Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo

These notes were written over twenty years ago when I was endeavouring to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Mackmurdo with a small exhibition at Forty Hall Museum, Enfield, & now urgently need revision. I place them in this blog for their, however remote, connection to the reception of William Blake.

Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo, English architect, designer, & socio-economic theorist was an extraordinarily complex man whose life spans over ninety years.

He was born at Hyde Side, Edmonton on 12 December 1851, the son of Edward Mackmurdo & his wife Anne (formerly Jones). His father, who was an independent-thinking Scot, owned & ran a company manufacturing & supplying chemicals.

He was educated at Felsted School in Essex & in 1869 was apprenticed to the architect T. Chatfield Clark. He left Clark in 1873 to work under the Gothicist James Brooks as an Improver. In 1876 or thereabouts Mackmurdo set up in practice as an architect at 28 Southampton Street, London.



His first building, Halcyon House, 6 Private Road, Enfield, designed in 1872 & built in 1876, is dominated by the influence of R. Norman Shaw & of John Ruskin. Mackmurdo's few buildings show him to have been an architect of real originality. Brooklyn, 8 Private Road, Enfield (1886-1887), & 25 Cadogan Gardens, London (1893-94) are both elegantly simple designs, owing something respectively to the early Italian Renaissance & to the Queen Anne style; while in Great Ruffins at Wickham Bishops, Essex (c. 1904), simplicity is abandoned in favour of an extravagant baroque inspired by Christopher Wren.

Mackmurdo's pioneering zest comes out most boldly in his architectural work of the eighties. The elegant use of simplified classical motifs, the beautiful proportions, & compact plan, even the rendering of cement roughcast over brick, were to influence later architects such as Voysey.

It was during 1880 that Mackmurdo established contact with the Aesthetic Movement through his cousin Richard D'Oyly Carte. He met Whistler, & Herbert Horne joined Mackmurdo's practice as an apprentice. Horne had received occasional instruction before joining him as a pupil in 1882, & subsequently became a junior partner by an agreement dated 2nd June 1883. Herbert Horne was 19 when taken on by Mackmurdo as an apprentice but within two years had become a full partner.



In 1882, Mackmurdo founded the Century Guild, an association which aimed to reconcile the fine & applied arts by producing beautiful articles of use, & which publicised its ideals through an artistically produced journal, The Hobby Horse.

In 1883 Mackmurdo moved to Enfield, established a craft workshop & organised an Arts and Crafts Exhibition there. His chief interest was always in detail, & he was particularly taken by the notion that all the contents, furnishings & décor of a building should be of a piece, & to encourage this approach he had founded the Century Guild as a society where craftsmen in all of the relevant skills could come together & work jointly. In practice the Guild never had more than two or three members, but there were many associates & friends.

In the following year appeared the first number of his Century Guild Hobby Horse, a magazine of which the original purpose was that it should exemplify & illustrate his hobby horse - that architecture & internal design & furnishing should be considered together. But he was also fumbling towards the notion that all the arts were one, & that literature too, should in some way fit into this all-embracing structure.

Mackmurdo inherited enough on his father's death to enable him to indulge his personal whims throughout at least the first half of his life. Mackmurdo's house at 20 Fitzroy Street soon became the meeting place for a whole group of artists. Here he accommodated most of the inner circle of the Century Guild as well as other artistic strays: Selwyn Image, Brangwyn, Henry Carte & his son Geoffrey, & Albert Rothenstein all lived there at various times. Herbert Horne had a room there, as did the painter T. Hope McLachlan, the poet Lionel Johnson, & Arthur Galton. Ernest Dowson, Sickert, Augustus John, William Rothenstein & Arnold Dolmetsch were among the visitors. The poets Laurence Binyon & W.B. Yeats were regular visitors; Mackmurdo discovered & encouraged the painter Frank Brangwyn & offered him a studio. C.F.A.Voysey, in the early eighties, worked under Mackmurdo's direction.

During 1888 Mackmurdo was actively involved with Walter Crane in the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Art and its Application to Industry, & it was during this period that the working relationship between Horne & Mackmurdo became tenuous. The partnership dissolved in 1890. The next years saw Mackmurdo practising as an architect in London & Manchester.

"In August 1896, I had to give up my practice and I worked with my old fellow pupil Latham Withall at Old Jewry till about 1906."

In 1902 he married Eliza D'Oyly Carte (his cousin). He was 51, she was ten years younger & possessed of independent means. Around this time, Mackmurdo's own private means seem to have started wearing thin. He retired to the Essex countryside, built a large house at Wickham Bishops (though he himself lived in the estate cottage) , & this leading architect, designer, prophet of art & patron of artists settled down for the next forty years or so, abandoning almost all his early interests, & giving himself over to the writing of socialist pamphlets of which he wrote about a dozen, ranging from Electoral Reform in 1913 to The New Social Order in 1940.

In 1920 further financial reverses enforced the sale of both Great & Little Ruffins & he & his wife moved to a small bungalow built on a part of the grounds. His later years were almost entirely devoted to the construction of an elaborate & idiosyncratic Utopian scheme for socio-economic reform. His major work on the subject, The Human Hive: its Life and Law, was published in 1926. Apart from editing the posthumous Poems and Letters of his friend Selwyn Image, that seems to have been that. Mackmurdo died on 15 March 1942.

Chronology

1851 12th. December, born London. Family originally came from Dumfries in the 18th. century. Educated at Felstead School, Essex.
1869 Apprenticed under T. Chatfield Clarke, London, Architectural Surveyor to the Fishmongers' Company.
1873 Worked for James Brooks, a London architect, as an improver. Admitted Freeman of the City of London. Attended Ruskins School of Drawing, at Oxford.
1874 Visited Italy with Ruskin.
1875 Set up in practice as an architect at 28 Southampton Street, Strand, London.
1874-80 Made several visits to Italy during this period.
c. 1877 Met William Morris. Active in formation of Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (1877).
1880 Met J. M. Whistler.
1882-85 Associate of the Royal Institute of British Architects.
1882 Founded The Century Guild.
1883 Lived, and had craft workshops, at Enfield. Organised an Arts and Crafts Exhibition there. Published 'Wren's City Churches'.
1884 First publication of'The Hobby Horse'.
1885 Active in Home Arts and Industries Exhibition.
1888 Active member for the National Association for the Advance­ment of Art and its Application to Industry.
1896-1906 Gave up own practice and worked with Latham Withall, architect, at Old Jewry, London.
1902 Married Eliza D'Oyly Carte.
1904 Began building "Great Rufhns', Witham, Essex, for personal residence. For financial reasons however, he never occupied the house on completion. Built, and lived in, 'Litde RufEns' nearby. Later moved to cottage "MackmurdoY. All these homes were personally designed by Mackmurdo.
1926  Published 'The Human Hive', a treatise on sociological and monetary reform.
1942 15th. March, died at 'Mackmurdo's', Wickham Bishops, Essex.

Some Buildings by A.H. Mackmurdo

"Halcyon", 6 Private Road, Bush Hill Park (date unknown, probably about 1873). Demolished.
"Brooklyn", 8 Private Road, Bush Hill Park (c. 1881).
Church of St Bede, Hartington Road, Sefton Park, Liverpool (1883); by J.E.K. Cutts & A.H. Mackmurdo. Rebuilt following a fire in 1924.
"Sandhill", Formby, Liverpool (date unknown, probably before 1890).
Gymnasium, Gordon Institute for Boys, St Helens, Lancashire (1890). Demolished.
16 Redington Road, Hampstead (1890).
Chapel of the Ascension, Bayswater Road, London (1890-93); by H.P. Horne or A.H. Mackmurdo. Demolished.
12 Hans Road, Kensington, London (1891 or 1893).
St Mark's House, Holland Street, Ancoats, Manchester (1892); by Mackmurdo & Hornblower.
25 Cadogan Gardens (1899); by Hornblower & Mackmurdo.
Olde Swanne Public House, Sloane Street. Demolished.
109-113 Charterhouse Street, Islington (1900).
"Little Ruffins", Wickham Bishops, Essex (c. 1900). Much altered.
"Great Ruffins", Wickham Bishops, Essex (1904).
"Beacons", Wickham Bishops, Essex (c. 1920).
"Mackmurdo's", Wickham Bishops, Essex. Much altered.
Shop, Wickham Bishops, Essex.
Village Hall, Bradwell-juxta-Coggeshall, Essex (c. 1932).