Francis Howard Greenway
How did a convicted forger, transported to Australia, become known as "The Father of Australian Architecture" and have his portrait on a banknote?
It happened to Francis Howard Greenway, the architect responsible for designing the new Hotel and Assembly Rooms (now the Clifton Club) in the Mall. Made bankrupt by the outbreak of the war against France in 1809, he forged a document claiming that he had been promised £1300 to complete a house in Cornwallis Crescent. Greenway pleaded guilty at his trial and was sentenced to be hanged, later commuted to transportation for 14 years.
Greenway landed in Sydney in February 1814. Luckily, he had a letter of introduction to the Governor, Lachlan Macquarie. Although relations were often strained between the short-tempered architect and the Governor, Macquarie was soon forced to admit that Greenway knew his job. He was allowed to set up in practice and in just two years was made civil architect to the Government on a salary of three shillings (15 pence) a day. A Government house followed, his wife and children joined him and he was promised 800 acres of land. Greenway first built a lighthouse then a succession of buildings followed, 44 in all, including churches, a convict barracks, a hostel for women convicts, a fort, an obelisk and plans for a mansion for the Governor modelled on Thornbury Castle. This last project was vetoed by Whitehall as too grand for a convict colony.
Despite this success, Greenway quarrelled with his patron claiming that the Governor owed him £11,000 for government work. Macquarrie could not tolerate this and when he was replaced a few months later by a new Governor, Brisbane, Macquarrie wrote to him describing Greenway’s ingratitude. Brisbane dismissed Greenway.
From then on until his death his fortunes declined. His 800 acres turned out to be swampland and both his wife and son died before him. Greenway died in 1837 and is buried in an unmarked grave in the Hunter Valley.
Many years after his death this complex man was recognised by having his portrait on the Australian 10 dollar note and here in Clifton a plaque outside the Clifton Club commemorates the convict architect.
Artists in Bristol in the 1820s and 30s were certainly not starving in garrets in the traditional way. A number of wealthy patrons was supporting a school of artists.
Amongst the subjects which attracted them was the scenery of the Avon Gorge. One of these artists, William West, went one better and made his home on a hill overlooking the gorge – 337 feet above sea-level - in what is now known as the Observatory.
West took a fancy to an old mill which had burnt out fifty years before, leaving only the walls standing. In 1828 he leased the ruin from the owners, the Merchant Venturers, for 5 shillings (25p) a year and re-built it, adding a house to the tower. He soon mounted a telescope on the tower and later replaced this with a camera obscura, then a fairly common attraction. (A camera obscura is a lens fitted into a revolving cowling in the roof. The lens acts as a camera, or a submarine periscope, picking up the view in all directions and reflecting it by means of a mirror on to a white saucer-shaped table in a darkened room).
The artist then added more telescopes, a wind gauge, an astronomical clock and a revolving observatory.
As well as looking upwards, West was also looking down. After two years of hard tunnelling, costing over £1300, a 200 foot passage was excavated, running from the Observatory down to the "Giant’s Cave", 90 feet below in the face of St Vincent’s Rocks. West claimed that this had been a mediaeval hermit’s cell. The tunnel opened to visitors in 1837.
West continued to be a prolific and well-paid artist and was also a pioneer of photography, advertising specimens of "photogenic drawing".
The artist left Bristol in 1857 but his descendants continued to live in the tower until the 1940s. The camera obscura, believed to be the last in England, still operates and people enjoy looking out from the Giant’s Cave at Brunel’s magnificent suspension bridge and the gorge as much as they did a century or more ago.
E H Young
If the worthy matrons of Clifton of the 1920s and 30s had known of the shocking private life of their favourite author, E H Young, they would not have read her novels – at least not in front of the servants!
Emily Hilda Young was a best-selling novelist of her time. Sadly, her work is today almost completely forgotten, although Virago re-published some of her books in the 1980s and the Clifton and Hotwells Improvement Society has marked her Clifton home with a plaque.
Emily Young was born in Northumberland, the daughter of a shipbroker. She first came to Clifton in 1902 when, at the age of 22, she married a Bristolian solicitor, Arthur Daniell. In 1907 they moved to the top floor flat at 2 Saville Place. During this time Emily became a supporter of the suffragette movement, published three unremarkable novels and began an affaire with Ralph Henderson who was to remain her lover until her death.
With the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Emily worked first in a munitions factory and then in a stables. Her husband was killed at the Battle of Ypres in 1917, and the following year Emily moved to London to join Henderson, now the Headmaster of the public school Alleyn’s, and his wife in a ménage a trois, although occupying a separate flat in their house.
This change seems to have been the catalyst that needed. Seven major novels followed, all based on Clifton, thinly disguised as ‘Upper Radstowe’. The first of these was The Misses Mallett, published originally under the title The Bridge Dividing in 1922. There then followed William in 1925, Miss Mole (1930), Jenny Wren (1932), and a sequel The Curate’s Wife (1934), Celia (1937) and Chatterton Square, a portrait of Canynge Square in 1947.
All the novels share a trenchant observation of Clifton’s inhabitants and have been compared with Jane Austen’s or more recently Barbara Pym’s writing.
However much Emily satirised society, no one was more aware of the costs of being caught disobeying the conventions. Her lover was the Headmaster of a famous school and one whisper could have destroyed Henderson’s career.
Emily was luckier than some of her characters. Mrs Henderson appeared to like her and she was generally popular. The affaire was never discovered. When Henderson retired and after his wife’s death, he and Emily moved to Bradford on Avon, although they never married.
Emily died of lung cancer in 1949.
John Loudon McAdam
"What is 50 miles of good road?" asks Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice"Little more than half a day’s journey"..
But in 1813 when Jane Austen’s novel was published there were hardly any good roads in Britain. At one spot the Bristol to Bath road was only seven feet wide. Sir Abraham Elton of Clevedon Court was nearly killed when his coach met another in an early example of road rage.
All this was soon to be changed. In 1815 a Scot, John Loudon McAdam, was appointed Surveyor-General of Bristol’s roads.
McAdam was born in 1756. He first worked in New York with his uncle but had to return to Scotland after the American War of Independence. However, he had made enough money to buy an estate in his native Ayrshire where he made his first experiments in road building.
Why McAdam came to Bristol is not known but in 1803 he lived in Park Street and then at 23 Berkeley Square.
In 1816 at the age of 60, McAdam was invited to take charge of Bristol’s 146 miles of road at a salary of £400 a year. The Trustees responsible for maintaining the roads were £45,000 in the red and were thinking of doubling the tolls and making no further repairs.
Roads in those days were built high in the middle and as they wore down more unbroken stone and unprepared gravel was thrown on top and left to settle. McAdam imposed a new system, insisting that roads should have ten inches’ depth of stone, none measuring more than an inch or weighing more than six ounces. His rule of thumb, or rather mouth, was that any stone too big to go into a labourer’s mouth was too large. He also lowered the height in the centre to allow the rain to run off and prohibited the use of earth or any material that would absorb water.
The results were soon obvious and visitors flocked to see the new highways. McAdam wrote a paper for Parliament at their request and was joined by his three sons and two grandsons. He travelled 30,000 miles and visited 28 counties to explain his system.
Bristol’s councillors, jealous of McAdam’s absence on consultancy work, tried to dismiss him without warning. He resigned in 1825 but they then began to have second thoughts and invited him back to give advice on a regular basis. He agreed and remained until his death in 1836.
Although McAdam never used tar, in the early 1900s experiments using bitumen resulted in the founding of the company Tarmac Ltd, thus preserving McAdam’s name for posterity. The founder of modern road building is remembered in Bristol by a small plaque at 23 Berkeley Square.
The Railwayman’s Friend
Every day thousands of passengers hurry through Temple Meads station. Few of them notice the marble plaque which commemorates Miss Emma Saunders – "The Railwayman’s Friend".
Emma was born in 1841 in Manchester and moved to Bristol when her father was appointed Agent for the Bank of England in the city.
Emma began her charitable career teaching at the Industrial School for Girls in Hotwells which her mother had helped to found. In 1878 she began a Bible class for railwaymen and launched on the work which she would carry out for the next 49 years. She began distributing printed religious texts but always accompanied by a small gift, usually made by her such as lavender bags or small bunches of flowers. She regularly visited areas of the rail system unknown to most passengers such as sail and tarpaulin sheds, wagon shops, waterside cranes, loco repair shops and coaling depots. Emma and her helper, Miss Hickson, were issued with tin passes allowing them to travel on footplates and freight guards’ vans.
Emma was concerned to protect young men posted to Bristol from the perils of a wicked city. Before employers set up social clubs, she founded the "Bristol and West of England Railway-men’s Institute" with 21 rooms offering a teetotal canteen, billiards rooms and rooms for engineering classes.
In an era when there were no social workers, Emma visited sick railwaymen in hospital and was often asked to break the news of fatal accidents to wives. Emma’s mission went on in all winds and weathers and she invented a garment for rainy days which left her hands free for her basket of flowers and tracts, umbrella and handshakes. Even in old age and wet weather she insisted on visiting, saying: "I’m not sugar. I shan’t melt."
Emma might seem just another well-off 19th century Clifton do-gooder but the appreciation felt for her work showed on her 80th birthday when over 5,000 Great Western and Midland Railway employees subscribed to an illuminated address and drawing room furniture for her home.
Emma lived at several addresses in Clifton but died at 6 Sion Hill in February 1927. Her funeral service at Christchurch on her 86th birthday was conducted by three vicars and Clifton society rubbed shoulders with over a thousand of "her" railwaymen, all of whom wore a daffodil in her memory of their friend.
Berthold Lubetkin
Tucked away at the bottom of Princess Victoria Street is a Georgian house bearing a plaque. Unlike the many green plaques erected to famous residents by the Clifton and Hotwells Improvement Society, this plaque is blue and was sponsored by the Design Industries Association.
It commemorates, Bertold Lubetkin, one of the most important figures in modern architecture who influenced most modern British architects. Yet for almost the last fifty years of his life did not practice architecture at all.
Lubetkin was born in Tiflis, Georgia, Russia in 1901. After studying first in Moscow and Petrograd, he then went on to study in Berlin, Warsaw and Paris, setting up practice in the French capital in 1927.
Four years later Lubetkin moved to England and became the senior partner with six young architects in a partnership named ‘Tecton’. Lubetkin did more than anyone else to introduce the new ideas of Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus movement to Britain.
The group built the Gorilla House for London Zoo and the Highpoint Apartment Block on Highgate Hill in 1935. The design of this building was totally radical for its period and even the smallest detail was taken into account. The engineer was Ove Arup who became closely associated with Tecton’s work.
The group then built the Penguin Pool at London Zoo and buildings at Whipsnade and Dudley Zoos. They then designed and added a second and completely different block at Highgate - Highpoint II.
In 1938 Tecton built the Finsbury Health Centre following which they were invited to carry out more local authority work.
After World War II the partnership dissolved and Lubetkin was appointed architect-planner for one of the first of the British new towns - Peterlee, Durham. He produced an ambitious plan with high buildings and a compact town centre. However, classic local authority political wrangling and bureaucracy caused the design to be rejected.
In 1950 Lubetkin virtually retired from architectural practice. After farming in Gloucestershire he came to Clifton in 1969 and died here in Bristol in 1990.
Copyright Michael Pascoe
30 July 2002