A Forger's Progress

by Alasdair McGregor

  The Duke of Norfolk was and is the premier peer of England, and claims descent from Edward I. At the time of Greenway’s visit to Thornbury, the incumbent was Charles Howard, 11th Duke of Norfolk. An obituary for the duke published in the Gentleman’s Magazine described a character with a passion for both building and family history, one who would have seemed ripe for cultivation by the likes of Francis Greenway:

  [He] repaired and adorned his country-seats; he expended vast sums, though not in the best taste … he bought books and pictures; and was zealously and sedulously attentive to every thing that could illustrate the history of his own family, which he regarded with such unlimited attachment that the most remote suspicion of alliance combined with name, could always command his good offices.22

  Of course, there is no surviving evidence to confirm that Greenway and the Duke of Norfolk ever even met, but there are more fragmentary clues that possibly connect Greenway to the Howards. Between 1809 and 1811, Charles Howard’s kinsman Lord Henry Howard-Molyneux-Howard restored and re-roofed the south-west tower of Thornbury Castle.23 The timing of such work on a building still largely in ruins and just a few years after Greenway’s Royal Academy submission, seems more than mere coincidence. Circumstantially at least, it therefore seems probable that Greenway and his brothers did have a working connection to Thornbury Castle and the Howard family.

  Events surrounding Greenway’s time in London also make some level of contact with the Howards at least plausible. As Duke of Norfolk, Charles Howard was head of the College of Arms, or Heralds’ College, the ancient body charged with researching genealogies, granting arms and determining matters of precedence. He was also a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. In these positions, and through his role as Earl Marshal of England, he was steeped in all matters of aristocratic genealogy and heraldry. With such ancestral authority and personal predilections, it is unsurprising that he became a patron of one George Nayler – miniature painter, prominent genealogist, antiquarian and an officer of the Heralds’ College.

  At some time either before or during his time in London, Greenway became acquainted with the determined and energetic Nayler. Like Greenway, Nayler was a Gloucestershire man (from Stroud, north-east of Bristol) and something of a networker. Being the fifth son of a naval surgeon who died when George was only 14 did not seem to hinder the young genealogist’s career. Charles Howard became his patron, and from there Nayler became, among other appointments, genealogist of the Order of the Bath. He was made York herald in 1802, at the time Greenway was in London.

  Nayler was moving in lofty circles and was obviously a person worth knowing. As a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, he would have been well acquainted with a number of artists and architects of the day. It is only conjecture that Greenway’s introduction to Nayler came through the Duke of Norfolk or, perhaps, through Lord Henry Howard, but where else could it have come from? And why would the York herald pass the time of day with a young provincial architect if someone of influence and importance had not eased open the doors of society for him? Apart from the Howards, the only other known associates of Greenway’s who might possibly have been in a position to arrange an introduction were members of wealthy Bristol banking family the Harfords. Charles Joseph Harford was a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and therefore a potential acquaintance of Nayler’s.

  However they became acquainted, in May 1802 Nayler wrote a letter of introduction for Greenway to his friend Ozias Humphry, fellow antiquarian, genealogist and miniaturist, and highly regarded portrait painter:

  My dear Sir,

  May I again trespass on your friendly services for my friend the bearer of this who is very desirous of having an introduction to Mr Wyat [sic] for the purpose of shewing him his Architectural Drawings and in the hope that Mr Wyat may possibly serve him which I am strongly inclined to believe he will from your recommendation.

  I need not My Dear Sir repeat that any favours shewn to my friend Mr Greenaway [sic] will be considered as shewn to

  Your very much

  obliged humble S[ervan]t

  Geo Nayler24

  The ‘Mr Wyat’ of Nayler’s letter was James Wyatt, the pre-eminent English architect of the era, trained in Italy and a versatile classicist. Wyatt’s London Pantheon (now lost) was described by Horace Walpole as the ‘most beautiful edifice in England’.25 He was also a renowned exponent of the Gothic revival, reaching an extravagant apotheosis in the doomed romanticism of Fonthill Abbey in Wiltshire. He held an erroneous belief in a uniform medieval style, and his controversial ‘renovations’ of Gothic cathedrals earned him the epithet ‘destroyer’ for his disrespect of the accretions of centuries. Despite the controversy, Wyatt was elected to the Society of Antiquaries in 1797, and at the time of Greenway’s London sojourn he was surveyor-general and comptroller within the Board of Works. With their respective antiquarian proclivities, Wyatt and Humphry were well known to one another.

  Once again, however, the faint trail left by Greenway’s early life and his passage through London is lost; all that is left is supposition. There is no evidence that Humphry acted on Nayler’s request, or that Greenway ever met Wyatt on anyone’s introduction, let alone worked for him. Alternatively, if Greenway did succeed in meeting Wyatt, the surveyor-general just might have arranged employment for him at the Board of Works. Greenway’s address in New Palace Yard seems more than coincidentally close to the board’s headquarters in Little Scotland Yard, whereas Wyatt’s private offices were located in Foley Place, more than two miles away.

  One of Wyatt’s pupils was Henry Kitchen, a bricklayer’s son from Ewell in Surrey. Kitchen worked in Wyatt’s London office from 1810 until around 1813 and exhibited student works at the Royal Academy during that time. Following his employer’s death in a carriage accident, Kitchen was briefly in practice on his own at 36 St James’s Place and in 1813 exhibited plans for Ewell Castle at the academy.26

  In 1816 Kitchen emigrated to New South Wales as a free settler. There, he and Greenway were to become immediate and bitter foes, the incumbent local architect resentful of any rival. In further speculation, might it then not be too fanciful to suggest that Greenway’s implacable disdain of Kitchen stemmed, at least in part, from his own lack of success in securing the opportunities in London he would have thought his due? Wyatt took on many pupils, and a place in his office would have been a significant boost to Greenway’s career. While a brilliant designer, Wyatt was disorganised and often neglectful of his numerous private clients, his own office and his public responsibilities. Sir John Summerson described Wyatt as ‘apparently destitute of any convictions whatever, moral or artistic’,27 while the fervent Gothic-revivalist Augustus Pugin said that ‘all that is vile, cunning and rascally is included in the term Wyatt’.28 One suspects that Wyatt, and the ambitious, opinionated and quarrelsome Greenway might not have hit it off much past a first meeting. Thus a seed of jealousy and resentment at thwarted ambition may have been planted in London only to erupt on the distant shores of New South Wales.

  Whatever happened in London – whether Greenway prospered or failed to thrive in the office of John Nash, fell out with his master, met or worked with James Wyatt or in the Board of Works – any dreams of a career in the great metropolis seem to have come to naught. By 1805, Francis Greenway was back in provincial Bristol, working in partnership with two of his brothers, Olive and John.

  A ‘RUINOUS ARCHITECTURAL TRIUMPH’

  On 26 January 1805 – by coincidence the seventeenth anniversary of the entry of the First Fleet into distant Port Jackson, New South Wales – the three Greenway brothers announced in the Bristol press that they were open for business:

  MESSRS GREENWAY

  Beg leave to inform their friends and the public that they have opened a room and a yard at No. 7 Limekiln Street opposite the Riding School … All orders for marble monuments, chimney pieces, and every kind of ornamental stone work shall be carefully attended to, and executed in the most artistlike manner. Desi
gns for houses, lodge gates, and every part of domestic architecture may be seen at the office drawn by F. Greenway – who takes this opportunity of offering his services to the Public in the capacity of Architect, Statuary, and Landscape-Gardiner [sic].1

  In his own eccentric style, Francis then took the readers of Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal through an explanation of the decoration above the doorway to the Greenway office. Perhaps he thought prospective clients would come and inspect this tribute to the Ancients and find the Greenways agreeably steeped in classicism:

  N.B. The Bass-Relief [sic] over the Doric Door, is intended to represent Minerva giving the Plan of the Pantheon … to Architecture; Mechanics is next to him as a necessary attendant; the boy on the left hand of Minerva is drawing a building, while Sculpture is modelling the famous torso, so highly admired by MICHAEL ANGELO.

  Orders received at Downend as usual.

  The move to Limekiln Street (or Lime Kiln Road as it is today), on the south-west edge of Bristol and near the River Avon, now placed the Greenway brothers close to the scene of much of their ongoing work.2

  Two miles to the west of the centre of the city, on high ground blessed with sweeping views over breezy Clifton Down, the Cumberland Basin and the gorge of the River Avon, lies the township of Clifton. Mentioned in the Domesday Book as Clistone, a ‘hillside settlement’, Clifton is one of the oldest and most affluent parts of Bristol, its early wealth deriving from the tobacco and slave trades. During the 18th century Clifton’s fashionable appeal took another turn as the Roman passion for ‘taking the waters’ was at last revived, and nearby Hotwells, with its ‘salutary spring, which pale-eyed suppliants drink, and soon flies pain’, was promoted as a spa town to rival Bath.3

  In the 1780s, Clifton’s own spring on Sion Hill was tapped, a pump room and baths built, and the waters piped off to 300 nearby residences, adding greatly to the area’s appeal. Several decades later, Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s Clifton Suspension Bridge – a wonder of the industrial age – would straddle the great void of the Avon Gorge and link fast-growing Bristol with neighbouring Somerset. But to late-18th-century sensibilities, Clifton was simply an increasingly fashionable place for refreshment and renewal. In his 1815 edition of A Guide to All the Watering and Sea-bathing Places, editor John Feltham described Clifton as ‘this beautiful village, which, for the purity and salubrity of the air, has been denominated the Montpelier [sic] of England’.4 In the flavour of the time, the Clifton waters were said to be a cure for a host of ailments, including ‘all cases of visceral obstructions … hypochondria and female complaints’.

  To accommodate well-to-do Bristolians, as well as the holiday trippers and health tourists come to breathe deeply of the fresh coastal air and take the salutary waters, a speculative building boom erupted. The south-facing slopes overlooking the Avon were soon transected with arcs and crescents. Each was walled with terrace houses, some growing spectacularly from the ramparts of the gorge, others reaching for the view across the contours of the hillside.

  But according to Bristol historian Timothy Mowl, the construction of the Clifton terraces became ‘one of the strangest episodes in English building history’.5 In this serendipitous agglomeration of buildings, the three- and four-storey terraces were set ‘like a Tibetan lamasery to face the warm south’, yet no individual architect took precedence or had their efforts even recorded. Instead, as Mowl enthuses:

  This first surge of Clifton development was a perfect instance of classical architecture working to a Romantic effect and of orderly units laid down in exhilarating chaos … Sunken paths walled down through woodlands, side-slanted roads … vertiginous gardens and massive arcades striding above headlong lawns, they all come together to create an urban experience only a stage removed from the original wilderness …

  But as soon as the boom reached its peak, the Revolutionary War of 1793–1802 put paid to progress. As a major British port, Bristol feared an invasion by the French, and speculative optimism quickly turned to bankruptcy and despair. Feltham’s guidebook noted that ‘The two Crescents [Prince of Wales and the Lower] were originally begun in an unfortunate moment by some speculators, who imagined that they should thereby reap a golden harvest; but the project failed, owing to the late war, and they were ruined’. From 1793 onwards the terraces of Clifton remained in various states of abandonment and disrepair; some were roofed and enclosed, while others remained mere shells. Just a few were completed and occupied.

  The new century and the short-lived Treaty of Amiens saw confidence and optimism return to Bristol. Although first mooted in 1792, a large hotel and assembly rooms in Clifton had so far failed to materialise. A second scheme, proposed in 1806 by wealthy Huguenot John Lewis (Jean Louis) Auriol, now received widespread support. On 16 May of that year, the local nobility and gentry met at the Sion Hill Pump-Room to consider Auriol’s proposal. The building was to be funded by public subscription and would cater to a growing spa clientele, as well as provide a meeting place for the Bristolian elite. The meeting settled on a site in The Mall looking south-west across a long strip of public garden with a ‘commanding view of Leigh Down and the rocks and woods of Ashton sloping to the Avon’.6 A mere six weeks later, on 28 June 1806, the following announcement appeared in Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal:

  The Foundation for a new Assembly Room is already begun at the East end of the Mall at Clifton; the design by Mr Greenway, architect of this city, does great credit to his abilities, and will be a handsome public building, and will do honour to the liberality and taste of those who had … subscribed to it.7

  Assembly rooms were the fashionable hub of Georgian- and Regency-era social life in provincial centres such as Bristol and Bath. They were the venue for balls, concerts, card games, public gatherings, lectures and the like. During the social whirl of the season’s balls they were also the backdrops for concerted matchmaking, where chaperoned young ladies could meet the eligible men of the city. They were a stage set made for the novels of Jane Austen or Georgette Heyer.

  Suddenly, into this world of possibility strode the obscure young architect, still in his twenties. The seminal moment in Francis Greenway’s life had surely arrived. By January 1809 and about two years after commencement, the roofing of the Clifton Hotel and Assembly Rooms was complete and the building fully enclosed; if successfully taken to completion, it would assuredly lay a firm foundation for Greenway’s career and help propel him and his brothers, as the project’s builders, to modest prosperity.

  Facing The Mall, and with two long wings set either side of a dramatic temple-fronted centre pavilion, the building’s dressed freestone façade is skilfully modulated, giving it a gravitas of which the architect’s socially savvy clients would no doubt have readily approved. In the imposing centrepiece of Greenway’s composition, six attached Ionic columns rise through two storeys from atop a rusticated basement arcade to a projecting attic floor, which is in turn capped off by a prominent triangular pediment. A carved shield in the tympanum, said to be the crest of John Lewis Auriol, completes the composition.

  The interiors of the Clifton Hotel and Assembly Rooms were completed by late 1811. Excited reports of the November opening augured ‘an important era in the annals of fashion’, yet neither Francis nor his brothers were to enjoy the accolades upon the building’s opening, or cement their place in Clifton’s social order. Instead, the only professional mentioned in the press was one ‘Mr [Joseph] Kay’.8

  It seems that from early 1809 onwards, the sunlit days of Francis Greenway’s professional youth had been clouded by debt and despondency. After an unspecified dispute with John Lewis Auriol, the Greenway brothers were forced to relinquish control of the project. Undoubtedly, the dispute was precipitated or inflamed by the builders’ insolvency. Joseph Kay summarily replaced Francis Greenway as Auriol’s architect.

  The decorative finishes – the painted sienna-red faux marble columns; the mahogany couches and velvet brocades; the tasteful Tower-of-the-Winds column c
apitals and decorative friezes; the Greek-revival statuary – all had what Timothy Mowl described as ‘that unmistakable Regency air of skin-deep affluence’.9 And, covering Greenway’s architectural bones, it must be assumed that this interior ‘skin’ was all Joseph Kay’s.

  At the time of the assembly rooms’ opening in November 1811, Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal published a detailed description of the interior layout, finishes and furnishings:

  From the Vestibule of the principal Entrance, the approach is by the Card Room; and from hence [?] the effect is very striking of the vista of the brilliant scenery that immediately presents itself of the adjoining ballroom, which is seen through an extensive opening and double screen of verde-antique columns; and of the tea room beyond, through a corresponding opening on the opposite side of that room.10

  Feltham’s Guide for 1815 – illustrated with an elevation of the building to The Mall – described the hotel and assembly rooms as ‘spacious and elegant’. He noted approvingly that they had been ‘finished by their spirited proprietor, Mr Auriol, at an incredible expense’. No original floor plan of the building survives, but Feltham’s description gives something of the flavour of the hotel’s interiors. It combined ‘every accommodation for both families and individuals, even to sets of apartments, with drawing rooms, a coffee room, with dinner tables for small parties or single gentlemen … a shop for pastry and confectionary [sic], with an adjoining room for soups, fruits and ices – hot, cold, and vapour-baths’.11 There was even a ‘take-away’ option where ‘dinners or single dishes, either in the English or French style of cookery, are sent out of the house to any part of Clifton’.