John Honeyman was born at 21 Carlton Place, Glasgow on 11 August 1831, the third son of John Honeyman JP of the corn factors John Honeyman & Co, and his wife Isabella Smith. The family business was just across the suspension bridge, first in Dunlop Street and later at Dixon Street. The Honeymans also had a weekend residence at Belmore on the Gareloch: there he acquired his lifelong interest in sailing during the school holidays from Merchiston Castle School where he was a boarder from 1841 to 1846. He then attended the University of Glasgow where he 'passed the arts curriculum' (the Merchiston Castle register credits him with an MA) with the intention of entering the church. But he changed his mind and spent a year in a London accountant's office, probably intending to join his elder brother Michael before changing course yet again and deciding 'to edify the church in another way'. On his return to Glasgow he was articled to Alexander Munro, and by the end of his time there was included in the Post Office Directory as being in his office at 213 Buchanan Street. His first estimate book dates from then, but later in that same year, 1853, he obtained a place in William Burn's office at 44 Stratton Street, Piccadilly, London where he became a lifelong friend of Macvicar Anderson. In that office he also became acquainted with David MacGibbon, whose interest in medieval and Renaissance Scottish architecture he was to share. Thereafter he undertook a short study tour of the continent and the English cathedrals prior to re-establishing his own practice at 13 Moore Place, West George Street where he quickly acquired some influential clients, notably the shipbuilders and engineers James R Napier and John Elder. His well-publicised competition wins for the innovative Free West Church, Greenock (1861) and the similarly planned Lansdowne UP Church, Glasgow (1862) made his name. At Park Free Church in Helensburgh and at St Andrew's Free Church in Glasgow, both of 1862, he followed John Thomas Emmett's lead at Sandyford Church - which he had been brought in to complete - in showing how the Puginian three-aisle plan could be adapted to Presbyterian worship, the former with masonry arcades for a wealthy congregation and the latter with cast-iron columns supporting galleries for a less affluent one.
These major commissions enabled Honeyman to marry at Partick on 3 June 1863 Rothesia Chalmers Ann Hutchison, the thirty-three-year-old daughter of Charles Hutchison, a Glasgow merchant, and set up house at Langside. Their marriage was brief as she died on 20 March in the following year, a week after giving birth to John Rothes Charles Honeyman. In 1867 Honeyman married a second time to Falconer Margaret Kemp (sometimes spelt Kempt), the daughter of the retired Greenock merchant and shipowner James Colquhoun Kemp, the ceremony being in London at St Saviour's, Paddington. By that date Honeyman was already well established in ship-owning as well as ship-building circles, having built John & J C Burn's office at 30-34 Jamaica Street, demonstrated that his skill in high renaissance design matched that of his Gothic.
Prior to his second marriage Honeyman had bought 13 Somerset Place, Glasgow, with the aid of bonds totalling £1,400. But as his practice grew so did the need to keep up with his clientele, which was soon to be considerably boosted by the acquisition of Rochead's practice in 1869. In the previous year he built Stroove, a large Tudorish marine villa at Skelmorlie, Somerset Place being sold to pay for it; and in 1872 he bought his own yacht. In May 1874 he acquired 140 Bath Street for his rapidly expanding practice which now included the F & J Smith warehouse in Gordon Street, Glasgow; the asylum at Riccartsbar, Paisley; schools at Fairfield, Burnbank, Woodside, Henderson Street, Tureen Street and Rockvilla, all in Glasgow; the Municipal Buildings in Helensburgh; and the hydropathic at Kyles of Bute, as well as many commissions for churches, suburban mansions and alterations to country houses. During that peak period, 'like many another lover of white sails and blue water he found at that busy period of his life that an occasional cruise of ten days or so [with his wife and sons] was the best possible means of regaining vigour and enjoying mental rest'. Other passions of these prosperous years were angling and photography: several albums of landscape views remained for some time in the office.
Honeyman was a prolific writer and inventor. His first publication was 'The Age of Glasgow Cathedral, and of the Effigy in its Crypt' in 1854, followed by 'The Drainage of Glasgow and the Purification of the Clyde with special reference to the Ventilation of Drains' in 1856 and the invention of the diaphragm trap in 1858. In 1853 he became a member of the newly re-formed Institute of Architects in Scotland, and co-founder of the Glasgow Archaeological Society and the Glasgow Architectural Society in 1856 and 1858 respectively. In or about 1860 he enlisted in the First Dunbartonshire Artillery, reaching the rank of Captain before retiring from pressures of business in or about 1870.
In 1862 Honeyman published a pioneering paper on the regulation of architectural competitions and in 1866 he became one of the consultant architects to the newly formed Glasgow Improvement Trust. His high public profile resulted in his being admitted FRIBA on 14 December 1874, just after Rowand Anderson in the preceding June, at which date David Bryce and William Mackison had been the only other Scottish Fellows. His nomination had the influential backing of his old friend and colleague Macvicar Anderson and of George Edmund Street and Professor Robert Kerr. After only two years as a Fellow he was elected to the Council, the object being to recruit all the leading Glasgow practitioners to the Institute. Between 1876 and 1881, and mainly during the presidency of Charles Barry Junior in 1876-79, he succeeded in nominating nearly all of them: only William Clarke, then nearing retirement, and James Boucher seem to have declined. Probably because of his position as an RIBA Council member he also ran a critical commentary on the first Glasgow Municipal Buildings competition in the journals and in the newspapers, and may even have been encouraged to do so by Barry who shared his view that the schedule of accommodation and the cost limit were incompatible. Honeyman's very public criticism of the competition, which must have irritated Carrick (and even Barry himself was not spared a query to the secretary of the RIBA, asking whether it was proper for him to be awarded the Royal Gold Medal while president), had wide support in Glasgow and was probably a factor in his election as President of the Glasgow Institute of Architects in 1881-82. But by then Honeyman's luck had begun to run out. In 1877 his wife Falconer and her sons William Frederick Colquhoun, born 1868, and George Michael Allan, born 1872, began to become consumptive. They spent some time in Italy, during which period he picked up the commission for the Scots Church in Genoa; and although Honeyman was not a shareholder in the City of Glasgow Bank he felt the effects of its failure almost immediately. Business plummeted in 1879 and he sold his yacht; and although the practice briefly recovered in 1880, the number of new commissions collapsed again in 1881 when the full impact of the bank's losses became apparent. Falconer died on 7 January of that year at Stroove which was sold some months later, Honeyman renting a house at 7 Blythswood Square. There he lived with Sarah Anne - known as Anne - Horne, who came of a farming family at Soulbury in Buckinghamshire. She was probably the governess of his two younger sons who were sent to Loretto as boarders in 1879 and 1884 respectively. In the latter year Honeyman married Anne at St Michael's Church, Slateford, in Edinburgh. The rather surprising out-of-Glasgow venue appears to have been chosen because of his justifiable pride in that church which pioneered a more liturgical arrangement of Presbyterian worship slightly ahead of Rowand Anderson's Govan.
At the time of his marriage Honeyman was living at 7 Blythswood Square but by the time their son Herbert Lewis Honeyman was born on 12 November 1885 the Honeymans had rented first Melburn and then Mine Cottage at Bridge of Allan, finally settling at Minewood which was also rented; for at least a time a smaller Glasgow residence was retained at 24 Newton Place. The move may have been made for the fishing but it may also have been on medical advice that the well-wooded surroundings would be good for the health of his sons. In that respect he was to be sadly disappointed. William died at sea in a final attempt to prolong his life on 27 January 1885 and George somewhere abroad in 1888. By then Honeyman's practice was in serious difficulty and the end of his term on the RIBA Council in 1884 may have come as a relief because of the travelling costs it entailed. The contract value of work in hand fell from a high point of some £42,000 in 1878 to about £11,422 in 1884, £4,515 in 1885, only £1,020 in 1886, rising a little to £2,444 in 1887. In 1888 he had no significant business at all.
Late in that year or early in 1889 Honeyman took into partnership John Keppie, then aged twenty-six, who effectively refinanced and re-founded the practice. This seems to have been the result of a mutual arrangement with Campbell Douglas following the early death of Douglas's partner, James Sellars, in October 1888. Born in 1862, Keppie was the son of a wealthy tobacco importer who had studied for a year at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, won the Tite Prize twice in 1886 and 1887 and had been Sellars's principal assistant on the Glasgow International Exhibition of 1888 and on Anderson's College of Medicine, the construction of which had only just begun. When Sellars died, Douglas was still recovering from a serious illness and seems to have felt obliged ot offer Sellars's partnership to an older senior assistant, Alexander Morrison. Whether Douglas recommended Keppie to Honeyman, or whether Keppie made the contact for himself is not known, but the Honeyman & Keppie partnership showed every sign of being a rescue operation. Douglas allowed Keppie to take the Medical School with him as a setting-up commission, and that, together with the Fairfield shipbuilding offices at Govan for old clients of Honeyman's, brought the practice back to its previous levels.
In those years the new partnership was supported by four brilliant assistants: Alexander McGibbon; Herbert McNair, a family friend at Skelmorlie whom Honeyman had accepted as an articled apprentice in 1888; Charles Edward Whitelaw, who had studied at the Ecole; and Charles Rennie McIntosh (soon to become Mackintosh), whom Keppie had engaged from John Hutchison's office in or shortly after April 1889. Of these Mackintosh became the lead designer in the practice following his return from the Alexander Thomson Travelling Scholarship in 1892. The superb neo-Greek design submitted in the first tier of the Kelvingrove Art Galleries competition was probably the last new-build design Honeyman made himself. It was not worked up and resubmitted in the second tier, and neither was Keppie's, both being superseded by a free Italian Romanesque and early Renaissance design developed from Mackintosh's sketches, which commanded a lot of support and nearly resulted in Waterhouse's recommendations being overturned.
By the 1890s Honeyman was suffering from problems with his eyesight and restricted actual design to church work and restorations. In 1893 he designed the new church for his former congregation at Skelmorlie, gifting a stained-glass window to the memory of his second wife and sons; in 1894 he reconstructed the church at Largo; in 1894-96 he carried out the major restoration of St Michael's Church at Linlithgow; and in 1895 he designed the enlargement of the church he attended at Bridge of Allan. The design of Queen's Cross Church in Glasgow he generously allowed to go to Mackintosh, though he probably advised on the plan. As the practice recovered, so did Honeyman's reputation nationally: he was elected ARSA in 1892, elevated to full academician in 1895, and seriously considered for the presidency when Sir George Reid retired in 1902, but pleaded to be excused on the grounds of blindness, seconding the election of James Guthrie.
The great works of Honeyman's last years were his restorations of Brechin and Iona Cathedrals. At Brechin the Early English choir was in ruins, the transepts had gone completely, and the nave arcades and clerestory were enclosed within a plain Gothic box of 1806. The Rev John Alexander Clark, who had taken over the charge in 1892, was a fellow Glaswegian who had been a founder member of the Aberdeen Ecclesiological Society in 1886; in 1890 Honeyman himself joined the Society which was later to merge with the Glasgow one. Between September 1898 and March 1902 Honeyman reconstructed the nave aisles and south transept, guided by 18th-century drawings and engravings, and rebuilt the choir in a shortened form, a mausoleum precluding its restoration to its original length. The later stages of the restoration were accomplished only with great difficulty as Honeyman's sight had failed and he modelled the details in some early form of plasticine to demonstrate what he wanted to achieve.
By the time the work was complete Honeyman had officially completely retired as of 1 January 1901. He allowed Keppie and Mackintosh to buy him out over three years by taking a half share of the profits for the years 1902, 1903 and 1904, an arrangement which was perhaps more generous than he could afford but which ensured that Mackintosh did not have to find any capital. But in real terms he did not retire as the restoration of Iona Cathedral for the Cathedral Trustees went ahead in 1902-04, Honeyman and Thomas Ross, the surviving partner of MacGibbon & Ross, being jointly appointed to carry out the work. Honeyman's role must by then have been primarily his knowledge of the building which he had surveyed with Mackintosh and McNair's help in the 1890s. Within the office he was consulted occasionally on ecclesiastical work during those years, Alex Smellie remembering discussion on the new parish church at Auchterarder which was in some degree based on that at Lochgilphead of twenty years earlier.
Throughout his years of blindness Honeyman was assisted by his son Herbert. Although a boarder at Glenalmond he spent as much time as possible with his father as companion and guide, describing and researching for him, and it was in that relationship that Herbert's own lifelong devotion to archaeology was formed. Honeyman asked Keppie if he would take him as an articled apprentice, but Keppie had not time for him and declined: Honeyman did not allow this to affect their good relationship and approached Burnet who agreed. Although very shy and old-fashioned for his years, Herbert excelled in Burnet's office and at Glasgow School of Architecture under his father's old friend Alexander McGibbon and Eugène Bourdon. He won the travelling bursary in 1907, spent the years 1908 and 1909 travelling in England and France, and won the RIBA silver medal essay prize in 1911. All of these gave great satisfaction to his father, but they did not bring a place at Keppie's where business had begun to dry up. He opened his own office at 180 West Regent Street in 1909 but despite his father's support it did not prosper and he took a part-time job in Dunfermline with James Shearer, a former colleague at Burnet's about 1912.
During Herbert's Glasgow years Honeyman initially rented a modest Glasgow base, first at 23 West Cumberland Street and later at 6 Ailsa Drive in Langside. The University of Glasgow conferred an LLD on him in 1904 and in November of the following year he gave two important papers to the Scottish Ecclesiological Society on his findings at Iona Cathedral, developing an earlier paper to the Glasgow Architectural Society. His interest in Glasgow Cathedral remained undiminished, his last major paper, 'The Old Arrangements of the Transepts of Glasgow Cathedral', being published in 1907. Thereafter his lecturing and writing declined because of Herbert's absence abroad, but after his return he contributed one final work of scholarship to the 1912 volume of the Regality Club of Glasgow, the wonderfully entertaining account of 'The Old Barony Pulpit'.
In December 1913 Herbert closed his Glasgow practice and joined the firm of Graham & Hill in Newcastle. The decision to take a job so far from home was probably driven by the need for money. When the elder Honeyman died of pneumonia a few weeks later on 8 January 1914 he had only £20 4s 10d left in his account at the Union Bank and no other property or investments of any kind. An insurance policy for £1,000 provided for Anne. Honeyman was buried with his first two wives at Glasgow Necropolis; Anne gave up the lease of Minewood and left for Newcastle to live with Herbert who practised in Newcastle for the rest of his life. Honeyman's elder son John Rothes Charles emigrated to Canada in 1885 and settled at Pense, Saskatchewan. He served in the Mounted Police for 5 years but subsequently became newpaper reporter and later deputy commissioner of agriculture for the province of Saskatchewan. He finally took the post in 1908 of librarian in Regina Public Library. He died in British Columbia in August 1938. (He should not be mistaken for the John Honeyman who settled in British Columbia as stated in 'Charles Rennie Mackintosh & Co': while that book was in the press it was found that he was a nephew, the son of Honeyman's eldest brother, Patrick)
Publications:
'The Age of Glasgow Cathedral, and of the Effigy in its Crypt', Glasgow, 1854
'The Drainage of Glasgow and the Purification of the Clyde with special reference to the Ventilation of Drains', 1856
'Remarks on proposed rules for the regulation of architectural competitions', Glasgow, 1862
'Trades-unionism the blight on British industries and commerce', Glasgow, 1877
'Hindrances', Glasgow, 1883
'Open Spaces in Towns', 1883
'On the exhibiting of architectural drawings', in 'Scottish Art Review', 1889, I pp33-5
'\"Betterment\" in relation to municipal improvements', Glasgow 1897
'The Cathedral Church', in Todd, George Eyre (ed.), 'The book of Glasgow Cathedral', Glasgow, 1898
'Working-class dwellings', 'RIBA Journal', 7 April 1900, pp249-78
'The shrine of Saint Columba at Iona', 'Transactions of the Scottish Ecclesiological Society', 1906, I, pp271-5
'The old Castle Vennal of Stirling and its occupants, with the Old Brig of Stirling … With introductory chapter by John Honeyman', Stirling, 1906
'Note on the position of altars and other arrangements within the transept of Glasgow Cathedral', 'Transactions of the Scottish Ecclesiological Society', 1907, II, pp127-32
'The Old Barony Pulpit', in 'Regality Club of Glasgow', 1912
'The drainage of Glasgow', Glasgow, n.d.
'The dwellings of the poor', n.d.