Mackmurdo: the Final Years

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.

But more and more I was conscious of an influence drawing me aside from architecture and planning of buildings to study problems connected with the Social Structure.

 - MACKMURDO

At the beginning of the new century Mackmurdo left London & settled in Essex where he had bought an estate. In 1904 he started building the large house of Great Ruffins, Wickham Bishops, symbolically surmounting it with a large tower to enable him to gaze at the stars. Great Ruffins was everything that Mackmurdo had dreamt of. It had seven bathrooms & as many changes of floor-level between what, from the outside, are the ground & first floors. Every room is approached either up or down several steps. The lantern overlooks the estuary of the Blackwater for miles.



Unfortunately, soon after its completion, financial pressures forced him to sell the house, & he moved to a smaller house nearby, occasionally persuading the new owner to organise large parties when his old urge for social gatherings grew too strong.

He now concentrated entirely upon economic research, which led him to his ideas of State-Socialism. He pleaded for living wages & pensions fixed by the State, & for replacing a monetary system based on gold by a system based on food vouchers. He published The Human Hive: its Life and Law in 1926 & A People's Charter in 1933. He died in 1942 at the age of ninety-one.

Sixty years had elapsed since, at the age of thirty-one, he had founded the Century Guild, & played a formative role in the  genesis of Art Nouveau, the Arts and Crafts movement, & the typographical revolution that developed into the Private Press movement. Such achievements, progressive & influential, had gained from the first international recognition, & continue to merit the utmost respect. Their sheer variety demands explanation . But despite the abandonment of these activities for the sociological work to which he attached greater importance, the old master builder gazing at the stars, the quintessential Utopian craftsman, is the image by which he would, perhaps, wish to be remembered.

When I first met him ... he was energetically pursuing these Utopian researches. He was eighty-six years old, but no less active and agile for that. He walked with me and talked of his economic conceits, his light blue eyes glittering, his wavy white hair blown by a breeze, a black coat slipped on over his butcher-blue blouse or blue shirt - the kind of blue blouse which William Morris wore, and which Voysey wore. The shirt being in this case - as in other cases- a profession of faith.

- PEVSNER

Books & pamphlets by A.H. Mackmurdo

The parable of the talents, or, profit on accounting of lending condemned. A.H. Mackmurdo. London: Charles Watts; Orpington: George Allen, 1878

The immorality of lending for payment of interest, or for any usurious gain. By Arthur H. Mackmurdo. London: Charles Watts, 1878. 61 pages

Essay on art education. By A.H. Mackmurdo. Liverpool: Adam Holder, 1882

Wren's City churches. By A.H. Mackmurdo. Orpington: G. Allen, 1883. viii, 133 pages

Plain handicrafts: being essays by artists setting forth the principles of designs ... with a preface by G.F. Watts ... Edited by A.H. Mackmurdo. London: Percival & Co., 1892. vi, 63 pages.

Pressing questions: profit-sharing, women's suffrage, electoral reform. By A.H. Mackmurdo. London: John Lane, 1913, xxi, 342 pages

Electoral reform: voting by occupations instead of by districts. "Every man in his own order". By A.H. Mackmurdo. London: P.S. King & Son, 1917, 35 pages

The human hive: its life and law. By A.H. Mackmurdo. London: Watts & Co., 1926. xvi, 309 pages.

Money and credit of the future, and other essays. A.H. Mackmurdo. London: P.S. King & Son, 1929. 87 pages

Gold standard and other diseases. By A.H. Mackmmurdo. London: Desmond Harmsworth, 1932. 72 pages (Hobby-Horse; 2)

How prosperity will come. By A.H. Mackmurdo. London: Desmond Harmsworth, 1932. 70 pages (Hobby-Horse; 3)

The poems of Selwyn Image. Edited by A.H. Mackmurdo. London: Grant Richards, 1932

Selwyn Image: letters. Edited by A.H. Mackmurdo. London: Grant Richards, 1932
With 60 special copies signed by Mackmurdo.

A people's charter, or, the terms of prosperity and freedom within a community. By A.H. Mackmurdo. London: Williams & Norgate, 1933. 269 pages.

Essex social services guide. Edited by A.H. Mackmurdo, etc. Essex Rural Community Council, 1934. 110 pages.

The new social order: its mechanism. By A.H. Mackmurdo. London: C.W. Daniel Co., 1938. 24 pages

Money & food: discoveries by a group of scientists. Introduction by A.H. Mackmurdo. London: C.W. Daniel Co., 1939. 91 pages

[Material collected & issued by A.H. Mackmurdo in connection with a proposed conference of British scientists, under the auspices of the Association of Scientific Workers, on the setting up of a new social order.] Wickham Bishops: Science Press, 1942