Peter Frederick Anson was born Frederick Charles Anson at 32 South Parade, Southsea, on 22 August 1889, the elder son of Rear-Admiral Charles Eustace Anson who for a time had been in charge of the Royal Yacht and was a collateral descendant of the 18th century admiral. His mother was Evelyn Ross who came of the family of Ross of Rossie, near Montrose, one of the reasons Anson settled there in later years. She had been born on Mull and was described by her son as 'highly strung and artistic', characteristics he himself inherited. It was only in 1924 after he became a Franciscan that the forename 'Peter' was adopted and 'Charles' was dropped.
Anson was brought up on the Isle of Wight from 1898 and educated at a prep school there, holidays being spent with his mother's family on the Moray coast. In 1902 he was sent to Wixenford, but the original intention of sending him to Eton or Harrow was not implemented because of an attack of rheumatic fever, and the remainder of his school education was entrusted to tutors, the family being based at Bournemouth from 1905-08 and thereafter at Portlland.
From 1908 until 1910 Anson studied architecture at the Architectural Association in Tufton Street, London where he became enthralled with the life of A W N Pugin and his twin passions for architecture and the sea. Design and draughtsmanship came easily to him but he had no patience with mathematics and had a horror of examinations. By that period he was already subscribing to 'Pax', the quarterly journal of Aelred Carlyle's Benedictine community at Caldey Island, Pembrokeshire, and in November 1910 he became a novitiate there.
The Caldey community had been founded in 1906 by Aelred Carlyle with money lent by Bryan Burstall. His original architect was the priest-architect John Cyril Hawes, also a product of the Architectural Association and a follower of J D Sedding. Hawes restored the medieval church buildings, and built new ones, including a guest house. In that same year, 1906, he produced a masterplan for the island, including an abbey with a tall-spired church, but in 1907 Hawes left to commence a pilgrimage as an Anglican Franciscan, leaving first for the Bahamas and then Western Australia where he became an important Catholic church architect. Although he had left before Anson arrived at Caldey, they kept in touch, Anson subsequently writing his biography, 'The Hermit of Cat Island', in 1957.
After Hawes's departure Carlyle turned to John Coates Carter, a product of the Royal Academy Schools who had succeeded to the practice of John Pritchard. On his arrival at Caldey Anson became involved in the building of the 'temporary' abbey church, the abbot's house, domestic chapel and the 'temporary' monastery which was to have become a preparatory school, all designed by Carter in 1910-13. The permanent monastery was now to have been a Durham-like structure on the cliffs at Paul Jones Bay, for which Anson made a perspective.
The original inspiration of Carlyle's Anglo-Catholicism with its white-washed walls, colourful English altars and simple life-style had been Percy Dearmer and his Parson's Handbook (later described as 'British Museum Religion') and the publications of the Alcuin Club. But in February 1911 the more extreme Anglo-Catholics founded the Society of SS Peter and Paul, the concept being a 'resumption of arrested development' to what the Church of England would have become if the Reformation had not occurred i.e. the seventeenth and eighteenth century continental baroque of their principal designer Martin Travers. In the June 1912 issue of 'Pax', Carlyle wrote that the Society would 'lead on, in God's good time, to Corporate Reunion with the Catholic Churches of Eastern and Western Christendom'. For Carlyle 'God's good time' was 5 March of the following year when he and twenty-two of his monks, including Anson, were reconciled with Rome and received into the main Benedictine order which reappointed Carlyle abbot in October 1914. Anson then had to recommence his novitiate but neurasthenia intervened. In January 1914 he was moved to Llanthony and spent time in several religious houses before returning to Caldey. In September 1915 he left again first for the chaplaincy at Portsmouth, followed by a spell with the French Benedictines at Farnborough, but he soon returned to Caldey. There he became librarian, taking a break in the summer of 1919 to study the art of topographical and architectural illustration at Chipping Camden under the great Frederick Landseer Griggs who had been received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1912.
Anson took over the Apostleship of Prayer in 1917 and his time at Caldey became increasingly concentrated on managing the welfare of navymen and seamen. In 1919 he again suffered from neurasthenia and spent time at Fort Augustus where he became acquainted with Reginald Fairlie and in 1920 he founded the Apostleship of the Sea, replacing the Apostleship of Prayer and other related Catholic missions on a world-wide basis. It took him to the Moray Coast and as far afield as France and Belgium.
Carlyle left Caldey as a result of financial problems in 1921 and was replaced by the less sympathetic Dom Wilfrid Upson. Shortly thereafter Anson's health again broke down and he recuperated drawing and painting on the Moray Forth, holding his first exhibition in London in 1922. During this period he also made contact with Eric Gill and his Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic, first at Ditchling in Sussex and later at the deserted monastery of Capel y Ffin to which Gill moved the Guild in 1924. He made his first visit to Rome in 1922, staying at the Scots College for two months and receiving the approval of Pius XI for his work on the Apostleship of the Sea; but his planned ordination as a priest with special responsibility for seafarers was not implemented because of his uncertain health. A return visit to Rome was made in 1923 and after a series of European travels he spent some months with the French Benedictines at Quarr Abbey. Throughout that time Anson was still linked with Caldey but in June 1924 Upson lost patience with his long absences and ended his association with that community completely.
In the same year, 1924, Anson resigned as Secretary to the Apostleship of the Sea and determined to make his living as an artist; and on 2 October of that year he was admitted to the Tertiary Order of St Francis, adopting its brown habit instead of the white one of the Benedictines. In this move he followed the example of Hawes who had been admitted twelve years earlier in October 1912. Anson then made further tours of Tuscany, initially as the guest of Thomas Croft-Fraser, and then as a guest in various Italian friaries, particularly San Damiano in Assisi. These travels resulted in a successful exhibition of topographical and architectural watercolours at the Challenge Gallery in London in 1926 and the publication of 'The Pilgrim's Guide to Franciscan Italy' in 1927. These were followed by a further London exhibition of architectural drawings in Umbria, Tuscany and the Pyrenees in October 1928 and of fishing boats at the Foyle Gallery in May 1930.
Throughout this period Anson had no very permanent base and no regular income. In 1926 he made a three-month voyage by cargo boat round the Mediterranean and across the Atlantic to Vancouver where Carlyle had become a prison chaplain, returning in March 1927 when a regular allowance from his father allowed him to set up in Portsmouth and undertake a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. On his return he settled for a time at 3 Hill street, Glasgow, moving to 12 Park Crescent, Gravesend in Kent in 1930. During that period he published 'Fishing Boats and Fisher Folk on the East Coast of Scotland' (1930), 'The Mariners of Brittany' (1931), 'The Quest for Solitude' (1932) and 'A Pilgrim Artist in Palestine' (1934), all based on the drawings he had made over the previous few years, but a much larger work, 'The Fishermen of Britain' begun in 1932 was not pursued by its publisher.
In 1933 characteristically on a sudden impulse, Anson bought a horse and gypsy caravan with which to make a Griggs-like pilgrimage of the medieval monastic sites in Britain, during the course of which he settled for about a year in Walsingham, although his home base from that year was Howard House, Northfleet. At Walsingham he became involved with James and Lillian Dagless as design partner for their church craftwork and decorating business. Anson's travels at that time resulted in the illustrations for Anthony Rowe's 'The Brown Caravan', Anson's own 'The Caravan Pilgrim' in 1938 and much later 'A Roving Recluse' in 1946.
In 1936 Anson moved to Banffshire, initially to Portsoy, then to 9 Braeheads in Banff, and from 1938, 2 Low Shore, Macduff, a low white fisher house at the end of the harbour which he named as Harbour Head. The purpose of this move was to be near the Catholic archive at Preshome for researching 'The Catholic Church in Modern Scotland', published in 1937, but it was also related to his continuing interest in the Apostleship of the Sea. At Macduff he kept open house, creating a chapel in the attic in 1946. Banffshire had remained a Catholic stronghold since the Reformation , and although the Brethern element in the fishing community was somewhat suspicious, in Patrick Nuttgens's words ;' Fishermen and boys, especially those suffering from some sort of disability…crowded into the cottage so that it was always full of life and laughter. The kettle was always boiling and ready for tea. It was a simple life, austere and unpretentious'. Among those boys was Campbell Cowie who had been discharged from the navy with cancer of pituitary gland. He was a skilled modelmaker and made a significant contribution to Anson's best-selling book 'How to Draw Ships', published in1941, but he died later that year.
In the course of the Scottish researches Anson made many friends, especially among those interested in Scottish nationalism. Among them were the authors Compton Mackenzie, also a Catholic convert, Eric Linklater and Neil Gunn, and the architect, Ian G Lindsay, for whose restoration of Iona Abbey Anson made the perspectives and Cowie madder the model. Another was the stained glass artist J E Nuttgens whose son Patrick later used his cottage as a base for sketching while studying architecture in the mid-1950s, sleeping in a box bed under the stair.
The war interrupted Anson's career as author and architectural perspectivist. Late in 1939 or early in 1940 he bought a fishing boat which he named the Stella Maris. This he operated commercially until September 1945 when it was wrecked in a collision with a collier. He did not buy another, resuming his previous career as author and artist, and briefly revived his links with Caldey. Not long afterwards he also renewed his association with those Caldey monks who had been absorbed into the monastery at Prinknash and had resettled at Pluscarden which the 4th Marquis of Bute had given to the Benedictines in 1948. It was at least partly through Anson's influence that the commission for the adaptation and restoration of the Abbey went to Lindsay, who was a high church Episcopalian and certainly through his intervention that the monks left the Lindsay practice for the Presbyterian Murray Jack after Lindsay's death in 1966. Anson's close interest in the project is recorded in a booklet 'The Story of Pluscarden Priory' published in 1948 and a larger work 'A Monastery in Moray' in 1959.
In 1948 Anson's association with the Daglesses and with Lindsay resulted in his first major work on church design 'Churches: their Plan and Furnishing' published in the USA in 1948, a pioneer article on the work of Sir Ninian Comper published by the Scottish Ecclesiological Society in 1950 and 'The Call of the Cloister' a history of Anglican monasticism which appears in 1953. These were followed in 1957 by 'The Hermit of Cat Island', a biography of Hawes, written by correspondence with him and 'Abbot Extraordinary', a memoir of Carlyle published 1958.
In 1952 Anson sold Harbour Head for what he acknowledged were 'unconvincing' reasons and moved to 13a Low Shore where he cared fort a polio victim, Alex John McBey, and provided a base for Patrick Nuttgens. But in 1958 he left Macduff for Ramsgate Abbey, a move probably associated with the preparation of 'Fashions in Church Furnishing 1840-1940' a large and extremely well researched book published by the Faith Press in 1960. It entailed a huge programme of travel and drawing and he ended up seriously ill, convalescing in the ground floor of Ian and Maysie Lindsay's house at Houston, Uphall, for much of 1960 following a return to Portsoy in the previous year.
In 1962 Anson again felt the call of the sea and was for a short time in the care of the Montrose newpaperman and published Jack Smith who was then reconstructing a house in Ferryden for his own occupation, Anson taking a tiny end-of-terrace first floor flat reached by a forestair close at 3 King Street. Anson lived there in a frail but hyperactive condition throughout the 1960s, David Walker being instructed by Ian Lindsay to keep an eye on him which he did most Fridays on his return journeys from Aberdeenshire to Dundee. In his tiny cabin-like rooms at King Street, crammed with books and typescripts and still with a constantly boiling kettle, Anson continued to write on church architecture in 'The Building of Churches', 'Bishops at Large' and 'The Art of the Church' (with Iris Conlay), all published in 1964.
Lindsay's illness in 1965-66 and his death in August of the latter year was a matter of great concern to Anson: he was acutely aware of how much he owed him. He concluded that it would be better for Lindsay's soul if he too were reconciled with Rome and he contacted Father McRoberts to arrange it. By that time Lindsay was only semi-conscious and if he was received into the Roman Catholic Church his family were unaware of it, his funeral taking place in St John's Episcopal Church in Edinburgh.
In 1964-66 the catholic hierarchy recommended Anson for some minor honour, but to its astonishment Paul VI made him a knight of the Order of St Gregory in recognition of his writing, an event which gave him enormous pleasure. In 1967 he was offered and initially accepted the post of curator of the Scottish Fisheries Museum which had been restored by Murray Jack, but withdrew before taking up the post. He remained at Ferryden until 1970 when declining health brought about his abrupt and unannounced return to Caldey, most of his Scottish friends then losing touch with him. Eventually the Benedictines at Nunraw in East Lothian took him into their care. He died at St Raphael's Nursing Home on 10 July 1975 and was buried at Nunraw. His death was little noticed but a belated obituary by his friend Tudor Edwards in 'The Times'.
Anson's actual building activities were confined to assistance at Caldey and his design work to the Daglasses' Wasingham business which is inadequately documented. His work for Lindsay in the late 1930s, 1940s and the 1950s was primarily presentational although he probably did contribute ideas, particularly in respect of furnishing. The influence of his book 'Fashions in Church Furnishings' was, however, extensive especially after it became widely available in the Studio Vista edition of 1965.
In his earlier years Anson was tall and clean-shaven with tonsured hair but in later years he was very slightly built and wiry with a white pointed beard. Only once, in 1962, did the writer see him in Franciscan habit: in later years he was invariably dressed in black fisherman's clothes with a polo-necked jersey over which he wore a reifer jacket in inclement weather. Although highly articulate every sentence began with a stammer which sometimes recurred when he got over-excited as ideas and memories flowed from his mind. There was a gentle sense of mischief and a wry sense of humour in his nature which together with the piercing twinkle in his eye made one as Patrick Nuttgens observed 'never quite sure as to whether he was serious or joking'. As a draughtsman he owed much to Griggs and something to Hawes but his style was more linear and usually without shadow, reminiscent of Schinkel's perspective drawings of which he may not have been aware. His watercolours tended towards pale flat washed with a calm distinctive quality which one reviewer likened to J R Cozens. Some four hundred of his drawings and watercolours are held by Buckie Museum.
Publications:
The Caravan Pilgrim (1938)
The Benedictines of Caldey (1940)
Harbour Head: Maritime Memories (1945)
A Roving Recluse: More Memories (1946)
The Apostleship of the Sea in England and Wales (1946)
The Hermit of Cat Island (1957)
Abbot Extraordinary (1958)