), St. John the Evangelist’s, Baildon,  for 280 (Leeds Intellingencer, 1st April 1848), and St. Paul’s, Manningham,  for 600 (The Bradford Observer, 6th November 1846, previously quoted).   For the costs of these churches, see Appendix 3.

10. Presumably John Hollings had set out the budget at the outset.

11. J.M. Neale & Benjamin Webb, introduction to Durand’s Rationale Divinorum, pp. xx-xxi.

12. J.M. Neale & Benjamin Webb, introduction to Durand’s Rationale Divinorum, pp. xxii-xxiii.

13. J.M. Neale & Benjamin Webb, introduction to Durand’s Rationale Divinorum,  p. xxiv.

14. J.M. Neale & Benjamin Webb, introduction to Durand’s Rationale Divinorum,  compiled from pp. xxxi & xxx.

15. Paper read by Francis H. Healey, 1953.  But see Geoff Brandwood's list of Cambridge Camden/ Ecclesiological Society members, 1845-67, available on-line.

16. The other five buildings to receive notice in this magazine were:  (i) St. John the Evangelist’s, Baildon, reviewed 1848;  (ii) St. Michael & All Angels’, Shelf, reviewed 1848 and again 1850;  (iii) St. Michael’s, Mytholmroyd, reviewed 1848;  (iv) St. Thomas the Apostle’s, Heptonstall, reviewed 1849; and (v) Haley Hill Cemetery Chapel, reviewed 1860.

17. The Bradford Observer, 13th December 1849, p. 6.

18. ibid.

19. The Ecclesiologist,  New Series, 23 (December 1848).

20. The Ecclesiologist,  New Series, 26 (April 1849).

21. Bradford Daily Argus, 22nd January 1900.  Cited by Hardman, Ruskin and Bradford, p. 39. 

22. 'The Lamp of Truth', para. xxiv  (Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture).

23. Rev. R. Kitching (incumbent) to the Secretary of the ICBS, Westow, 5th July 1862.  LPA, ICBS 5962.

24. 'The Lamp of Truth' para. xvi  (Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture).

25. Memel timber was the term applied to any softwood exported through Memel, now Klaipéda, in Lithuania.

26. The Ecclesiologist,  New Series, 22 (October 1848).

27. Revelation, 21/16, and 'The Lamp of Power', para. viii (Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture).

28. 'The Lamp of Power',  para. ix (Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture).

29. Pevsner & Leach, The Buildings of England - Yorkshire: Leeds, Bradford & the North, p. 198.

30. Signed plan, dated July 1860.  LPA, ICBS 5445.

31. Notes in the church.

32. Pevsner &  Harman, The Buildings of England - Yorkshire: Sheffield and the South, p. 320.

33. In fact, Historic England does not even get the chapel’s former denomination right, describing it as United Reform.

34. Nikolaus  & Leach, The Buildings of England - Yorkshire: Leeds, Bradford & the North, p. 161.

35. Christopher Webster,  'An Alternative to Ecclesiology - William Wallen, 1807-1853' in Seven Church Architects, 1830-1930, ed. Geoff Brandwood (London: The Ecclesiological Society 2010), p.9.

36. Thomas Healey to Sir Francis Sharp Powell, Bradford, 17th March 1860.  Bradford, WYA, B-P papers, 16D86/2957.  Edward Kaufman has explored the Victorian concept of truthfulness in architecture in depth in his article 'Architectural Representation in Victorian England' (Journal of theSociety of Architectural Historians, 46/1, 1987, pp. 30-38), but although the metaphysical contortions through which he conducts his readers may have been compelling to Ruskin and his adherents, it seems doubtful they held much cogency for the bustling provincial architect.

37. Hulbert, Sir Francis Sharp Powell, p. 39.

38. 'Few districts present a finer field for setting forth to advantage the powers of architectural skill than this; and, in fairness and justice, we may say that the building now erected to the honour of God is well calculated to heighten and increase the charms which nature has hitherto spread out with a lavish hand.'   Halifax Guardian,  9th September 1848.   Reprinted in The [London Evening] Standard, 13th September 1848.

39. The Morning Post, 24th June 1850, p. 2.

40. Among the many examples of this form of reportage may be cited the articles describing the ceremonies for the laying of the foundation stones at Christ Church, South Ossett (The Leeds Intellingencer, 11th  January 1851) and St. Andrew’s, Listerhills (The Bradford Observer, 23rd October 1851), and the ceremonies for the consecration of St. Paul’s, Thornaby-on-Tees (Yorkshire Gazette, 25th September 1858) and St. Mary’s, Lower Dunsforth (Yorkshire Gazette, 28th September 1861).

41. The Bradford Observer, 26th April 1860, p. 5.

42. The Bradford Observer, 23rd February 1860, p. 6.  Report on the consecration of St. Philip’s church, Girlington.

CHAPTER 10.  ►