Along the way, much of the lobbying for preservation came, naturally enough, from bodies such as the Royal Australian Historical Society. Claiming ‘widespread and enthusiastic’ public support for the cause, the society’s president, GD Blaxland, wrote to the Sydney Morning Herald as the postwar debate gathered pace:
The Hyde Park Barracks is more than a genuine Georgian building exhibiting in the elegant simplicity of its faultless proportions the good taste of early colonial architecture. It possesses national significance in the story of Australian social legislation, of architectural art, and building skill … [The building] is a monument to Macquarie as the father of Australia’s progressive social policy, to Greenway our pioneer in architectural art, master builder, town planner, and democrat, and to the spirit of this country’s enlightened social tradition.22
Architectural pioneer, artist, master builder and town planner – Greenway would have simply nodded: ‘Yes, of course’. Yet ‘democrat’ might have made even that immodest little man blush.
WALLS OF SPITE: ST MATTHEW’S AND ST LUKE’S, 1817–24
The sun was at last setting behind the folds of the nearby heavily timbered hills – known since Governor Phillip’s time as the Blue Mountains – as a small group gathered in a burial ground at Windsor, north-west of Sydney. On that spot several months before, the governor himself had chosen the site of a new church, and the plan of the building was marked out. Now, avoiding the heat of an unseasonably warm October day, the assembled gentlemen had come at dusk with ceremonial duties to perform.
As had become his usual custom, Lachlan Macquarie placed a holey silver dollar and dump under the cornerstone of the new building, ‘and in a very impressive tone of voice, said – “God prosper St. Matthew’s Church”, gently striking the stone three times with a mason’s mallet’.1 Others in the party on Saturday 11 October 1817 included the new lieutenant governor, James Erskine; Captain John Gill; the road-builder William Cox; and the church’s contractor – none other than Henry Kitchen. Conspicuous by his absence was the building’s architect, Francis Greenway.
The site for the church was on high ground at Windsor, looking down on an elbowed bend in the Hawkesbury River and the expansive valley beyond. At the time, the settlers of the surrounding district were still recovering from recent floods. Early local historian James Steele described the disaster:
The rivers … having inundated the various settlements on their banks three times within nine months, and swept away great quantities of wheat and stock of all kinds, as well as totally destroying the growing crop of maize, which was nearly ripe, a most lamentable scarcity of grain prevailed, and hundreds in the districts of the Hawkesbury were reduced to a state of starvation.2
But while these and previous floods brought havoc, they left behind fertility, and from the 1790s onwards the banks of the Hawkesbury and Nepean rivers were transformed into the breadbasket of the colony. A seemingly impenetrable wall of sandstone, scored by deep ravines and draped in dense forest, lay to the west. The colony was hemmed in and vulnerable, and the flood plains of the two rivers were often all that stood between famine and plenty. In the first days of his governorship, Macquarie recognised the need for townships to service the agricultural communities of the region, and so Windsor, along with Wilberforce, Pitt Town, Castlereagh and Richmond – the so-called Macquarie towns – were born.
From food security to the certainty of the soul, provision for worship was never far behind the birth of a new rural community. The first church at Windsor was built in 1805 then abandoned in the floods of the following year. Two more makeshift churches followed, of which little is known, before Macquarie noted among his New Year’s Day 1817 ‘List of essentially necessary Public Buildings …’:3
At Windsor
1st A new Church
2nd A Parsonage House & Office
…
This fourth Windsor church was to be built by contract, but despite it being deemed ‘essentially necessary’, a further seven months passed before Macquarie finally committed the government to the project. On 17 August the Sydney Gazette carried an invitation to tender, with a closing date of 9 September. All tenderers were requested to vouch ‘Unquestionable Security’.
The delay of almost ten months from advertising the tender to letting the contract seems puzzling, but at last, on Friday 6 June 1817, Macquarie noted that:
I this day signed and approved a Contract I have made on the part of Government with Mr Henry Kitchen Architect & Builder for erecting a Church and Tower at the town of Windsor … for the sum of Two Thousand Two Hundred Pounds Sterling … and which Church and tower are to be completed in Eighteen months from yesterday … William Cox and John Piper, Esquires, having gone Security for Mr Kitchen for the due performance of his Contract.
Perhaps those delays from tender to contract involved disagreements between the two rival architects, Greenway and Kitchen. If Kitchen’s name as ‘Architect and Builder’ appeared on the contract as Macquarie had noted, the acting civil architect would have been none too pleased. Here was a stern test of Greenway’s fragile equanimity.
On the day of the St Matthew’s foundation-stone ceremony, Macquarie made a present of ‘Five Gallons of Spirits to the Artificers & Labourers employed by Mr. Kitchen’.4 In return, Kitchen presented the governor with a silver trowel and then, the ceremony complete, the assembled gentlemen repaired to the governor’s cottage overlooking the river and there drank to the success of the project.
Well might the gathering have uttered more hope-filled toasts, however, for two days later they were back at the St Matthew’s site. During the small hours of Sunday morning someone had moved the freshly laid foundation stone and made off with the two silver coins – the ceremony would have to be repeated! On 13 October, Macquarie dined with Windsor’s resident chaplain, the Reverend Robert Cartwright (absent from the previous ceremony due to the heat), and the one he continued to describe as ‘the Architect’, Henry Kitchen. Macquarie then gave another moving address and replaced the missing coins, with Kitchen, Cartwright and some among the previous gathering of officials present. With the repeated ceremony concluded, the crowd again repaired for refreshments, this time to the nearby inn, the aptly named Macquarie Arms. The abstemious Reverend Cartwright refrained.
No one thought to mount a sentry on site, and predictably, a few nights later the crime was perpetrated for a second time! Parish clerk Joseph Harpur wrote of the farcical events: ‘This infamous species of theft could not have been practiced [sic] only through the neglect of the contracting builder not having prepared materials to immediately work over the stone’.5 The building of St Matthew’s Church at Windsor was off to a less than an auspicious start.
As the building slowly fumbled its way out of the ground, Greenway was ever watchful, exercising a ‘hawklike surveillance’ while looking for Kitchen’s first mistake. In his usual arch style, Ellis commented that ‘when a contractor not chosen by himself was concerned, Mr Greenway was apt to exhibit the combined qualities of a particularly zealous ferret and of an unusually vociferous terrier’.6 More broadly, Kitchen was a rival to Greenway’s own tenuous position on the very small architectural stage that was colonial New South Wales; he must be dealt with ruthlessly and expediently.
Greenway claimed not to have seen the contract for St Matthew’s at this stage, an assertion contradicted by Captain Gill in his written evidence to Commissioner Bigge. But despite Macquarie assuming, or being led to believe, that Kitchen was the church’s architect, Greenway and Gill agreed on that score at least. ‘Mr Greenaway [sic] drew the Plan, and Specification’, Gill claimed, and ‘at all events it was his business to see that the work was … in every particular conformable to his Plan and Specification’.7
As the walls rose higher they inevitably became the issue in dispute. ‘I recollect Mr Kitchen saying something to me about the thickness of the Walls’, thought Gill. He then consulted Greenway, who made the obvious statement that ‘if he (Mr Kitch
en) adhered to the specification he could not Err’. But in a memorial addressed to the commissioner, Greenway was far more emphatic: ‘I, on no occasion, either asserted or judged, the Walls of Windsor Church to be good, sufficient, and durable; on the contrary, before a Stone of the Foundation had been laid, I protested against the thickness of the Walls as being insufficient’.8
Greenway complained about the walls to the governor, who referred him back to Gill, who ‘briefly observed, that the Contract had been entered into, and no alteration could now be made’. Either Greenway’s drawings and specifications were at fault, or the contractor had ‘erred’ from what the architect intended. Not for the first time, Gill and Greenway were at cross-purposes.
Then there was the matter of the mortar. Before the widespread availability of factory-made cement, traditional mortars were a mix of sand, or sandy loam, with hydrated or slaked lime. The best source of lime is limestone, but none could be found in the Sydney region. Apart from small quantities of limestone brought from Norfolk Island, the only supply in the early colony came from burnt marine shells – oysters and the like. Aboriginal shell middens were raided, but when these were exhausted, the tidal harbour shores were dredged for shells. The harvested shells were burnt in brick kilns or in pits, and under the high heat the calcium carbonate turned to calcium oxide or ‘quicklime’. Slaked in water overnight, the hydrated lime was then ready for use in mortar or stucco. For the convict lime-burners, the work was arduous, hot and debilitating, their skin excoriated and stung by salt water from the labours of shell collecting, then burnt by the caustic lime of the kilns.
There was always a shortage of building lime in the colony, so much so that clay was used as an inferior mortar substitute at the most desperate times. Naturally, the lack of lime was often a problem for Greenway. But in the eager architect’s appetite for this precious material, he was probably oblivious to the plight of the miserable lime-burners, even though any one among them could just a few years before have been his shipmate on the General Hewett.
Greenway stated to Commissioner Bigge that he had complained to Gill as to ‘the quantity of Lime, [and] as it was of Shells, [it] was not sufficient’.9 To this, Gill asserted that: ‘Mr Greenway in specifying the materials very well knew there was no other but Shell Lime in the Colony, and he was the best judge as to the proper quantity; and upon whose judgement I invariably acted. I consulted him upon everything in his line of business’.10
In one of his later restagings of long-passed battles in The Australian, Greenway expounded on the rather grubby goings-on at Windsor. He could not even bring himself to mention Kitchen by name, but regardless set out to besmirch his by now deceased rival architect. That supposed former ‘pupil of Mr. J. Wyatt’ was nothing but an interloper who had ‘contrived … to get the contract for [the] Windsor church, at £400 more than an estimate … given by a known tradesman’.11 For ‘£400 more’, read financial irregularities. Could a bribe have been offered? Even with his rival permanently removed as a threat, an obsessively uncharitable Greenway thought nothing of slandering Kitchen’s memory.
Greenway claimed that Kitchen’s first progress payment had been received ‘without [him] having done any thing for it, [and] the second … when there was very little done’. All very contradictory and confusing – for someone who denied having seen the contract, Greenway seems to have known it well – if not to the letter, then by its substance. What is also puzzling is Greenway’s implication that the contract, and the plans and specifications (which are actually part of any building contract), were in conflict. Kitchen was either adhering to what was stated in the contract, or to the drawings and specifications. By Greenway’s reasoning, it seems impossible that he was attempting to do both.
The disgruntled architect continued: ‘The different workmen at this time circulated a report at Windsor that the work was unsound … I was [then] requested by the Governor to go up to Windsor, and make my report’. Rather than ‘requested’, Greenway – the yet to be emancipated convict – would have been ordered to Windsor by an increasingly worried Macquarie. He made the journey via Government House at Parramatta and found the viceroy in residence there. Greenway insisted that he view the contract, and the offending document was duly produced. He was aghast, it appears not so much by its contents but by the omission of his name. Greenway was rattled, written out of the contract by a rival who was obviously out to usurp his position: ‘The merit of the design had been claimed by the contractors. However, on the margin the Governor had written my name as architect, and subjected the whole to my approval: – this satisfied me …’
His outrage temporarily quelled by the governor’s reassurance, Greenway headed for Windsor to observe firsthand and ‘accordingly surveyed the building’. He then calculated his next move. The architect was now faced with a dilemma: if he condemned the work outright he might be accused of prejudice ‘as the parties had acted so unhandsomely by me’. No, the canny one would bide his time: ‘I therefore advised the Governor to call a survey of indifferent persons, two on the part of government, and two on the part of the contractor’.
A committee to survey the progress at St Matthew’s was duly set up. Kitchen’s nominees were the bricklayer Thomas Legg and the builder James Smith – ever an irritant to Greenway – while bricklayers John Jones and William Stone represented the government. On 14 July 1818, the governor’s secretary, John Campbell, wrote to the four on Macquarie’s behalf. Henry Kitchen was stated to have ‘acquiesced’ in the appointment of the committee, but he maintained throughout that the work was ‘good sufficient & durable, being erected of good Brick and Lime’. And as for the architect, ‘Mr Greenway [had] reported to His Excellency that a considerable part of the wall of the said Church is insufficient and composed of bad materials, and thereon given it as His opinion that it ought to be condemned …’12
In his later evidence to Commissioner Bigge, Greenway contended that ‘in many parts the mortar was bad, mixed up with vegetable Earth instead of screened loam. The Brickwork was tolerably good as to the workmanship, but the bricks were bad & the joints in some places ¾ of an inch thick’. And on and on Greenway pattered.
Two weeks after receiving their instructions, the committee reported to Macquarie. The four gentlemen concluded that ‘The mortar is of a very bad quality throughout … The labour is also very inferior to what it ought to be in such a building’.13 The committee estimated that there were ‘about 74 000 bricks used in the Church and Tower’ but the remainder were ‘of a very inferior kind … and of little or no value’. Of the good bricks and prepared stone, they gave an estimate of value of just £149. For Kitchen, the final paragraph of the report effectively razed his building, and consequently his fledgling career, to ruins. ‘Upon the whole’, they wrote, ‘we consider the building as unfit to stand, and therefore give it as our opinion that it ought to be taken down’.
And taken down it was. It seems that Greenway took advantage of the false start by reworking his design and possibly even changing the church from a two-storeyed building to a single storey. Joseph Harpur noted progress on the new St Matthew’s nearly two years after Kitchen’s original building had begun: ‘The walls of the church … have been taken down to the very foundation through some defect in the building, and another is now in building on its site by Government, of much larger dimensions, and of the very best materials …’
Greenway must have gloated at his rival’s downfall, writing in The Australian that ‘to satisfy the interested views of a few individuals, government lost £900, besides suffering the inconvenience, and loss by delay, &c.’14 For Kitchen, the prospects were grim. He had mortgaged a block of land and cattle (possibly at Minto) promised him by Macquarie.15 A Robert Jenkins held the block as security against advances, and in return tided Kitchen over until progress monies came through on St Matthew’s. But Greenway advised Macquarie to withhold payment pending settlement of the dispute. Kitchen was soon in default and Jenkins swiftly pursued him f
or repayment of his loan. In addition, John Piper and William Cox refused to pay a £300 forfeit claimed by the government because of Kitchen’s failure to complete his contract. The two guarantors claimed to have ‘an opinion’ that the government ‘had not performed the Contract on their part’ and therefore the pair were ‘not amenable to the penalty’.16
Three years later, Kitchen was still trying to fight his way out of the morass into which Greenway had happily seen him cast. In August 1821, he presented Bigge with an account for £1211 12s, the balance he calculated was due on St Matthew’s. With Gill by then returned home, his only true witness to the contract was long gone and there was no one to counter Greenway’s maliciousness. Kitchen realised the ‘impossibility of … taking legal measures for the recovery of my Claim’. Nevertheless, he felt his circumstances would ‘be accepted as an apology for urging it’; he desperately wanted his money and pleaded fruitlessly with Bigge for ‘favourable representation to His Majesty’s Government’.17 Kitchen’s only redress lay in the satisfaction he was afforded in venting his spleen before the Commission of Inquiry. Needless to say, he took every opportunity through his evidence and letters to do to Greenway’s buildings verbally and on the written page what the acting civil architect had done to the walls of his Windsor church.
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