MACKINTOSH

  

While not, perhaps, a household name, Charles Rennie Mackintosh is sufficiently famous to be comfortably addressed by his surname only. This is manifestly true in his home city of Glasgow. 

Not having grown up with much exposure to architecture and design, my first encounter with Mackintosh came late.  It was at the 1969 Melbourne Film Festival, and through the documentary tribute, Mackintosh, that I first heard the name; and came to admire.  The film was a revelation; and there was an intriguing and possibly prescient line in the Festival programme notes:  “Mackintosh was a remarkable man with the sad affliction of having been born ahead of his time.”

 

 Later, much later in 1996, I attended a three-part Council of Adult Education course The Glasgow of Charles Rennie Mackintosh.  My class notes from that time form the backbone of this Blog, and I have now added more of the skeleton, and fleshed it out. 

 

And then a little later, in 1997, I had the pleasure of spending several days in Glasgow with Annie, my wife.   Exploring Mackintosh was high on our agenda.  My exposure to Mackintosh has undoubtedly been long enough, and whether it has been deep enough is for the reader to judge.   

 

At the outset I think it will be useful to detail the significant events of Macintosh's life even though this will eliminate the "surprise element" from the story.  The subsequent melding together of the timeline with some geography, with Mackintosh's achievements, and with his travails will then, I hope, give a better sense of the man. 

*      1868: Mackintosh was born in Townhead, a close-in suburb of Glasgow, on 7 June. 

 

*      1884: [age 16]  Begins architectural apprenticeship in Glasgow; enrols in evening classes in painting and draughtsmanship at Glasgow School of Art [the School did not offer an architectural course until 1887].

 

*      1889: [age 21]  Joins the Glasgow architectural firm of Honeyman & Keppie.

 

*      1890:  [age 22]  Wins scholarship for his design for "A Public Hall"; wins National Silver Medal for his design for "A Science and Art Museum".

 

*      1891: [age 23]  Scholarship tour of Italy, taking in Paris, Brussels, Antwerp and London [a selection from the numerous watercolours executed during that cultural trip was subsequently exhibited to acclaim]; wife-to-be, Margaret Macdonald, enrols as a painting student at Glasgow School of Art [at age 27].

 

*      1892: [age 24]  Enters competition with design for "A Chapter House", subsequently winning National Gold Medal. 

 

*      1893: [age 25]  Designs and oversees modifications to Glasgow School of Art [completed 1895].

 

*      1895:   [age 27]  Joint exhibition in Liege with friend Herbert MacNair (a fellow apprentice at Honeyman & Keppie), and Margaret Macdonald and her sister Frances - later known as the Glasgow Four.

 

*      1896: [age 28]  Enters Glasgow School of Art design competition; exhibits with the Glasgow Four at the Arts & Crafts Society Exhibition in London.

 

*      1897: [age 29]  Building of new Glasgow School of Art commences [the new School opens 1899].

 

*      1899: [age 31]  Herbert MacNair and Frances Macdonald marry, and move to Liverpool.

 

*      1900: [age 32]  Marries Margaret Macdonald; exhibits with the Glasgow Four at the Eighth Secessionist Exhibition, Vienna.

 

*      1901: [age 33]  Designs Daily Record Building, Glasgow; enters "House for an Art Lover" competition in Germany, and is awarded a special prize.

 

*      1902: [age 34]  Exhibits at the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative Art, Turin; commissioned to design Hill House [completed 1905].

 

*      1903: [age 35]  Designs the Willow Tea Rooms, Sauchiehall Street [opened in 1904]; exhibits in Moscow.

 

*      1904: [age 36]  Becomes a partner in Honeyman & Keppie.

 

*      1906: [age 38]  Designs second stage for Glasgow School of Art, including boardroom; elected Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects.

 

*      1913: [age 45]  Leaves Honeyman & Keppie.

 

*      1915: [age 47]  The Mackintoshes move to London.

 

*      1916: [age 48]  Designs ranges of textiles for Foxton's, and for Sefton's, London.

 

*      1923: [age 55]  The Mackintoshes move to Port-Vendres, France; exhibits watercolours at the Fifth International Exhibition, Chicago.

 

*      1927: [age 59]  Returns to London; has treatment for cancer of the tongue.

 

*      1928: Dies in London, 10 December, of throat cancer, at age 60.

 

*      1933: Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh dies in London at age 68; memorial Mackintosh exhibition held in Glasgow.

 

*      1989 to 1996:  House for an Art Lover built in Glasgow substantially to Mackintosh's 1901 design.

 

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Mackintosh was the fourth child and second son of the eleven children of a police superintendent.  He was said to be a weak child, with a slightly deformed foot that produced a pronounced limp; but this encouraged the adoption of open-air exercise, which his parents facilitated through extensive country holidays. During his many “strengthening” rambles Mackintosh gained an appreciation of the countryside; and of rural architecture - as his sketches of rural buildings and the local flora attest.

 

From early on, Mackintosh wanted to be an architect, and became articled in 1884, at age 16.  He remained in architecture post-apprenticeship, first working as a draftsman.  He was very successful while an apprentice, winning medals and scholarships.  He trained at the Glasgow School of Art - where he subsequently designed what came to be known as The Mackintosh Building.  From 1889, post-apprenticeship, he worked for the Glaswegian architectural practice of Honeyman & Keppie, in 1904 becoming a partner of the firm.  In the meantime (in 1891) he won a scholarship tour to Italy, and also travelled to Paris, Brussels, Antwerp and London.  Over the next decade he designed a number of important buildings, public and private, and incorporated interior design and furniture design into his suite of talents.  In 1900 he married Margaret Macdonald, a decorative artist and designer, whom he had known from about 1891 when she undertook a design course at the Glasgow School.  Mackintosh and Macdonald had no children.     

 Mackintosh exhibited in Turin, Moscow and Dresden and, importantly, Vienna.  He was greatly influenced by Vienna and the Secessionist School that emerged from there. (The Viennese Art Nouveau movement was known as Sezessionstil.)  Encouraged by Francis Newbery, head of the Glasgow School of Art [from 1885 to 1917], he went to Vienna in 1900 and exhibited there at the Eighth Secessionist Exhibition, to great acclaim.  (The Secessionist House had opened in Vienna in 1890.)  The recently married Macintoshes met Gustav Klimt, whose work had a similar feel to Margaret Macintosh’s (or vice versa!).

Throughout, the Glasgow School of Art was central to Mackintosh’s life and career: he took evening classes in drawing and painting from 1884 at the start of his apprenticeship (his wife-to-be, Margaret Macdonald, enrolled there as a day student in 1891); in 1896 he won the competition for the design of a new building for the School, and subsequently supervised construction. The new Glasgow School of Art opened in 1899.  Later, in 1906, Mackintosh designed the second phase of the Glasgow School project, building of which was completed in 1909.  

 

Occasioned by the economic downturn of 1913 he resigned from his architectural practice.   And likely because of lack of commissions the Mackintoshes left Glasgow, eventually moving to London in 1915.  Mackintosh never returned to Glasgow.  The subsequent years were professionally unspectacular – interior designs, a range of textile designs, unexecuted architectural work.  

 

Moreover, there was an unsettling time in 1915 when, directly after Glasgow, the Mackintoshes lived in a coastal Suffolk village, in rented accommodation nearby to their friends the Newberys.  It was wartime, and there was elevated security and surveillance.  The Macintoshes wore Bohemian clothing, spoke with foreign (Scottish!) accents, went for long coastal walks, and received mail from their German and Austrian friends. After a walk one day they returned to find their home being raided; Mackintosh was arrested and brought before a tribunal, accused of espionage.  He was detained, later cleared and released, but only after intervention from the Home Secretary and the Foreign Minister.  Nevertheless, the Mackintoshes were thereafter banned for the duration of the war from living in East Anglian counties, from living near the coast, and from living near a major road or railway.  Furthermore, they were required to advise the authorities where they intended to live, and to report upon their arrival.  As Mackintosh said, this was an "absurd outrage on the rights of perfectly loyal subjects".  It forced the Mackintoshes to seek refuge in London, where they lived for the ensuing eight years. 

 

The London years were not propitious.  Although welcomed by the Chelsea artistic circle - including Bernard Shaw and Augustus John - Mackintosh's architectural work was practically unknown in the capital.  And the wartime constraints inhibited the likelihood of new commissions. Added to this, Philip Mairet, the colleague who shared a studio with Mackintosh, is quoted as saying: "His personality, unfortunately, did not make a very congenial impression on me - but this was chiefly because his aura was suffused with the alcoholic potations to which he was addicted [ouch!].  The impression that remained with me was that of a brilliant man who was a tragic case."

 

It was during this period that Mackintosh turned to textile design, developing mainly geometric patterns and stylized plant forms. The work was reasonably lucrative; but it was not architecture. Architecture to Mackintosh was "the synthesis of the fine arts".

 

In 1923 the dispirited Mackintosh abandoned his architectural career, and the Macintoshes moved to France to economise, eventually staying in borrowed quarters at Port-Vendres, a Mediterranean fishing port near the Spanish border.  Mackintosh spent his time in painting the surrounding environs.  

 

The situation remained amenable for some years, albeit financially difficult (Margaret Mackintosh had a small inheritance) - until Margaret Macintosh became ill, and returned to London for medical treatment in May 1927.  Macintosh’s loneliness was expressed in frequent tender letters to his wife through the two months' period of separation.  In the meantime Mackintosh had been complaining of a blistered and swollen tongue, which he attributed to French tobacco.  Cancer was not diagnosed until the Mackintoshes returned to London later in 1927.  There was insufficient money to cover treatment; but the intervention of the Newberys, and a generous surgeon, enabled the administration of radium therapy. In apparent better health Mackintosh undertook speech therapy, but deterioration in his condition robbed him of all speech. Then the Mackintoshes were ejected from their rental premises after a dispute with the landlord.  A friend took them in.  Mackintosh died in a nursing home in December 1928.  His cremation was attended by six people only. His ashes were scattered in Port-Vendres by Margaret Mackintosh a couple of years later.  Margaret Mackintosh died in 1933.

 

Who is to say which of Macintosh’s architectural works were journeyman or mundane, or which were masterpieces, or the most influential or lasting?  In the career of a great artist, however, no work can be ignored.  What follows are thumb-nail descriptions of a number of Macintosh’s achievements, more or less in chronological order.

#  Glasgow Herald Building. The Glasgow Herald newspaper (now simply The Herald) began publication in 1783 and is the longest-running newspaper in the world. Mackintosh's Herald project involved alterations and additions to an existing building, and a new adjacent structure.  It continued through several stages, from 1893, for some years.  Mackintosh was not a partner of his architectural firm at the time, and the name of his principal, Keppie, is on the relevant documentation; but history gives Mackintosh most of the credit.  He worked from 1893 to 1895 on the project, soon nicknamed “The Lighthouse” for its prominent corner tower.

A number of features are evidence of Mackintosh's hand: the asymmetrical windows, the curious tower which concealed an 8000 gallon water tank for fire protection, and (unusual for their time) fire-resistant concrete flooring, and an hydraulic lift.  In 1896 The British Architect magazine asserted that the building:  "ranks first of any modern building we know of for boldness and originality of treatment."

 #  Glasgow School of Art   As an institution the Glasgow School of Art has existed since 1845.  From 1869, and at the time Mackintosh and later Margaret Macdonald were students there, it was located in Sauchiehall Street.  Mackintosh took evening drawing classes from 1884.  The expansion into new premises - same block, but facing Renfrew Street - was overseen by Director, Francis Newbery - who formulated the idea, oversaw a design competition, and awarded the commission to Mackintosh.  The Glasgow School of Art building is regarded by many as Mackintosh's masterwork.

The structure is of asymmetrical design, with echoes of Scottish castles.  Unusually for the late 1800s, Mackintosh's planning proceeded “from the inside out”; that is, first conceptualise the functioning of the interior then design the building to house it - a process that Mackintosh was later to follow in his design for Hill House.  But the design process was not made easier by the constraints on funding - which led to the project evolving in two stages, phase one 1897-1899 and phase two 1907-1909. In the interim Mackintosh was able to refine his ideas.  The first phase produced the central and eastern sections, including the boardroom, the headmaster's room over the front portal, 

 and the museum.  The later western section contained the library,

a complex design of timber posts and beams evoking traditional Japanese architecture.

And a sorry footnote: The Glasgow School of Art has been extensively damaged by fire.  In May 2014, flammable gases from a foam canister used in a student project were accidentally ignited.  An upgraded sprinkler system had been installed but was not yet operational. The library was gutted.  Then in June 2018 with restoration almost completed, there was a second fire, caused by spontaneous combustion of linseed-oily rags. The second fire was much more devastating than the first.  The roof was totally destroyed; only the walls remain. 

    Mackintosh’s design had extended to the smallest detail, including the furniture, lamps and glass – all gone.  The hoped-for total restoration remains stalled.

 

#   Ruchill Church Hall.  Mackintosh designed this building in 1899 as a mission for the Free Church of Scotland. Every canard about the dour Scots is exemplified in its grim and forbidding exterior.  The Hall is in a side street in an industrial part of the city, helpfully hiding its lack of charm from those not prepared to look closely. Purpose built and built to conform to that purpose, on its ground floor the building contains a main hall capable of separation from an adjacent meeting room by a sliding partition; plus committee room, servery, and catering facilities.  The hall is nowadays designated the "Mackintosh Tea Room".  Upstairs are another hall and smaller meeting room, again separated by sliding partitions. In capitalising on Mackintosh's fame, the "Tea Room" is today open to the public for refreshments.  There is a striking stone canopy over the main entrance, and there are some lighter Mackintosh touches in the stained glass and the decorative panels, including recessed panels in the main doors. Surprisingly for a building more than 120 years old, the Hall (aside from the "tea rooms" function) is still used for its original purpose, and its architectural features are intact.  And of special mention is the street-front exterior, said to evoke a face - with two first floor windows for eyes, and a large ground floor window for the mouth, separated by a horizontal slash of stonework for the nose.  Intentional whimsy perhaps.  Or perhaps not.   

  

 #  Windyhill.   Mackintosh was commissioned by his friend and patron, William Davidson, to build this family home at Kilmacolm, some fifteen miles west of Glasgow.  The dates: 1900 to 1901.  Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh collaborated on the interior design and furnishings.  The garden is of two acres, its design also the work of the Mackintoshes.  "With its rough-cast facing material, pitched roofs, and severely plain south elevation, Windyhill embodies the character of a traditional Scottish farmhouse"; yet, "the staircase bay, protruding from the rest of the house, also presages developments in architecture from the 1920s".  Withal, the house is in Art Nouveau style.  With its unique features it's no surprise that it is Category A listed. 

 

During its 120 years there have been a number of owners, and periods of serious deterioration, but in recent times there has been major restoration making careful use of Mackintosh's plans and drawings and contemporary photographs.  In 2014 the 3 million pounds price tag failed to achieve a sale; and later attempts to secure the property into public ownership were likewise unsuccessful.  One would think that a nice little arrangement between the National Trust for Scotland and some philanthropist with a lazy 3 million might be orchestrated. 

 

#  Hill House.    Having recently designed Windyhill, Mackintosh was approached in 1902 by book publisher, Walter Blackie, to design for him a residence at Helensburgh overlooking the Firth of Clyde, some 32 miles north-west of Glasgow.  

 Mackintosh was again allowed the total design concept, including the planning of the garden.  It is said that the exterior design was dictated by Mackintosh's plans for the interior, the concept of "form follows function".  This was a radical approach, given that at the time interiors were typically planned to fit within already-formulated exteriors [although Mackintosh himself had used it earlier for the School of Art].

 Mackintosh designed the furniture and it, and the interior as a whole, survives virtually intact.  Hill House is now a National Trust property, and also a designated Conservation Area.  Unfortunately, Hill House has had long-time rising damp; and the problem became so severe that in 2019, as part of a radical conservation plan, the entire building was encased within a "box" - initially for five years - to dry it out.  Once dry, it is expected that there will be several years of conservation work. 

#  Mackintosh Club.   As if to prove that the life, times and works of Mackintosh are not tied up with string, a previously unrecognised architectural work was identified in 2016 - located in the town of Helensburgh not far from Hill House.  Formerly the Helensburgh & Gareloch Conservative Club, this is a substantial building, now with retail occupancy below, and the "Mackintosh Club" occupying the upper level. 

   The building was apparently Mackintosh's first completed commission, dating from 1894. The Mackintosh Club describes itself as "a creative hub for architecture, art, design and music", and "a gallery and arts venue that celebrates the Glasgow Four". The unmistakably Mackintosh leading facade makes one wonder why its architectural identity remained lost for so many years. 

 

#   Scotland Street School.  It was during the execution of this major commission (1903 to 1906) that Mackintosh became a principal of the Honeyman & Keppie architectural practice. The School's three-storey layout is conventional and practical, having 21 classrooms, a "drill hall", a cookery room, separate outdoor toilets for boys and girls, cloakrooms and playgrounds - all up, accommodation for 1250 students.  

Built for the local municipal council, and with significant budgetary constraints, the structure is said to lack many of the usual Mackintosh design flourishes.  Nevertheless, Mackintosh was able to incorporate two protruding baronial style stairwell towers, with conical roofs.  The imposing towers have sizeable windows, and the well-lit stairs are able to handle large volumes of foot traffic.  Indeed, the entire building is pierced with windows of formidable proportions. But over time there has been urban decay, and a decline in the population of the heavily industrialised area of inner-city Govan, and when in1979 the school population fell to fewer than 100 students the school was closed.  The building has been saved, however, and since 1990 has functioned as the Scotland Street Museum of Education.  Architectural texts laud Mackintosh's use of glass in the stairwell towers as "outstandingly modern", and the banks of enormous windows flanking the towers is a design arrangement that was to become "a prominent feature of the Modern Movement and later post-war architecture".  Notwithstanding, the building was Mackintosh's last significant project in Glasgow

 

#  The Mackintosh House (at The Hunterian Museum).   Having been married for six years, in 1906 the Mackintoshes moved to 78 Southpark Avenue, Glasgow.  The two storey end-of-terrace house was their home for eight years.  The substantial alterations and re-decoration effected                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        in 1906 were in distinctive Mackintosh style, "remarkable then, and now, for the disciplined austerity of the furnishings and decoration".  The property was acquired by the University of Glasgow in 1946, and the vendors gifted the entire original furniture - which had remained intact during the 30-odd years since the Mackintoshes had lived there - to the University.  The building was demolished in 1963, but not before all salvageable fittings were removed; and a meticulous re-construction of the Mackintosh dwelling was undertaken within the nearby Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery - even to the point of ensuring that the direction of the light falling in the display rooms is from the same angle as formerly at Southpark Avenue.  The Hunterian display does not incorporate kitchen, bathroom, secondary bedrooms and cloakroom, nevertheless all furnishings are of Mackintosh design, and curtains, soft furnishings etc. are based on contemporary descriptions and photographs.

 

#   Willow Tea Room.   Catherine (known as Kate) Cranston was the daughter of an affluent tea merchant.  Father and daughter alike were proponents of temperance, and Miss Cranston established a chain of temperance tearooms in Glasgow.  While Mackintosh was involved from the outset, the degree of his participation increased with each project.  For the Buchanan Street tearooms in 1896 Mackintosh designed stencilled friezes. For the Argyle Street tearooms in 1898 Mackintosh designed the interiors and the furniture.  This saw the first appearance of Mackintosh's high-backed chair design. 

 For the Ingram Street tearooms in 1900 he created an entire room, the White Dining Room.  Then, in 1903, Mackintosh was presented with a four-storey former warehouse, for which he became the architect and designer of the new Sauchiehall Street tearooms, including all fittings and furniture.  Indeed, Mackintosh designed everything, including the cutlery, the menus, and the uniforms of the waitresses. These premises were to become The Willow Tearoom and, unlike the other three, it survives today.  

Kate Cranston was something of a reformer, and part of her tearoom concept was to steer office workers away from alcohol at lunchtime.  The tearooms were effectively social centres, with men's, women's and mixed smoking rooms, and billiard rooms.  The concept is said to have totally collapsed by 1920!  But, in the meantime, the Sauchiehall Street tearoom's range of spaces included an all-purpose open-space tearoom on the ground floor with gallery above; with a ladies' tearoom on the street frontage.  The first floor had a more exclusive ladies' tearoom, the Room de Luxe, overlooking the street; and on the second floor were a men's billiard room, and a smoking room.

 

Macintosh's remodelling of the Sauchiehall Street facade included a building-wide first floor bay window for the Room de Luxe, and a further line of Art Nouveau windows across the upper facade of the ground floor.  Inside, the decoration was thematic: dark panelling for the masculine spaces, light decor elsewhere.  The ground floor general tearoom featured light-coloured panelling and canvas, with the gallery area in white, pink and grey; and the adjacent ladies' tearoom was in white, silver and rose.  

 

The Room de Luxe, said to be Mackintosh's "most extravagant room", featured a vaulted ceiling and grand lead-lighted doors, sumptuous furnishing, and a grey, purple and white colour scheme - not forgetting the rose-purple upholstery of the settees.  A contemporary description calls the Room "a fantasy for afternoon tea".  One wall featured a panel by Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, "Oh ye, all ye that walk in Willowwood" - which now hangs in the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, with a reproduction hanging in the renovated Room de Luxe.  

In what we might term a postscript to the Cranston/Mackintosh collaboration, in1917 (while he was living in London) Mackintosh was commissioned by Cranston to create another tearoom, this time in the basement of the building adjacent to The Willow Tearoom.  It being wartime, this project emerged as The Dug-Out - with windowless black walls and ceilings, the darkness alleviated by green and blue geometric stencils and yellow settees. 

The Dug-Out was short-lived.  Kate Cranston's husband died later in 1917, and in 1919 Cranston sold her business and retired.  

 

A hundred years of change and naming disputes have followed, but today there survives - courtesy of the Heritage Lottery Fund and some 10 million pounds - the resurrected "Mackintosh at the Willow", including visitor centre. Resurrected, maybe, but for the real deal give me, any time, a Tardus trip to 1918.

 

#   House for an Art Lover  Mackintosh had a long involvement with the design world of Continental Europe, starting with his scholarship tour in 1891.  In 1898 he was commissioned by the editor of Decorative Art [Dekorative Kunst] magazine to decorate for him a dining-room in Munich.  The result included darkly coloured built-in cupboards beneath a frieze of stylized plants.  Later, the principal financial backer of the Secessionists had Mackintosh design a music salon.  Completed in 1902, the salon, with its touches of lilac and rose over predominant white, caused "something of a sensation" and was much visited by connoisseurs.  But Mackintosh's most significant Continental work was his entry in the1900 competition sponsored by a German design journal for the design of a "House for an Art Lover" [Haus eines Kunstfreundes].  He did not win the competition, although he was awarded a special prize.  In recognition of their high standard, however, Mackintosh's  architectural designs were later published in a full-colour portfolio of lithographs.

While Mackintosh's architectural and design drawings were prepared for competition purposes, they were realised nearly a century later when the House for an Art Lover was built in Glasgow's Bellahouston Art Park.

 Whereas Mackintosh had conceived a residence, the building that emerged in 1996 necessarily substituted some commercial features - cafe, gift-shop, offices - with the capacity to hold exhibitions and to host conferences and banquets. Nevertheless, the building is true to Mackintosh's concepts, and contains a number of rooms decorated in accordance with the Mackintosh designs. 

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Mackintosh’s work is geographically enigmatic.  The externals of his public buildings are undeniably Glaswegian – monumental, dour, dark, even forbidding.  When I saw them first as images in the late 1960s (and again up close years later) the pervasive darkness fooled me into thinking that the building stone of choice had been granite, but I was wrong.  Glasgow is a sandstone city; and unlike the black granite of Aberdeen or of Melbourne's Victorian-era churches, the public buildings of the same period in Glasgow are dark-honey coloured - although for generations with their natural hue darkened by pollution.  In the late 1800s Glasgow was known as the second city of the British Empire, principally because of shipbuilding and allied activities; and the darkness and bleakness of later years was a product of Glasgow's industrial age, and the smoke and pollution that it brought with it.  A latter-day commentator observed: "Glasgow in the days I was a kid was a dirty place.  The buildings were all black.  I thought the stone was black.  It was actually dirt."  And another observer, in the1990s:  "Some marvellous and intriguing things have been happening in the city. Epidemics of stone cleaning and tree planting have transformed its former blackness into chequer works of salmon pink, yellow and green."  That spit and polish has been a significant factor in the city’s renaissance and, in turn, a trigger for Glasgow's designation as European City of Culture for the year of 1990. 

 

Still, while the colour of the building stone has been lightened the monumental architecture - and Mackintosh's contribution to it - cannot be denied.  Mackintosh’s internals, in contrast, while not necessarily light, have an airiness of touch, likely born of the Viennese scene at the same time - one explanation, perhaps, being the relationship between Mackintosh’s skills as an architect and his skills as an artist and designer.

 

But to focus on the differences between Mackintosh's exteriors and his interiors is to gaze too narrowly.  One writer, Ian Colville, widens the lens:  "Charles Rennie Mackintosh was an architect who designed schools, offices, churches, tearooms and homes [and significant public buildings].  He was an interior designer and decorator, an exhibition designer, a designer of furniture and a famous designer of chairs, a designer of metalwork, textiles and stained glass, and a water-colourist.  Without doubt, Mackintosh had a distinctive style; few designers can claim to have created a unique and individual style that is so instantly recognisable.  With a spirit of romanticism, he mixed together traditional Scottish norms, the English Arts and Crafts tradition, Art Nouveau, and simple styles reminiscent of Japanese, to produce his own unique brand of progressive modernism." As another writer puts it: "Mackintosh was an intensely individualistic designer and must be judged as independent from any broad contemporary stylistic movement."

 

I have been troubled by the assertion, near the outset of this Piece, that Mackintosh had the sad affliction of being born ahead of his time.  On reflection, how so?  He was a leading architect of public buildings in Glasgow, and his architectural work although dated today was very much of his time.  He was immersed in the contemporary design scene of the Vienna of the day.  And he exhibited his works internationally.  But his career fizzled, and his later professional years were bare of the vigour of his earlier years.  Perhaps, therefore, he was not so much ahead of his time as trapped in the bubble of his time.  

 

And then there seem to be elements of his personality that made him difficult to work with.  He insisted on total control, both of exteriors and interiors and, I suspect, was difficult when he was granted that control, and more difficult when he wasn't.  As an example of his perfectionist manner (query obsessive/compulsive) it was said that in the early days of the Willow Tea Room he used to visit the Room de Luxe each morning before opening time to ensure that the flowers were perfectly arranged. 

 

He was famous in the Art Nouveau world of Europe, but then he didn't work there.  He had undoubted recognition in Scottish architectural circles, but this professional respect did not translate into sufficient fulfilling commissions............and increasingly he drank too much.  Frances Newbery Sturrock, daughter of Francis Newbery, suggests that Mackintosh gained little work after the completion of the Glasgow School of Art in 1909:  Glasgow was too provincial - they thought the tea-rooms were a joke, and the School of Art very peculiar.  

 

There seems to me to be a pervasive sadness in Mackintosh's life.  It's not that he lived until age 60 only, or that his final days were blighted by the affliction of tongue and throat cancer.  He had a brilliant early career in architecture, but his talent - or, at least, the public appreciation of his talent - was subsumed by the architectural practice that employed him, true even after he was a partner.  After 24 years of practice in Glasgow he drifted to London - not, in the event, to spread his name in architecture, but to dabble in textile design and water colouring.  After some years he was so financially straitened that he had to accept support from his mentor, Francis Newbery, and to re-locate to France to economise.  

And there is the possibility that Mackintosh was worn down by his wife's talents. Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh through her lifetime contributed to some 40 European and American exhibitions. Mackintosh himself wrote that she was "half if not three-quarters of all my architectural work", and that "she had genius while he merely had talent".  Is this the clue to Mackintosh's fifteen final forlorn years? 

 

Gary Andrews

BRITAIN IN PICTURES - NUMBER 7

 

#65   Wildflowers in Britain by Geoffrey Grigson

 

I was at university when a friend told me about “only watching”. Reproved me, actually, for getting it wrong; and set me on a life-long crusade to watch where the word “only” is placed in a sentence.  Not a crusade in the sense of overt pedantry [until now!], or with the aim of hunting down and rebuking the miscreant, merely a private resolve to watch where I put the "only".  Manically similar, I suppose, to ensuring at all cost that an infinitive is not split – something that I and the world should have given up on long ago; although I remain an unrepentant closet non-splitter, even though hardly anybody to-day cares a fig. You’ll remember – no, perhaps you won’t! – the early days of Star Trek, where Captain Kirk and his brave band were enjoined each episode “to boldly go where no man has gone before”, causing projectile vomiting among the grammatical purists who insisted the Enterprise and its crew were okay “to go boldly where no man has gone before”, or, at a pinch, “boldly to go where no man has gone before” - but not "to boldly go".  In the intervening 55 years a lot less angst has been caused by Star Trek's split infinitives, and the focus has shifted and a lot more heat generated over the outrageous sexism of the one boldly going before being a man!

 

Yet while the Star Trek fracas has died down, and I no longer un-split infinitives with religious zeal, I remain on alert for "onlys" in the wrong place.  Hence, barely even concealing my contempt, I pounced on Geoffrey Grigson’s opening sentence: “Very few flowering plants are only found in the British Isles”.  He should have said: “Very few flowering plants are found only in the British Isles”, or “found in the British Isles only”. The distinction is important.  Having already spent 300 words, though, I have no desire to explain further.

 

In a series whose subjects are sometimes too esoteric for the general reader the topic of wildflowers surely ranks; but in this book there’s always something absorbing, something to learn.  Geoffrey Grigson was knowledgeable beyond our right to expect, and his anecdotal way of writing is welcoming.  His CV - not the words provided by his publishers but provided by Wikipedia 75 years later - ranges from naturalist and botanist, through teacher, essayist, journalist, broadcaster, editor, writer and anthologist – to poet, which was his principal pursuit.  He lived from 1905 to 1985, and it rather surprises that 80 years was enough to cover everything.  Wikipedia lists 82 Grigson publications.  He wrote and published a guidebook to English plants, The Englishman’s Flora, in 1955.  I expect that it’s an expansion of his 1944 48-page contribution to the Britain in Pictures series.  At 542 pages, some expansion!

 

 In Wildflowers in Britain Grigson ranges widely, with chapters on the introduction of plants from abroad; on the rarity of plants; on the geographical distribution of growing conditions; and on writing about plants, including anthologies, and books on plants ranging from handbooks to botanical texts.  At times the cavalcade of species can be pretty dense, and the desire to skip over pretty irresistible, but there is such a lot to learn.  Here are a few of my gleanings, some factual, some romantic:

 

·              It is rare for plants in Britain to be more than 50 miles from the sea, so the influence of the seas was fundamental to species selection.

·              On the whole Britain is a mild and moist place – plenty of rain, little enduring cold, little enduring heat.

·              Very few plants are found in the British Isles only.

·              Climate is more important than soil.  A bomb site, or a ruined landscape, will soon enough be colonised by plants.

·              Seeds are always on the move through the world - by sea, in the air, attached to birds' feet, on dragonflies' wings, and through men. Tomato plants come up on sewage farms!

·              We cannot, emotionally, separate a flower from the place, or the conditions, we usually find it in.

·              The attraction of any plant is increased by any curious fact about it.

·              Apropos of plants: to find what is rare is the last pleasure left to millionaires.

·              If you are a garden plant you are regarded, well regarded, just so long as you stay in the garden.  Go outside, go on to the streets, and you lose your reputation. You become a rogue.

·              In the context of Australian seeds brought to Britain in bales of wool:  it is not easy for a species to find room to live, even if it can stand the climate. In a garden it is one thing, but a foreign plant which tries to get out of a garden, or one that comes in at a seaport, has to face the close trade union of plants already there, already well adapted to temperature, and dampness, and soil.

·              Notwithstanding the previous point, an expert survey in 1931 established that, at the time, there were 4468 species of plant growing in Britain (without human assistance), comprising 2270 natives, plus 399 foreign species virtually naturalised, and 1799 foreign species from Europe and the rest of the world that were growing in Britain but not expected to be able to colonise successfully.

 

One of the joys of riffling through old books is the occasional discovery of a dedication, or some pencilled commentary in the margin, or some slipped-in newspaper cutting.  Taped to the rear endpaper of Grigson’s volume is a cutting from Melbourne's The Herald.  I gauge its vintage through the reverse-side article by Professor Walter Murdoch (see the Britain in Pictures blog I posted on 21 June this year), and I reckon it dates from the 1950s.  It is a picture of a plant in a large pot, with the following caption:  “Twisted Hazel.  Here’s an uncommon, decorative small tree that can be grown in a tub or anywhere in the garden.  It’s a twisted hazel or cobnut tree (Corylus Avellana ‘Contorta’).  This deciduous species was propagated from one found by a hedgerow in England in 1863. It’s fairly expensive, but very attractive.”

 

 

#64  The Londoner by Dorothy Nicholson

 

The obvious place to start with The Londoner was to assume that I was picking up the book – in 1946 from the first retailer; or to-day from a second-hand bookshop; or, heaven forfend, from my own shelf where it has languished unread for maybe forty years – and imagining, sight unseen, what the book was about.  I would have been wrong.  Expressed straightforwardly, the words “The Londoner”, much the same as “The New Yorker”, convey to me the sense of a present-day inhabitant, an habitué or a denizen of that place.  But Nicholson’s book has no temporal limitation: it describes and celebrates Londoners from earliest times.  Then, not content merely to discuss the inhabitants of London, the author describes London itself through the years; and by way of background to people and place, she also gives us a comprehensive thousand-year history lesson, the history of the microcosm that is London, including what we might term history at street level.  And all this from a scholar who was an archaeologist by profession.  The blurb on the fly leaf asserts that “……...in the present book scholarship and entertainment are admirably combined to delight both the erudite and curious reader”.  Although meant as praise, those words I think sell the book short.  And to pick a nit, why can't a reader be both erudite and curious?

 

Dorothy Nicholson [nee Lamb] (1887 to 1967) was an honours graduate in classics from Cambridge and, until the First Balkans War in 1912, she was based in Greece.  For some years she catalogued the terracotta figurines held in the Acropolis Museum. She was married to Sir John Reeve Brooke from 1920 until his death in 1937; and to Sir Walter Nicholson from 1939 until his death in 1946.  At the time of writing The Londoner she was known as Lady Dorothy Brooke Nicholson.  How did she manage to accumulate the sweep of her London knowledge while surrounded by the dusty shards of Greek antiquity?  A long life and an enquiring mind, perhaps?  Whatever, the book is a trove of facts and impressions.  Some snippets and elaborations follow.  

·              Alfred the Great might be said to have “made” London when, in the year 886, he expelled the Danes and re-built the walls; and brought into the town people from neighbouring areas, and enjoined them henceforth to keep the Danes out.    Thereafter, the Londoners  “developed a most exemplary aptitude for their own defence” and the consequent protection of their trade, and their liberties. 

·              Added to these freedoms, the Londoners have always been keen to see within the City “a pleasant life of industry, sport, pageantry, and the free practice of their religion, with peace and orderly rule to secure them”.  Remember that the “City” of London is a separate area from Westminster, the seat of government.  Often over the centuries the principal impediment to the pleasant life of the Londoners of the City has been their own king – “in early times rapacious, war-mongering, regarding the City as a place unblushingly to plunder”.  Down to the eighteenth century the Londoners of the City carried on a running fight with the Crown, or with Parliament, and with frequent riot and bloodshed.

·              Even before the Norman Conquest Londoners had acquired wealth and prestige.  “They fought at Hastings, but when disaster befell they accepted William with philosophy and William accepted them with a most comprehensive and positively deferential charter.”

·              From King John London got the right of the Court of Aldermen to choose a Mayor; and from the Magna Carta a specific clause confirming the City’s “ancient liberties and customs both by land and water”.  Thereafter London was “almost a city-state, which neither the sovereign nor his armed forces may enter without permission”, and in which the Lord Mayor took precedence over everyone except the sovereign.

·              In the fourteenth century life for the 100000 or so citizens "packed within the walls of the City" was neighbourly and intimate, and the common punishments of the stocks and the pillory exemplified the torment of having to bear the neighbours' ridicule.  Rich and poor lived close together, not in separate districts.  Relief of poverty and infirmity was everybody's business: the wealthy citizen had to provide everything now provided by authority, including hospitals.

·              The Londoners accepted Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries, not only because Henry was determined, but also because the Roman Church was an encroachment which they were glad to shake off.  By the time of the Stuart kings London was fiercely Protestant.

·              The independent-minded Londoners defied James I (a Protestant, but son of the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots).  The clergy resisted his Book of Sports, which he'd ordered to be read from the pulpit to encourage working men to take exercise on the Sabbath.  When the royal carriage was refused passage into the City, James threatened to leave London - to which the Lord Mayor retorted that it didn't matter where he went so long as he left the Thames behind him.

·              Fifty years later the great plague (1665-1666), and the great fire (2 September, 1666),  "cut a hideous gash" in London.  Those who were able to do so, fled.  But the doctors, city officials, constables, attended to their grim and dangerous duties. Samuel Pepys wrote to a military friend: "You sir took your turn of the sword; I must not grudge mine of the pestilence."  The poor showed contempt of infection.  Some sat in such taverns as were open hoping to meet their end drinking.  "There was a great friendliness.  Even Dissenting and Episcopal congregations and clergy forgot their quarrels and mixed freely at worship."  But lo: "the Londoner's power of recuperation was almost excessive. "  Within about four years of the fire everything in London seemed as flourishing as before.

·              Street fighting was much practised in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  Not roughhouse, but with rules, the crowd forming a ring to ensure fair play.  A gentleman could fight a butcher and no one must interfere even if the gentleman was being thrashed.

·              "London of the eighteenth century was a mixture of humanitarianism and urbanity.  People lay starved to death in deserted tenements.  Bedlam and the prisons were heart-rending; hangings at Tyburn were public holidays with gin sold in the crowd for refreshment."  And yet, nearly all the great hospitals were founded in the mid-1700s; and Handel played the organ and conducted The Messiah at the Foundling Hospital.

·              In the hundred years from 1750 to 1850 the population of London grew from one million to over two million souls.  The old villages had spread out to meet one other, and in the central London slums the air was so foul from smut, smoke, drains and cesspools that the tulips died.  And, too good an anecdote not to repeat:  "In 1836 the directors of the Bank of England were startled to see a man appear suddenly in the middle of the floor in the bullion room at the bank, having come in by an old sewer."

·              "The contrast between rich and poor eventually disturbed the complacency of the prosperous Londoner, and with the Factory Acts came movements to cleanse, feed, uplift, study the poor, even to educate them."  From the middle of the nineteenth century much effort was expended in dealing with London slum life.  It was said that the three great agencies of social reform were the London City Mission, Dickens's novels, and the cholera.  Still, better days (and enabling legislation) didn't arrive with any haste; and Nicholson concludes that real reform wasn't apparent until about 1911. 

 

This selection has taken us through to the twentieth century; and, given the time of writing, it is not surprising that Nicholson's post-1900 comments predominantly evoke the times of the then War.  And it's not surprising that, finally, the Londoner has become the hero of the story.  I offer some extracts, some verbatim, some paraphrased:  

# At the start of the War many Londoners were evacuated, either voluntarily or under pressure from the authorities.  Those who stayed through the ensuing "phoney war" wondered whether their civil defence training would ever be needed.  

#  The implications of the fall of France were not perhaps fully grasped, and there was a tendency to regard the Battle of Britain, while it was being fought, as the world's transcendent sporting event.  

#  Shelter life began confusedly, but soon the miracles of organisation - sanitary and alimentary - and the joys of communal life, were so much appreciated that many were loth to relinquish them when the need for shelter passed.  

#  In any case, two-thirds of central Londoners made no use of shelter of any kind, public or private.  

#  A virtuosity of ingenuity was displayed in the punctual arrival of milk, newspapers and letters, over broken glass and craters at addresses that were little else; and in maintaining an existence in battered houses with the remnants of household chattels.

#  Every Londoner felt that anything he did, or refrained from doing, that helped to keep the daily wheels of life revolving and the ordinary routine alive was a blow to Hitler; and he was right.  The Londoner's endurance was not passive, but aggressive.

 

And, Nicholson's final tribute to the wartime Londoner - sentimental and flowery no doubt, but forgivable:  "The Londoner was called upon to fight and to suffer till the very eve of victory:  the roar of the last rocket had scarcely died when VE Day dawned and the Londoner, with an elation almost angelic in its calm, walked the streets of his city which seemed like the New Jerusalem bathed in the May sunshine under a sky of limpid, tranquil blue from which no missiles fell."

 

Observant readers will have noticed that I have mostly excluded reference to the numerous great names who have been born in London or who have lived there.  That list is endless.  In view of the book's title, The Londoner, this might be construed as a fatal omission, but how to select, and where to stop?  In any case, "the Londoner", to me, implies a type rather than an individual.  But was there such a "type" in 1946?  I would venture "no"; and much less so today, with the mass migrations into the United Kingdom in the most recent half-century.  

 

I had thought to allow Nicholson to peer beyond the cross-hairs and to describe the people she sees.  But her descriptions and her musings are so extensive that they would need to be heavily redacted [thank you CIA for that onomatopoeic gem].  Suffice to allow to Nicholson a short final comment: "A typical London character is hard to find", and to leave it at that.  

 

Gary Andrews

 

MY COUSIN GRAEME

 

When my cousin Graeme Lee died in 2010 I was unable to attend his funeral in Perth, but I was prompted to record some memories - because I had known Graeme for longer than anyone then living.   Some of what follows was used in Graeme's eulogy. The whole memoir may be of interest to those attracted to a bit of social history and, indeed, may be "news" to my family.

 

Graeme and I were both born in 1939, me in the August and Graeme in the December.  We were cousins – my father Gordon was the younger and only brother of Graeme’s mother Cath.

 

It isn’t just that we were cousins, but we spent a lot of our early years together.

 

Graeme’s father, Alec Lee, was a policeman, and died tragically when Graeme was very young, before the age of two.  Graeme’s mother married again, to Ron Napier.  I never knew Napier, or ever heard a word spoken about him.  The marriage clearly failed, although Aunt Cath in her professional life always went by the name Napier.

 

There was a lot of dislocation during the Second World War, and Graeme and I were thrown together – although I have no personal recollection, and am relying on photographs and the memory of later conversations.  Where Aunt Cath and Graeme spent most of the War I have no idea. Gordon, as a farmer, was reserved from active service but, in the down-time from wheat farming, worked at the Maribyrnong munitions factory.  I believe that at those times he stayed with his aunt Em Templeton at Essendon, and that Graeme was there too.   There are photos of me and Graeme together at Essendon, but no firm evidence of how much time we spent together during the War years.

 

But our lives really came together after the War was over.  Farming in the Mallee region of Victoria had become a disaster because of prolonged drought, and my parents Gordon and Gloria, were forced to leave their share farm, and the land.  Their farm was only a mile or so from Pa Andrews' farm near Chinkapook, land that he had selected around 1910.     Meanwhile Cath Napier was operating a delicatessen in Elizabeth Street, Melbourne.  I never learnt the story first-hand, but by whatever means Cath and Gordon in 1946 pooled their resources and took over a delicatessen in Chapel Street, Windsor.  The arrangement was a lifeline for Gordon and Gloria (and, by extension, for me and my sister Margaret - who was just a little over a year old at the time).  It was also a lifeline for my grandparents, Fred and Margaret Andrews, who had had to leave their Chinkapook farm of 35 years after foreclosure by the bank. The upshot was that while the delicatessen operated at street level, behind and above the shop the private dwelling housed two grandparents, the four Gordon Andrews family, and Graeme and his mother.

 

Graeme and I went to Windsor State School, just a couple of hundred yards away.  My only recollection of the School is that we were given hot cocoa at morning break!  Graeme and I were in grade 2.  After school we were playmates in the paved yard behind the shop.

 

Doubtless the living arrangements at Windsor were rather cramped.  But we stayed there for around six months only; and then we moved to Bridge Road, Richmond.  

 

The Richmond “shop” – numbers 294 and 296 Bridge Road - was really two shops in one – a delicatessen and a cake shop.  The place was very large [see the background photo to this Blog, taken circa 1990], mirror image premises, but opened structurally into one at both ground floor and upstairs levels.  Behind the delicatessen were a work space and a huge cool-room, and three other rooms - an office, a storeroom, and a kitchen.  Behind the cake shop were two rooms that made up the bakehouse, a produce storeroom, a scullery, and a laundry.  Upstairs the residence comprised eight spacious rooms. 

 

Aunt Cath ran the delicatessen, my mother Gloria ran the cake shop, and Gordon ran the bakehouse – and, in the process, taught himself to be a pastry-cook.

 

Grandma and Pa Andrews were with us at the start.  Pa stayed on, but Grandma soon moved out to run a rooming house in Hawthorn.  Graeme and I shared a bedroom.

 

All this time Aunt Cath’s romance with Bill Warren was developing.  Cath and Bill had met on Flinders Street Station [shades of Brief Encounter].  This was back when Cath was running the delicatessen in Elizabeth Street.  Bill was living at Cheltenham, I expect having recently been demobbed.  Cath and Graeme and Grandma Andrews were living at Aspendale. I'm not sure where Pa Andrews was residing at the time – maybe still back on his farm at Chinkapook, more likely with Gordon and Gloria (and me) at the nearby share farm – but he’d certainly caught up with us by the time we all got to Windsor; and he later moved with us to Richmond.

 

Cath and Bill were married; Bill moved in with us at Richmond, and there was another re-arrangement of the sleeping quarters.   Graeme and I moved in with Pa Andrews.  

 

So Graeme and I were kids together from age six.  We were different in size and shape and every other way, and I recall that we brawled a fair bit.  But I also recall that we played incessantly in the back yard at “cowboys and Indians”.  Since Graeme always played Tom Mix and I always played Hopalong Cassidy (or was it the other way around?) it must be that Beverley Cummings, our tomboy friend from school, always played the Indians. 

 

Our years of living under the same roof ended when Cath and Bill managed to extricate the Andrews family farm from the foreclosing bank (where it had languished unsaleable for five years), and with Graeme and Pa Andrews moved to Chinkapook – for Aunt Cath and Pa Andrews a return to their roots, for Bill the life-changing experience of rural life, and learning to be a farmer.  Graeme would have been eleven at the time.

 

Graeme simply loved farm life.  Bill was an easy-going and non-judgemental step-father.  The four or five years together on the farm were wonderful bonding years, and Graeme always thought of Bill as his dad, and always called him Dad.  If Graeme ever missed city life I never heard of it.    

 

I spent several school holidays at the farm; but saw a lot more of Graeme when his family sold the farm and returned to Melbourne in 1954.  Cath, Bill and Graeme moved into their newly-acquired place in Brighton; and the connection with Graeme strengthened again when he later became apprentice pastry-cook to my father, Gordon.  Given the early-morning start time in the bakehouse, Graeme was always there when I went off to school or university, sometimes still there when I got home. We saw a lot of each other in those days, one reason being that Graeme had by then become a member of the water polo squad based at the Richmond Pool. He had taken lessons from the legendary Tom Donnett, and was an excellent swimmer and water polo player.

 

We saw a lot more of each other after my father Gordon died in 1960.  Some time in the mid-1950s Gordon had acquired a second cake shop in Bridge Road, a few hundred yards closer to the city, number 158A.  The vendors had baked behind the shop, but Gordon discontinued the bakehouse, and supplied the new shop with deliveries from the original shop.  After Gordon died my mother, Gloria, continued the businesses, with Graeme as her mainstay pastry-cook.  But she could not cope, and the original delicatessen and cake shop were closed – and my family moved to Canterbury.  But Gloria continued to run the new shop, and Graeme stayed with her and re-commissioned the bakehouse.  Graeme was an excellent pastry-cook.  That arrangement continued for another year or so.  I doubt that this was an easy time for Graeme, but he showed true kindness and loyalty.

 

Graeme and I had an inevitable drifting apart.  My career took me in one direction; and marriage to Kaye and young children took Graeme’s interests in a different direction.  Then Graeme and family moved to Western Australia, and for some years Graeme was an ore train driver based at Dampier.  After returning to Perth he established a wedding-car hire business. In later years Graeme and I rarely saw each other.  

 

But our lives were intertwined right into our twenties, and that can not be gainsaid.

 

By way of postscript, and something that I did not reference for Graeme's funeral, I note that Graeme was dyslexic.  The condition was not diagnosed early, and he had difficulty in his school years. He read very little, and wrote even less.  But despite the drawback he was able to complete his pastry-cooking apprenticeship, and to qualify as a train driver - persistence and hard work overcoming adversity.

 

 

Gary Andrews