Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo

This is the script for an illustrated talk on Mackmurdo I gave some twenty-five years ago.  The slides are currently missing but I'll fill in the illustrations as and when I can. Additionally, all bibliographical citations and source notes are omitted. This is a gap even more difficult to fill.

[Preamble]

There's a basic problem that's encountered by anyone attempting to talk or write about Mackmurdo. It's that there seems to have been an element of the bogus or of the mountebank in his character. For example, he repeatedly claimed to have been a pupil of Ruskin and to have been chosen  to accompany the great man on a tour of Italy. No evidence has been found for this claim. There's doubt if he ever met Ruskin. Of course he read and admired Ruskin, Carlyle, Walter Pater, Herbert Spencer. And they had a deleterious effect on his literary style. But there was never the personal acquaintanceship he was prone to claim.



Or again, to choose a local example, when, in old age, Mackmurdo prepared some pages of autobiography, he told stories such as the following

When Inigo Jones' Temple Bar was pulled down by the London County Council, M. (he refers to himself as M.) bought the material and had the beautiful structure re-erected at one of the entrances of Theobalds Park.

I don't think there's any truth in that story. But, of course, Sir Henry Meux who had spent £10 000 to re-erect Temple Bar at Theobalds was long dead when Mackmurdo was writing. There was no-one around to contradict him.

Nevertheless I should also stress that Mackmurdo's work as architect and designer is wholly admirable. If he had pursued his architectural vocation instead of drifting into sociological writing, he would undoubtedly have been of very great importance in the formation of the modern style. As it is, his achievement is still very considerable.



The slides I'm going to show are mostly authentic Mackmurdo or at least the work of his collaborators.

Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo (born 1851) was the eighth of the ten children born to Edward and Anne Mackmurdo. The first five children, none of whom survived to adulthood, were born when the couple were living in Bermondsey. Around 1847, the Mackmurdos moved to the healthier climate of Edmonton where Walter, Agnes, Arthur and Herbert were born in rapid succession. The 10th child Harold, was born in 1858.

The slide shows Mackmurdo (standing) with his mother and Herbert Horne, his architectural pupil, taking tea in the garden of Halcyon, in Bush Hill Park.

His mother, Anne Jones, was related to the Carte family of music publishers. Through his cousin Richard D'Oyly Carte, of the Savoy Hotel and Savoy Theatre, and impresario of the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, Mackmurdo was acquainted with the leading artistic figures of the time: artists like Whistler, designers such as Godwin, writers like Oscar Wilde were all part of the D'Oyly Carte circle and their work was to influence the younger man.

Herbert Horne had received occasional instruction before joining Mackmurdo as a pupil architect in 1882, and subsequently became a junior partner.

The photograph was taken in 1882 when Mackmurdo would have been thirty-one and Herbert Horne about eighteen.  The photographer was probably Mackmurdo's youngest brother Harold for whom he was to design the house next door.

[Halcyon]

Some time after the death of his father in 1872, Mackmurdo began work on the design of his first house, a residence for his widowed mother, to be erected on part of the Bush Hull Park estate sold as building plots that year.  The house, appropriately named "Halcyon", (6 Private Road, but now demolished) was built in 1876. The design is dated 1871 but that date was added later by Mackmurdo and is not to be trusted; he had not then completed his apprenticeship; Halcyon is the work of a very young man but not, I think, of a teenager.

Mackmurdo himself would spend the weekends here until the death of his mother.

The house shows Mackmurdo boldly & confidently responding to the fashionable "Queen Anne" style of the time: complete with tile-hanging, and decorative plaster-work, with large Tudor chimneys and lots of timber-framing. Mackmurdo certainly claimed to have carried out some of the plaster-work and wood-carving himself.

Mackmurdo had completed his apprenticeship with the architect Chatfield Clarke in 1872 and then spent some years in the office of the architect James Brooks.

When I had completed my apprenticeship to an Architect and Surveyor in the city of London I was as ignorant of architecture as when I entered this architect's office. I knew noting of any art. I craved for the association of artists from whom I might learn something of their craft. I sought about, found, and became the pupil of an man who was in the true sense, an architect (James Brooks).

In 1878 he set up his own architectural office in Southampton Street, Strand, and the building of Halcyon was soon in hand. His ideal was the architecture of teamwork which he had experienced in Brooks's office, and which he saw in the results of a partnership between architect and craftsman, such as that between Philip Webb and "the Firm" of Morris and Co.

The destruction of Halcyon in 1967 was an act of vandalism. Enfield didn't just lose a fine house but one in a particular and striking relationship with the house next door—"Brooklyn".

And this is the house next door. Mackmurdo designed this bachelor dwelling for his younger brother Harold—and now he had found a style all his own.

The history of Brooklyn is not clear. Pevsner, who interviewed Mackmurdo in extreme old age, gives the date as about 1878. This must be a mistake for 1887 since it was that year that Mackmurdo published a design very similar to that of Brooklyn in his magazine The Century Guild Hobby Horse. But in the absence of any documentary evidence and given Mackmurdo's resolute mendacity it is impossible to be precise.

Mackmurdo comments anonymously in the Hobby Horse

The Century Guild lays stress upon the fact that all art makes for the needs of an entire people, and more particularly does it recognise this fact in the case of Architecture.

To bring Architecture within the reach of all is then its especial aim; nor is this very difficult, if in the first place the materials, selected with care, are treated in a workmanlike way, and if, in the second place, the proportions are made artistically valuable.

In the case of the present design, it has been the endeavour to introduce a certain dignity of treatment and interest of detail into a class of house which has been hitherto left to the suburban builder to run up as insufficiently and vulgarly as the genius of commercialism is able.

[Brooklyn 2: detail]

The terracotta figures and the other decoration were by Benjamin Creswick, who was involved in the Century Guild, the Mackmurdo and Horne design partnership.

[Brooklyn 3]

Peter Stansky in his book Re-Designing the World draws attention to what he terms Brooklyn's "sophisticated classicism" and calls it "one of the most exciting houses of the nineteenth century". Between Halcyon and Brooklyn, hew rites, "there is a sense of transition to modern architecture that parallels the advance between the two landmark houses built by the modernist Otto Wagner in Vienna". He is making enormous claims here for Mackmurdo's importance.

There can be no question that the house is unique of its period in England and its compact regular form presages the concrete box type of house of the 1930s.

The house is now painted white which somewhat disguises its original impact.

[The 3rd Enfield house, 2 elevations]

In his autobiographical notes Mackmurdo gives a list of his buildings which begins "Halcyon and 2 others at Enfield". One other was Brooklyn and the third a building for which three elevations survive at the William Morris Gallery.

Designed around 1878, that is to say, between Halcyon and Brooklyn, this house marks a transitional stage in the development of Mackmurdo's art. Does anyone recognise it? Does it still exist? Was it ever built?

[Enfield house, elevation]

And another view of this same missing house.

The curious roof is repeated in cottages that Mackmurdo built in Formby, Merseyside, for his friends the Rathbones.

The harmony of its exterior colours—yellow-painted roughcast cement, white woodwork and red tiles—probably derives from Whistler. Though when Pevsner suggested so much to Mackmurdo, it cause such offence that he had hurriedly to change the subject. Mackmurdo saw himself as a complete original and denied all influence.

Brooklyn is now painted white. Probably it too should share Mackmurdo's favoured colour-scheme. Try and imagine Brooklyn with the terracotta ornament & white woodwork contrasting with a yellow-ochre roughcast.



It was as a conservationist that Mackmurdo first went into print. The Enfield newspaper, Meyer's Observer, carried in April 1883 a report of a lecture given by Mr Mackmurdo of Bush Hill Park on "Wren's City Churches", at a time when, to quote Mackmurdo

The representatives of the English Church were trying to pass through Parliament a bill for the destruction of these City churches.

The lecture in turn led to a campaigning book published later the same year. But it is more interesting for the insight it gives into Mackmurdo's architectural attitudes than as a well-stated case for preservation.

When Mackmurdo wrote Wren's City Churches he made his clearest profession of faith in the Aesthetic Movement

The charmed wiles, and full power of beauty belonging to architecture (he wrote) are only to be shown to those who love all art for her own loveliness' sake, and to those who by pain and many pains have sought to discipline and culture their taste, for receipt of her favour and enjoyment of her gifts.

The language and sentiment recall the writings of Walter Pater.

The book is now better known for its striking title page which prefigures the style we now call art nouveau than for the issues it seeks to raise.

[For the title page Mackmurdo uses a wood-cut design in which three stylized flowers (tulips?) form a striking asymmetrical pattern, flanked by two attenuated phoenixes, with a third bird crouching at the base of the design. The spaces between are filled by leaves which have metamorphosed into flames. The title is worked into this rather violent pattern. After the fashion of the phoenix, new life rises out of the ashes, like the churches that had been built by Wren after the Great Fire.]



Another extract from the autobiography

As Architect and Craftsman, M. gathered round himself a band of Artists and craftsmen enabling him to supply all those things that equip a house. These men became the nucleus of the Century Guild of Artists, established by M. in 1882.

Mackmurdo and his friends had founded the Century Guild in part to create appropriate  furnishings for his new architecture. This dining chair (of 1882 or 1883) was designed by Mackmurdo for the Guild and has the initials "CG" (for Century Guild) painted on the back.

As a group, the Century Guild was short-lived, disbanding in about 1888, although individual members still remained in close association. Such was the unity of their style during the Guild's lifetime that it is difficult to attribute designs to any one person.

The Century Guild's work allowed Mackmurdo to develop a personal decorative style. There is a simplicity and a handling of proportions which is individual and original.

Mackmurdo created many textile designs in the 1880s. They all have the same whirling flame-like movement, based on floral motifs. The colours too—yellow ochres, coral pinks, purples and acid greens, are new in English design.

This is "Peacock", a printed chintz in shades of yellow ochre and light brown on a cream ground designed by Mackmurdo, around 1882, for the Century Guild. It also exists in other colourways: in pinks and browns, and in shades of turquoise.

The initials CG of the Century Guild are cleverly worked into the design.



This firescreen designed by Mackmurdo was exhibited at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition of 1888. It has a satinwood framework with inset panels embroidered in blue and gold silks.

In these designs of Mackmurdo's one sees all the characteristics of art nouveau. What is extraordinary about them, particularly the chair with the fretwork back of 1882, and the title page of Wren's City Churches, published in 1883, is that he was working fully ten years before the Belgian artists Victor Horta and Henry van der Velde who are usually credited with establishing the style.

This is my favourite Century Guild fabric: the Angel with the Trumpet. It's by Mackmurdo's partner, Herbert Horne (1864-1916), one of the Century Guild's chief designers of textiles and wall papers. This design, printed on cretonne, with its striking pattern of trumpeting angels set against a swirling decorative background, was also known under the alternative title "Thorn and Roses".



The pattern was also used for printed velveteen, which gave a richer textural effect. If the influence of William Blake is obvious, so too is that of Edward Burne-Jones.



This small oak writing desk of 1886 demonstrates the severe form and careful proportions of most of the furniture designed by Mackmurdo. Many designers from the 1880s onwards had been influenced by the plain, undecorated forms and construction of Japanese work, and this is reflected here in the shaft-like verticals and equally emphatic horizontals of this piece. These features were to recur again in the work of Voysey and Mackintosh. I find the desk a remarkable forerunner of Mackintosh's work of twenty years later.

[cabinet]

In contrast, this cabinet of c 1886 shows Mackmurdo in less austere vein—a large satinwood cabinet set off with repousse brass fittings and painted leather panels.

It was probably intended for Pownall Hall in Cheshire: an early nineteenth-century house decorated by the Century Guild for the brewer Henry Boddington. The cabinet was shown at the Manchester Exhibition of 1887 and at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition of 1888.

[settle]

My next slide shows a settle attributed to either Herbert Horne or A.H. Mackmurdo, and probably designed for Morris & Company.

It has a mahogany frame-work with cane seats and back panels.  The design has much in common with the small writing desk already seen, its shaft-like vertical posts terminating with sharply horizontal slats.

[tiles]

These lustre-ware tiles are typical of the ceramic work that Willam De Morgan supplied for Century Guild interiors.

[Lustre decoration had already been revived before De Morgan began his experiments,, but his achievements with this difficult technique were unrivalled in both quality and design.  This selection shows, from left to right, three decorative tiles in "New Pineapple" design, examples of his animal designs—an eagle, a dodo, and a serpent with an apple—and a more conventional "four-square" pattern tile of leaves and flowers.

The yellow and ruby lustre dish with eagle and serpent and the ruby plate with winged griffin and decorative border date from some years after the demise of the Century Guild.]

[Rainhill]

So what did a Century Guild room look like? This is one of the few photographs of a completed commission: the Library, at Rainhill, Liverpool, photographed by H. Bedford Lemere in 1890.

The Century Guild broke up during 1888, in part because the working relationship between Horne and Mackmurdo had become strained. Their architectural partnership was dissolved around 1890. The next years saw Mackmurdo practising as an architect in London and Manchester. My remaining slides show some of Mackmurdo's buildings from the 1890s.

[Redington Road]

No 16 Redington Road, Hampstead probably dates from the late 1880s or early 1890s, and its design was strongly influenced by Voysey's work. (Mackmurdo preferred to claim that he had influenced Voysey.) It shows Mackmurdo working in a modern style based on traditional ideas, rather than the much more original style of Brooklyn, Private Road, or 25 Cadogan Gardens.

His client was a Mrs Geddes and the house comes fairly close to the neo-Georgian façade conventions then gradually being developed. It looks a lot more conventioal now than it would have done in 1890.

Mackmurdo was one of the first in England to think about regional planning and garden cities. Mrs Geddes was no doubt a relative of Patrick Geddes with whom (about 1881) Mackmurdo had discussed his plans for building "regional communities"—something like New Towns or at least New Villages.

The Chapel of the Ascension, Bayswater Road, was built 1890 to 1893. The Chapel was built at the expense of a Mrs Russell Gurney as a place for quiet rest and meditation. The interior was burnt out during World War II and the whole building subsequently demolished.

Comtemporary accounts and later critics disagree about the authorship of the Chapel of the Ascension.  Both Mackmurdo and Herbert Horne are suggested as the architect. The truth is that both had a hand in its design, and that Horne's was probably the larger share.

Herbert Horne (1864-1916) was apprenticed to Mackmurdo in 1893, when he was 18 or 19, and became his junior partner in 1885. By 1889, when the idea of the chapel was put forward, he was still with Mackmurdo, though their partnership was dissolved just after building began.

The cause of the rift remains unclear, though Mackmurdo's cavalier financial approach was probably a factor.

The building was completed by 1893, though Frederick Shields (another Century Guild associate) continued work on the paintings that covered the interior until 1910.

Mackmurdo excelled when building on a smaller scale, and the house at 12 Hans Road, which he biuilt in 1894 for Archibald Grove, a Liberal MP, shows the maturing of his style. The Builder of 29 August 1896 remarks

It shows what can be achieved by simplicity of arrangement, and how restful is the appearance given to a street frontage when treated in so unpretentious a manner.

[Hans Road, 2]

The design succeeds in being both backward looking and innovative. Note for instance, the heavy classical pediment over the door and other renaissance details.

[Hans Road, 3]

and contrast the very elongated oriel window through two storeys. This latter feature is repeated in the house in Cadogan Gardens and in other buildings by Mackmurdo.

[Hans Road, 4]

It's as though the long window through two or more storeys—often an oriel widow—is Mackmurdo's architectural signature.

One house of the 1890s is, however, perhaps Mackmurdo's most accomplished work. No 25 Cadogan Gardens was built about 1893-94 for the Australian painter Mortimer Menpes, friend and biographer of Whistler, and shows a great advance over 12 Hans Road.

It is on a corner site and Mackmurdo used this position dramatically when he constructed four long vertical windows in the west façade and three, this time oriel windows on the north.

[Cadogan Gardens 2]

On the northern façade the tall oriel windows let in as much of the north light required by an artist as possible.

The house was originally doubly interesting, for its interior was decorated by Menpes in an elaborate version of the Japanese style favoured by Whistler & his friends. The carved panelling, of which there was a large quantity was made in Japan under the supervision of Mortimer Menpes himself. At the time it was described as "the most wonderful house in the world".

Pevsner calls it Mackmurdo's masterpiece. But Mackmurdo was at this time in partnership with E.A. Hornblower. It is still uncertain which architect had the chief responsibility for the design.

[Cold Store]

But this authentic and unequivocal Mackmurdo at 109-113 Charterhouse Street, Islington: a neo-Wren façade with giant pilasters, little garlands above the windows and an attic curving up towards the centre.

It was built for the Charterhouse Cold Storage Company in 1900. Mackmurdo proudly claimed that this had been the first cold storage warehouse in London. I doubt the truth of that. It has recently been converted into offices.

[Liverpool International Exhibition]

This is the Century Guild stand at the Liverpool International Exhibition as illustrated in The Builder in 1886. Mackmurdo's work was there acclaimed as the most advanced and unusual in Europe,

But Mackmudo's lack of business skills (coupled with the devious way he treated his collaborators) meant that the Century Guild was to founder just as its work began to receive recognition,

What of his influence on other architects? This is the library of Glasgow School of Art by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Note the stained wood, the emphasised verticals, the oriel window running through two storeys. All reminiscent of Mackmurdo's work of twenty years before. (The School of Art is 1906-1908.)

And this is not the best example—just the only illustration available. Other parts of the Glasgow School of Art are even more reminiscent of Mackmurdo's work.

[Mackmurdo with Eliza]

In 1902, Mackmurdo married Eliza Carte. He was 50. She was his cousin and possessed of independent means. He and Eliza left London and settled in Essex where he started building the large house of Great Ruffins, Wickham Bishops, symbolically surmounting it with a large tower to enable him to pursue his hobby of astronomy.  Unfortunately, as it neared completion, financial pressures forced him to sell the house, and he moved to a smaller house ("Little Ruffins") nearby, occasionally persuading the new owner to organise large parties when his old urge for social gatherings grew too strong.

Champagne!

Mackmurdo was extraordinarily casual about money (his own and other people's). He is said to have lost large sums of money belonging to Selwyn Image that he had talked Image into investing in some surefire scheme. He lost his own fortune on a planned hydrotherapy hotel in Cheshire; the saline wells ran dry before the hotel opened.

For construction of Great Ruffins he was reliant on his wife's money. Before he had completed the project, his brother-in-law, Geoffrey Carte, stepped in to warn Mackmurdo that though he might use Eliza's income on the grand house, her capital was held in trust and not for him to spend.

Such was Mackmurdo's charm, however, that his financial subterfuges seem to have caused no ill feeling. Selwyn Image remained a friend until his death. Geoffrey Carte even allowed Mackmurdo to build him a house just down the road from Great Ruffins.

By the 1920s even Eliza's fortune was wearing thin. The Mackmurdos moved into the small bungalow where they saw out their days.

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

His later years were almost entirely devoted to the construction of an elaborate and idiosyncratic Utopian scheme for socio-economic reform.

Since I retired from professional work I have concentrated upon the study of Social events in the old & the new world, pondering over them with a view to formulating if possible some Social Synthesis which would be consistent with what we know of the process of Evolution in the organic world.

He pleaded for living wages and pensions fixed by the State, and for replacing a monetary system based on gold by a system founded on food vouchers. 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 at the age of ninety-one. Sixty years had elapsed since he had founded the Century Guild, and played a major formative role in the genesis of art nouveau, the Arts and Crafts movement, and the typographical revolution that developed into the Private Press movement. Such achievements, progressive and influential, had gained, from the first, international recognition, and continue to merit the utmost respect. Their sheer variety is impressive. And despite the abandonment of these activities for the sociological work to which he attached greater importance, the old "master builder" gazing at the starts, the quintessential Utopian craftsman, is the image by which he should, perhaps, be remembered.