The Architectural Profession in Scotland, 1840-1940: Background to the Biographical Notes
David M Walker
The research carried out for the DSA has significantly widened
our understanding of the Scottish architectural profession in the period 1840-1940.
This section aims to provide a wider context to the events described in the
biographical notes.
The DSA's commencement date of 1840 has been determined by
the terminal date of Sir Howard Colvin's Dictionary of British Architects
1600-1840, but it also marks the founding of the Institute of Architects
in Scotland as a counterpart to the Institute of British Architects - from
1866 the Royal Institute (RIBA) - which had been formed six years earlier in
1834. Despite its title the latter was for its first forty years a very English
body, William Burn, Thomas Hamilton (both admitted 1835), Archibald Simpson
(admitted 1838) and David Bryce (admitted 1845) being the only Fellows to practise
in Scotland for the first twenty years of its existence. But the Scottish Institute
foundered within a year as a result of an internal power struggle, and was
not re-founded until 1850 under the slightly changed title of the Architectural
Institute of Scotland. This second Institute attracted virtually all the leading
architects in Edinburgh and Glasgow and included lay members (i.e. clients)
and associate members (related professors, decorators and tradesmen). Shortly
after its inception there was a move - which never came to fruition - to found
a chair in architecture so that the profession had a similar standing to law
and medicine. Perhaps with that higher status in view a small number of architects
had already attended university either prior to or in parallel with the usual
five-year articled apprenticeship. This trend was first noticeable in Aberdeen
where William Smith and the brothers William and James Henderson attended Marischal
College in the 1830s: of the architects who attended university in the 1840s,
some at least originally had other professions in view - law in the case of
John Dick Peddie and the church in the case of John Honeyman. But in the case
of at least two others, David MacGibbon and Charles George Hood Kinnear, university
does seem to have been a conscious preparation for a career in architecture,
the difference being, perhaps, that both came from extremely well-off families.
Most architects became articled apprentices at the age of fifteen or sixteen.
Predictably those in the cities, and particularly those in offices with good
libraries, were best placed for their future careers. Part-time classes in
applied art had been available at the Trustees' Academy in Edinburgh since
1760. They were provided at the Government Schools of Design from 1844 onwards
under the aegis of the Department of Practical Art, the Trustees' Academy becoming
one of them in 1845. Their departments of design taught architecture, geometry,
perspective, modelling, fresco and encaustic painting, all by a single master
with one assistant. In 1858, after the Department of Science and Art took over,
the Schools of Design became Schools of Art. These schools also taught drawing,
the design of ornament and the decorative arts, and presentation rather than
architecture. Classes in the technical aspects of construction and services
were available at the numerous mechanics' institutes (the most important being
that in Glasgow which taught architecture from 1855-1856 onwards) and at the
Edinburgh School of Arts, founded in 1821 and absorbed in 1824 by the Watt
Institute which in turn became the Heriot-Watt College in 1885. References
to these will be found in the biographical notes for the earlier architects,
although only in the case of the Trustees' Academy is the record of those who
attended complete.
In early to mid-Victorian times the architectural profession in Scotland was
well trained and well read but fairly insular. Most of the leading Scottish
architects of that period - David Bryce, David Cousin, Charles Wilson, Thomas
Mackenzie, Alexander Thomson, John Dick Peddie and his partner Charles George
Hood Kinnear, James Maitland Wardrop, and James Boucher - never sought experience
south of the Border. Continental travel, as in the cases of David Rhind (who
had some London experience with the elder Pugin), James Hamilton, Wilson, Boucher,
and Peddie and Kinnear was seen as the key to professional success. Backed
up by very cosmopolitan libraries, they did not feel the need for London experience
when the Greek revival work of the previous generation was comparable to the
best work then being done in London. They proved excellent teachers for the
next generation, not only in Scotland but also in the dominions. William Hay
from John Henderson's office settled in Toronto; Thomas Turnbull from David
Bryce's in Wellington; Robert Arthur Lawson from John Lessels' and David Ross
from Thomas Mackenzie's in Dunedin; Andrew Davidson and George Henderson from
John Henderson and David Cousin's in Geelong; and Francis Drummond Greville
Stanley from Brown & Wardrop's had an extremely distinguished career in
Brisbane.
From the early 1840s there was an increasing trend towards obtaining experience
with a leading practice south of the Border - William Burn's London office
in the case of David MacGibbon and John Honeyman (the former made a Grand Tour
as well); Charles Barry in the case of George Penrose Kennedy; George Gilbert
Scott in the case of James Matthews; John Dobson of Newcastle in the case of
Campbell Douglas; and William White and John Loughborough Pearson in the case
of William Leiper. The main advantage of London experience was a far greater
expertise in Gothic design than could be achieved in Scotland, and in the case
of Leiper a more fashionable approach to interior work which embraced the Anglo-Japanese.
It helped win competitions, particularly for churches, and launched the careers
of Honeyman and Leiper very quickly indeed. But for some an important advantage
of being in London was the prospect of attending the classes in architecture
at University College under Thomas Leverton Donaldson or in construction at
King's College under Robert Kerr, who had been a pupil of John Smith in Aberdeen.
Successful attendance at these courses resulted in a very few Scots being admitted
ARIBA rather than FRIBA, the earliest (1842) being William Smith of Aberdeen,
who had taken Donaldson's course. At both Colleges the value of the courses
was limited by the ruling that design was not an examinable subject. For that
aspect of architecture there was the Department of Practical Art's School of
Design, based first at Somerset House from 1837 to 1852 and then at Marlborough
House from 1852 to 1857, the architectural instructors being the sculptor Alfred
Stevens, the architect Charles James Richardson, and, briefly, the German refugee
Gottfried Semper from 1852 until 1855. After the Department of Practical Art
was restructured as the Department of Science and Art in 1853, the Schools
were moved in 1857 to the South Kensington Museum where they remained until
they became the Royal College of Art in 1897. As set out above, the consequent
restructuring of the provincial Schools of Design as Schools of Art came a
year later in 1858.
While the teaching at South Kensington was perhaps at a higher level than at
some of its provincial outposts, it was the subject of a great deal of criticism
in the architectural journals, partly because of its close association with
the Royal Engineers and partly because the inflexibility of the South Kensington
system prevented the Schools of Art from attempting to teach at a higher level.
From 1870 the classes at South Kensington were seen as more of a prep school
for the Royal Academy School of Architecture where the Ecole des Beaux-Arts-trained
Richard Phené Spiers had been appointed master and where the academician
architects were visitors. It thus represented a much stronger inducement to
get a job in London. As is already well known, many of the Scots in London
in the 1870s and 1880s were assistants of Campbell Douglas who found a place
with his former partner John James Stevenson; and from Stevenson's a few made
their way to the offices of even more distinguished architects, such as William
Eden Nesfield in the case of George Washington Browne. Some, like William Flockhart
and James MacLaren, stayed in London to seek their fortune there, albeit with
predominantly Scottish clients; others, like Browne, came home bringing the
Stevenson and Nesfield idiom with them. But Stevenson's was not the only leading
office in which the Scots found a place: John More Dick Peddie, like Robert
Rowand Anderson and William Forrest Salmon before him, obtained an assistant's
post with George Gilbert Scott; Duncan McNaughtan one with Scott's pupil William
Henry Crossland; Hew Montgomerie Wardrop one with George Edmund Street; Thomas
Lennox Watson one with Alfred Waterhouse; and William Laidlaw Carruthers one
with Ernest George. As some distinguished Scottish architects - notably Thomas
Leadbetter (who briefly exhibited at the Royal Academy) - never joined the
RIBA, the record in the DSA will not be complete. Further research in the records
of the Royal Academy Schools is required.
The classes at the Royal Academy Schools were still only an adjunct to experience
as an assistant in one of the leading London offices and Spiers had at least
some misgivings about exposing his students to the conflicting ideologies of
the visiting academicians. In or about 1871 he advised John James Burnet to
seek a full-time education at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts as he himself had done.
Burnet distinguished himself there and his Diplôme du Gouvernement ensured
his admission as ARIBA in 1881. From 1880, beginning with his assistant and
future partner John Archibald Campbell, a steady trickle of Scots followed
him to the Ecole and to the atelier of Jean-Louis Pascal. Virtually all of
them came from well-off families and had a link of some kind with the Burnet
office: the only one who had to save up to go there was Robert Douglas Sandilands,
the son of a Lesmahagow joiner, who entered the atelier of the Ecole's theorist
Julien Guadet rather than Pascal's. Not all of these products of the Ecole
had successful careers: the DSA has shown that there were rather more Scots
élèves than hitherto realised, and that a few still went to the
Ecole long after the reorganisation of architectural education in Scotland
under Ecole-trained professors had made a sojourn in Paris less obviously advantageous
than it had been.
As late as the early 1870s there were still only two Fellows of the RIBA in
Scotland - David Bryce in Edinburgh and William Mackison (admitted 1865), a
Stirling architect and engineer who became burgh engineer of Dundee in 1868:
it was probably one of the main reasons for his appointment. But in 1874 Robert
Rowand Anderson in Edinburgh and John Honeyman in Glasgow were admitted. The
latter had retained good connections in London through Burn's nephew John Macvicar
Anderson and, as the sole representative of one of the largest provincial institutes
in Britain, was made a council member after only two years as a Fellow. Over
the next five years (1876-81) he recruited at least one partner from all the
leading Glasgow practices, with the single exception of James Boucher's. Anderson
did not recruit with the same zeal and the more senior members of the profession,
including the City Architect Robert Morham, kept their distance. The Edinburgh
members of the RIBA were thus nearly all younger architects who had passed
the qualifying exam and had been elected Associates, beginning with Thomas
Purves Marwick in 1882-83. These early candidates for the qualifying exam were
at least partly influenced by the planned linking of the qualifying exam to
the proposed Architects and Surveyors Registration Bill, for which a self-appointed
body, the Architects' and Surveyors' Registration Committee, had been campaigning
for some years, and which the Society of Architects was founded to promote
in 1884. It was a breakaway body of architects dissatisfied with the Institute
and the status of Associates in particular: John More Dick Peddie must have
agreed with its aims as he joined it.
The Institute's progress towards a professional examination
had indeed been slow. It introduced a voluntary professional examination in
1860 but the first candidates did not sit until 1863 and interest in it remained
at a low level. Nineteen years later, in 1882, the RIBA passed a byelaw requiring
all candidates for Associateship to sit the exam, but this was not embodied
in a supplemental charter until 1887. As the exam at first had to be sat in
London and lasted a week, it was both expensive and unpopular, but Honeyman
later succeeded in making it possible to sit it in Glasgow. Although the number
of candidates remained relatively low, the Scottish architects were generally
in favour of registration in principle, but after the Registration Bill of
1891 proposed to make the title of architect dependent on passing the qualifying
exam, some of the most distinguished architects in Britain, including Richard
Norman Shaw and Robert Rowand Anderson, presented a memorial to the RIBA Council
stating that the art of architecture could not be assessed by such an examination
and that, by setting the same hallmark on the surveyor and the architect, the
Institute would further divorce architecture from the arts of painting and
sculpture and from the craft of building. Although the much-respected Alfred
Waterhouse was then President, the memorialists resigned from the Institute.
They published their views in Architecture, a Profession or an Art?,
edited by Norman Shaw and Thomas Graham Jackson, but to the provincial architect
and civil engineer this divisive issue was, in the words of Charles Ower in
Dundee, 'the Practical Architects versus Fancy Men and Faddists'.
The initial willingness of the Scottish architects to contemplate registration
with a recommendation that Scotland should be a separate district, was probably
influenced by the fact that Scotland no longer had any central institute. In
1858 the Glasgow members of the Architectural Institute made their dissatisfaction
plain in a confrontation with the Institute's secretary, their main cause of
complaint being that it was too Edinburgh-orientated with its library in David
MacGibbon's office. Later that year the Glasgow Architectural Society was founded
with the object of establishing an outstanding library in Glasgow, open to
draughtsmen and apprentices as well as principals. Although its driving force
Alexander Thomson did not intend it to happen, this new Society resulted in
the Scottish profession becoming polarised. In December of the same year, 1858,
the Edinburgh draughtsmen and apprentices formed the Edinburgh Architectural
Association on the model of the London one as a self-help educational body
and duly established a work class committee. From 1862 it too began to build
up a library separate from that of the Architectural Institute.
These developments caused the members of the Architectural Institute to conclude
that a restructuring of the several professional bodies was inevitable. As
Glasgow had lost interest in the Institute, resulting in it becoming virtually
an Edinburgh-based body, in 1862 David MacGibbon proposed that it be amalgamated
with the Edinburgh Architectural Association, a merger duly implemented in
March 1863. Although the Edinburgh Association survived in that form as a body
for both principals and draughtsmen, the Glasgow society did not. In 1868 the
leading Glasgow principals found it necessary to create another body, the Glasgow
Institute of Architects, to deal with fee scales and other regulatory matters,
its members putting the letters IA after their names on their writing paper
and in the Post Office Directories. Two years later, in 1870, the Glasgow Architectural
Society became the architectural section of the Glasgow Philosophical Society,
its magnificent library surviving intact until the 1960s when it was regrettably
sold. In 1884 the Dundee architects formed the Dundee Institute of Architects,
the catalyst being the standardisation of schedules of quantities; its original
title was the Dundee Institute of Architecture, Science and Art (a very South
Kensington concept) and it included the applied sciences, the other Fine Arts,
and an associate membership of lay members, very much on the model of the old
Architectural Institute. It too began to build up a library and for a time
it had its own premises. In 1891 these bodies became 'allied societies' affiliated
to the RIBA. Few of the members of these allied societies were also members
of the RIBA, but their presidents - if they were Fellows - had an ex officio
seat on the RIBA Council, a development which probably hastened the founding
of the Aberdeen Society of Architects in 1899. It too became an allied society.
Although the Glasgow Institute had unsuccessfully proposed a merger of the
Scottish allied societies as a single Scottish Institute in 1897, these developments
brought the Scottish profession into a closer relationship with the RIBA and
the numbers of well-established architects seeking Fellowship grew after 1900,
beginning with Hippolyte Blanc in 1901.