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Overview
A forger and convicted felon, Francis Greenway was transported to Sydney in 1814. Only a decade later, his dreams of a “city superior in architectural beauty to London” began to be realized as he designed Hyde Park Barracks, St James' Church, the Supreme Court, St Luke's Church in Liverpool, and the Windsor courthouse. In this first biography of Greenway since 1953, award-winning author Alasdair McGregor scrutinizes the character and creative output of a man beset by contradictions and demons. He profiles Greenway's landmark buildings, his complex and fraught relationship with Governor Lachlan Macquarie, and his thwarted ambitions and self-destruction.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781742241821 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | UNSW Press |
| Publication date: | 03/18/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 425 |
| File size: | 8 MB |
About the Author
Alasdair McGregor is the author of Frank Hurley: A Photographer's Life; Mawson's Huts: An Antarctic Expedition Journal; and Grand Obsessions: The Life and Work of Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin, winner of the 2011 National Biography Award; and the coauthor of Australia's Wild Islands and The Kimberley: Horizons of Stone, both with Quentin Chester.
Read an Excerpt
A Forger's Progress
The Life of Francis Greenway
By Alasdair McGregor
University of New South Wales Press Ltd
Copyright © 2014 Alasdair McGregorAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74224-702-1
CHAPTER 1
EARTHLY REWARD: 800 ACRES AND 16 COWS
The walls of the small hut were made of rough-sawn eucalypt slabs, and the roof framed in saplings and covered in sheets of stringy bark. There were just two rooms at first, with mud floors and no glass in the miserable openings that passed for windows. Sheets of calico were all there was to keep out the rain and cold. In the middle of the main room was a table made from four planks and secured to uprights sunk into the earthen floor. Two rough benches served as the only seating.
At Tarro, approximately 15 miles north of the convict settlement of Newcastle, and not far off the road from Hexham to Wallis Plains, the hut stood on a grassy ridge overlooking a tight bend in the Hunter River and a stretch of low cultivated ground growing wheat, potatoes, maize, pumpkins and watermelons.
William Howard Greenway had built the hut with the help of convict labour some time around 1827 on Howard Farm, an 800-acre grant of land made to his father a few years before. Born in England, William had arrived in New South Wales as a small boy in 1814, and had later become a builder of sorts around Sydney. He worked with his architect father and claimed to have helped with the building of Australia's first lighthouse. But following the death of his mother in 1832, the Greenway family fortunes went into decline and William left Sydney for good, taking his two sisters and two of his three surviving brothers with him to Howard Farm.
To accommodate the family, he extended the hut in a rather desultory fashion and added two bedrooms, although rather than a dirt floor, these extra rooms were afforded the luxury of roughly sawn planks for floorboards. And of the original virgin bush that comprised the Greenway land grant, census records show that by 1828 just 30 acres had been cleared, with only half that area under cultivation. A herd of 16 cows grazed the land.
John Wallace, a young engineer from England who in 1846 married the youngest Greenway sister, Agnes, recalled William as 'idle and pleasure hunting'. He was unable to stick at business in Sydney, and the hut 'was all after years and years [that] William had provided for his sisters and brothers'.
In his final days, the hut also became the last miserable home of William's father, Francis – likewise distinguished by the middle name of Howard. Francis was no farmer, and the grant of land had been made to him by the colonial government in 1821, partly in compensation for remuneration forgone, but also to shut him up. Although they never met, Wallace knew Francis Greenway by reputation among the family, describing him as a 'violent tempered man, dictatorial and quarrelsome'.
The small hut on the grassy ridge beyond the edge of civilisation must indeed have been a wretched abode for the five children and their father. Again, Wallace noted a 'violent quarrel when the father came up from Sydney'. And it was there on Howard Farm, in September 1837, that Francis Howard Greenway died at the age of 59, possibly of typhoid fever.
His passing went unnoticed and unrecorded in Sydney, or anywhere else for that matter. If he was remembered at all at the time it might have been as the choleric associate of the former governor, Lachlan Macquarie, and for their short-lived collaboration in the pursuit of civic progress.
Even the death of the indolent William in 1894 was marked by an obituary that described him as a 'most observant as well as an educated man'. But for Greenway the father there were no public obituaries, and no crowds to nod in sombre agreement as eulogies were spoken softly over his coffin. Perhaps not even his children cared for their querulous father, as there is no known grave for Francis Howard Greenway. In the absence of a clergyman, the local schoolmaster from East Maitland read the burial service on 25 September 1837.
It was a bitterly sad end for a man who had dined at the governor's table, courted the favour of the English aristocracy, and claimed the illustrious Arthur Phillip as a friend and patron. He had exhibited at London's Royal Academy, immersed himself in the study of the Ancients and worked with John Nash, the most fashionable architect of his day. He had dreamt of a city the equal of any in architectural beauty and refinement, a city of cathedrals and grand public buildings, broad avenues, generous squares and flowering gardens. And in his own completed works he had fought against ignorance and indifference to bring civility and aesthetic good manners to a benighted gaol at the outer limits of the British Empire, only to be repaid with a miserable piece of land in the wilderness. Ridiculed and rejected, he had spent the final years of his life in desperate poverty, an enduringly obstinate and proud yet disillusioned man obsessed with setting the record straight –according to his own lights – and righting the injustices an uncaring world had wrought upon him. But by the late 1820s no one was listening, and he might as well have expostulated to the cows that grazed languidly by the bend of the Hunter River.
From noble public buildings imbued with the civilising power of architecture to a rude hovel on the barbaric frontier – such was the decline and fall in less than two decades of Francis Howard Greenway.
He began his life nearly 60 years before in Gloucestershire, as the fourth son among an eventual brood of eight children born to Francis Greenway and Ann (née Webb). Francis was a Mangotsfield man from near Bristol; Ann was from the Cotswolds village of Colerne in nearby Wiltshire. The first four Greenway boys appeared in quick succession: Olive was born in 1775, then twins William and John Tripp in the following year. This latest baby boy arrived soon after and was baptised on 23 November 1777 in the 13th-century parish church of St James, Mangotsfield. He was simply called Francis, after his father; he would add the middle name of Howard himself in adult life. Mary and Elizabeth followed, before two more boys, Daniel and Charles, both of whom died young.
Francis Greenway senior was a stonemason and builder, one of generations of West Country Greenways, Grinways or Greenaways, steeped for centuries in the ways of quarrymen, architects, builders, masons and weavers. Proud of their formidable skills, the masons of the West Country had some of the best stone in the British Isles to work with – the hard, blue and red pennant sandstones of South Wales and Bristol, and the famous honey-coloured limestone known as Bath stone.
Among the members of the family noted by history, a John Greenway became a wealthy wool merchant in Tiverton in Devon in the early 16th century, built a chapel to St Peter and endowed almshouses for the poor. Ellis describes the parapet of St Peter's as a 'miracle of stone tracery, as light as lace'. Two centuries on, Thomas Greenway built the Theatre Royal in Bath in 1720, a richly ornamented building connected with the famous dandy and leader of fashion Beau Nash. But rather than Devon or Bath, Francis's immediate family was more closely associated with the port city of Bristol and its outlying hamlets and villages.
About three miles north-east of Bristol, unremarkable Mangotsfield was like countless other villages ranged across rural England. Occupation of the district dates back to Roman times, and the village was mentioned in the 11th-century Domesday Book as Manegodesfelle. The settlement grew around the intersection of local roads, with Downend to the north-west, Staple Hill to the west and Pucklechurch to the east. The latter had been the site of a Saxon villa or palace used by the Kings of Wessex, and to the south of Mangotsfield lay the forest remnants of the Kingswood, a vast royal hunting estate in medieval times. By Francis Greenway's era, much of the Kingswood had been turned over to common use or leased for coalmining. The Mangotsfield villagers were poor folk, employed in the main as farm labourers and quarrymen, or miners working in the scattered coal pits of the district.
In Mangotsfield itself, bluff gable-fronted houses faced inwards towards a small village green and the medieval church of St James. Close by stood Mangotsfield House, a distinguished red-brick building that served as the vicarage. Still standing in the 1790s was the 500-year-old manor house of William Putot (demolished in 1845), while a short distance away on Rodway Hill lay another manor house, built in the 1350s by William Blount, and said to have been used by Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn while hunting in the Kingswood.
By the time Francis and his brothers were active as masons and builders, Bristol was stirring, expanding outwards to the north and the east. Over the following century and a half, the port city swallowed Mangotsfield, and as a village green became a car park, rustic unpretentiousness was degraded to amiable though dreary suburbia.
Nothing is known of Francis Greenway's earliest days, where he lived in Mangotsfield or its surrounds, or where and how he was schooled. No image remains among the few remnants of the late 18th-century village to conjure the life of the boy, or to fathom from whom or where he gained a respectable knowledge of the classics and of English literature, whereby he could quote in later years from the likes of Cicero and Shakespeare, or the novels of Laurence Sterne.
Francis senior died in 1793 at the age of 45, leaving 18-year-old Olive as the head of the large family and proprietor of the Greenway mason's yard, probably located at the time in Downend. Despite their tender ages at the time of their father's death, the four eldest brothers were no doubt already well trained in the mason's craft. They would have readily picked up the tools in his memory, keeping on building and planning, repairing and maintaining the churches and churchyards, townhouses and great country piles of Gloucestershire. 'So persisting were most Greenways in their attachment to the arts and trades of stonework', wrote Ellis rather quaintly, 'that the best of them seemed to have learned their business almost instinctively at their fathers' knees'. Without evidence, Ellis also describes the Greenways as followers of the great architects of the age, men of the calibre of Nicholas Hawksmoor, George Dance and Robert Adam. And in the wider landscape, he saw them playing in the 'same fields of fancy as "Capability" Brown and Humphrey [i.e. Humphry] Repton'.
The port city of Bristol had grown rich through the 18th century on brass founding, tobacco and the ill-gotten gains of the slave trade. The city fathers and prosperous classes had money to spend on lavish construction and architectural aggrandisement. But while Bristol had grown in size and influence, it was still provincial in its outlook, and conservative and philistine in its taste. In such an atmosphere of opportunity and promise, a young Francis Greenway might have dreamt of more than the mason's yard, of more than monumental masonry, church repairs, garden walls and ornamental statuary. Perhaps he dreamt then of a city of fine public buildings of good taste; of drawing and design; and of giving the gift of architecture to a world appreciative of his many talents, his own god-given talents received from the great architect of the universe himself.
Long before formal courses in architecture, to become Francis Howard Greenway, architect and painter (as he was soon to describe himself), the young stonemason's son required a teacher, a master to whom he could be apprenticed. By good fortune he soon found that teacher, perhaps come to do business at the Greenway brothers' own yard.
CHAPTER 2FH GRINWAY COMES TO LONDON
Some time around 1797 Francis Greenway drifted out of the shadows of provincial obscurity and arrived in London at the home of 'Mr Nash'. Nothing is known of his impressions of the great unruly metropolis, the city of Samuel Johnson and coffee houses, of fashionable Mayfair and Christopher Wren's St Paul's, of crime and grim poverty. But here was architecture writ large in a city growing fast and soon to be the largest in the world. London was the city of young Greenway's dreams made real, and its impact could hardly have been anything but profound. Arriving at Mr Nash's placed him on the threshold of what could shape up as a significant career, his own good fortune bound to that of the prominent architect John Nash. Nash was destined to become one of the most fashionable architects of the regency and reign of George IV, his name soon to be synonymous with the layout and appearance of large tracts of London. The chance to work with such a mentor opened up a world of possibility to the lad from Mangotsfield.
The son of a Welsh millwright, London-born Nash had served an apprenticeship with the architect Sir Robert Taylor before branching out on his own as a surveyor, carpenter and builder. An indifferent early career in London soon came unstuck, with the failure of speculative ventures in Bloomsbury Square and Great Russell Street. In 1783, a bankrupted Nash retreated to the town of Carmarthen on the River Towy in South Wales and the support of his mother's family. And so began what the architectural historian Sir John Summerson described as 'ten years of provincial oblivion'.
During his exile in Wales, Nash established an extensive practice as an architect and building contractor. There he also met Richard Payne Knight and Uvedale Price, two theorists on the picturesque in architecture and town planning who were to have a lasting influence that by extension would flow to Greenway. Towards the end of his Welsh sojourn Nash formed a partnership with the landscape designer Humphry Repton, often viewed as the successor to the great Capability Brown. As his practice expanded through the 1790s, Nash took on and trained several assistants and draftsmen, the likes of whom included Repton's son John Adey, and Auguste-Charles Pugin, the father of Augustus Pugin of Gothic-revival and Palace of Westminster fame.
With the city of Bristol lying a short distance across the estuary of the River Severn from South Wales, it seems inevitable that as Nash's practice grew, he would have called on an everwidening circle of tradesmen and suppliers in the region, and he could readily have come into contact with the Greenway brothers. As James Broadbent and Joy Hughes speculated, in the late 1790s young Francis Greenway was 'just the right age ... for attachment through apprenticeship or other arrangement to an up-and coming architect'. Nash was working in London again in 1796 and returned there to live the following year, building a house for himself at 28 Dover Street, and possibly taking Greenway with him.
A first clue as to the association with Nash lies not, however, in London but in Nash's Welsh bolthole of Carmarthen, the site of one of only three buildings in Britain known definitively to be by Francis Greenway, or identified with him. In the late 18th century, coal and iron, the lifeblood and bones of the industrial revolution, saw previously slumbering provincial towns such as Carmarthen outgrow their medieval walls. In October 1800, the Corporation of the Borough of Carmarthen ordered the removal of the old marketplace to outside the town walls, and a new market building was opened in April the following year. According to Broadbent and Hughes, no reference has been found to verify the identity of the builder or architect, but Greenway appears to have assumed the latter role.
Upon his eventual arrival in New South Wales in 1814, Greenway sent a portfolio of his work to Governor Lachlan Macquarie. Among several designs supposedly submitted, the only scheme mentioned by name was 'one for a Market House & Town Hall & carried into effect at Carmarthen in Wales'. Greenway's addition of the 'town hall' was probably part of a more elaborate scheme that never came to fruition at Carmarthen. A contemporary plan of the town shows a humbler building than that alluded to by Greenway, with what appears to be a simple single-storeyed structure surrounding an open quadrangle. In his efforts to impress Macquarie, it would have mattered little to Greenway whether his town hall was ever realised. A humble effort or not, the connection between Nash and Greenway – master and pupil – appears to hinge on the Carmarthen Market House. The building was demolished by the middle of the 19th century and unfortunately there are no surviving illustrations to provide any clues as to its appearance or stylistic roots.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Forger's Progress by Alasdair McGregor. Copyright © 2014 Alasdair McGregor. Excerpted by permission of University of New South Wales Press Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Introduction: a forger's progress 1
1 Earthly reward: 800 acres and 16 cows 6
2 FH Grinway comes to London 13
3 A 'ruinous architectural triumph' 26
4 A curious and noteworthy crime 40
5 Bristol Newgate: 'white without and foul within…' 50
6 The blighted voyage of the General Hewett 59
7 A state of 'infantile imbecility' 71
8 To copy a courthouse 84
9 FH Greenway, 84 George Street 94
10 Three shillings a day and a government horse 105
11 Bright prospect: the Macquarie Tower, 1816-20 118
12 Pain and humiliation: the Barrack Square incident 135
13 A mansion for the viceroy: Government House, 1816-20 151
14 Transportation: 'an object of considerable terror' 160
15 A 'palace for horses': the Government House stables, 1817-21 169
16 Follies, fountains and fugacious toys, 1818-20 179
17 '… a neat handsome fort': colonial defences, 1816-21 193
18 '… an idea of grandeur': the Hyde Park Barracks, 1816-19 211
19 Walls of spite: St Matthew's and St Luke's, 1817-24 224
20 Feeding body and soul: St Andrew's and the market house, 1819-22 245
21 Fragments of a plan: St James' and the Supreme Court, 1819-27 256
22 A 'vile conspiracy': the Parramatta Female Factory, 1818-21 273
23 '… for the sake of a numerous family' 293
24 From George Street to the 'City of the World' 310
Measurements and currency 329
Buildings mentioned in the text 331
Notes 334
Bibliography 353
Acknowledgments 357
Index 359