A Forger's Progress

by Alasdair McGregor

  Greenway was also as dilatory as ever. On his assumption of office, Brisbane had requested ‘an enumeration of the different public works … under your superintendence’. Such a report was to be furnished ‘with as little delay as possible’. Three weeks later, the governor was still waiting.31 At some time in the latter half of 1822, Greenway stopped visiting government worksites altogether.

  Back in 1818, Sir John Jamison engaged Greenway to supervise the completion of an existing two-storeyed house in Charlotte Place (now Grosvenor Street), Sydney. Sir John was to become an important private client for Greenway, an impressive three-storeyed house in George Street in the early 1820s the main fruit of their collaboration.32 But the little house in Charlotte Place proved anything but a successful association. After more than two years, the project descended into a dispute with a convict plasterer named Robert Parsons. Amid widespread slanders over an amount of £59 8s 6d that Greenway deducted from the settlement of Parsons’ account, the aggrieved plasterer went as far as petitioning Governor Brisbane. The petition was such a document ‘as His Excellency probably had not seen during his troubled reign’. Ellis suspected that Parsons was egged on in his bid for justice; he was ‘merely a tool used to bring home to Government the inner wickedness of the Civil Architect’.33 Whatever the degree of shadowy manipulation of humble tradesmen, Greenway’s fragile standing in the eyes of the new government was bound to be further diminished by such protracted and bitter squabbling.

  Greenway’s end was nigh when on 1 November 1822 Ovens wrote to Goulburn and in one long, devastating sentence sealed the fate of Australia’s first government architect:

  Sir,

  I have had the honour of occasionally mentioning to you how neglectful Mr Greenway the Civil Architect was … and I now consider myself called upon to report to you … that I have not myself derived the least assistance from the individual mentioned nor do I think he has rendered any benefit to the Government during the time I have held the appointment of Acting Engineer.34

  Barely two weeks later, Goulburn dismissed Greenway on the governor’s behalf.

  FROM GEORGE STREET TO THE ‘CITY OF THE WORLD’

  Following Greenway’s dismissal, an old rival emerged from the shadows, keen to accede to the vacant post of civil architect. The mysterious and forever frustrated Daniel Dering Mathew had last felt Greenway’s sting when Commissioner Bigge was gathering evidence. Mathew now saw his chance to exact a reward from the spoils of his adversary’s demise.

  In early 1816, just before his appointment was made official, Greenway had been directed to inspect the recently completed colonial secretary’s residence. His instructions were underscored by shoddy workmanship, as John Gill had ‘frequently inspected the work and found great fault with it … [and] the Governor was exceedingly angry’.1 Greenway produced a damning report against the contractors, Messrs Boulton and Manning. And if his estimates were correct, the modest two-storey structure of no more than eight rooms with a detached kitchen, privies and so on, had cost the government ‘upwards of £3000’.2 To Greenway, such a figure smacked of profiteering.

  Campbell’s house was possibly the work of Mathew. In the Commission of Inquiry in January 1820, Greenway was asked, ‘Who drew or gave the design?’ Curiously, rather than damn a rival outright, he simply recalled with feigned insouciance, ‘a man of the name of Pan I believe from a Book of Cottage Architecture lent him by Mrs Macquarie’.3 ‘Pan’ was probably a simple transcription error of the familiar ‘Dan’ for Daniel in the commission’s handwritten documents. Mathew signed his letters ‘Dan Dering …’, and although there is no direct evidence, the project was most likely his responsibility.4

  Assuming Mathew was Mrs Macquarie’s architect, the colonial secretary’s residence was certainly his first and last government project. Little wonder, considering the governor’s displeasure over what was just a rehashed pattern-book house.5 In 1819, it was Greenway, and certainly not Mathew, who was asked to ‘arrange and give directions’ to alterations and additions to the house.6

  Angered by Greenway’s appearance before the commission, Mathew set about damaging the acting civil architect’s reputation. He wrote to the commissioner, insinuating that his rival was taking £5 backhanders from stonemasons. ‘I understand’, Mathew claimed, ‘that Murphy the stone mason gave Mr Greenway three five pound notes to settle with him for building the wall round the [George Street] dockyard’. In the same letter, Mathew also made the rather more alarming claim that ‘the Contractors of the Parramatta Factory are to pay to Mr Greenway Five Pr Cent for their work’ – in other words, Payten and Watkins were buying an easy ride from the architect.7 Henry Kitchen made similar claims, telling Bigge that Greenway ‘both expects and receives a commission on the public works built by contract’.8

  Following Greenway’s dismissal, Mathew complained to Secretary Goulburn that ‘so many buildings’ were being erected by the government ‘at the risk of the lives of its subjects, only for want of a person duly qualified to superintend them’.9 He followed with virtual treatises on engineering, roof trusses and building construction. Mathew even sent the all-suffering colonial secretary a bribe – a violin, lovingly craft by his own hand. His last ploy was to threaten to quit the colony – ‘the most miserable part of the Globe’ – should his application be refused.10 But as Morton Herman wryly put it, the colonial secretary ‘was apparently quite unmoved by the horror of the idea of New South Wales without a D.D. Mathew’, and Greenway’s frustrated rival duly faded to the obscurity of his farm at Lane Cove.11

  And what of Greenway’s far more formidable foe, Henry Kitchen? Financially ruined after the St Matthew’s disaster, Kitchen had hoped to return to England, but a creditor served a detainer on him, preventing him from boarding ship. The order was revocable only by the governor, but Kitchen’s pleas to Macquarie were ignored. Having cultivated Bigge’s friendship, in August 1821 he wrote to the commissioner (who by then was back in England) complaining of his ill treatment and hoping Bigge would intercede on his behalf. Despite the difficulties, Kitchen had ‘no doubt my exertions will ultimately be crowned with success’.12 He mentioned ‘a new Dwelling House for Mr McArthur [sic] at the Cow Pastures’ and projects for ‘Mr Howe’ (almost certainly Robert Howe, owner and editor of the Sydney Gazette) and Sir John Jamison.

  Kitchen designed Belgenny Farm House, a timber cottage orné13 at Camden Park for John and Elizabeth Macarthur, and Hambledon Cottage on the family’s estate, Elizabeth Farm, at Parramatta.14 He also produced a design for a Greek-revival mansion at Camden Park. Kitchen was one among a number of architects and builders-cum-draftsmen employed by the Macarthurs. But whether it was a matter of architectural taste, his emancipist status, his close association with Macquarie, or a combination of all three, the Macarthurs never deigned to employ Greenway.

  Robert Howe’s parents, George and Sarah, had been two of Greenway’s early private clients, but the architect’s relationship with the Gazette and its then owner soured in the 1820s after Howe made some mild criticisms of Greenway’s courthouse and its controversial roof. The architect demanded space in the Gazette to put his case, Howe demurred, and in return Greenway accused the paper’s editor of ‘illiberal and calumniating conduct … attempting to alarm me from my purpose’.15 Whatever building Robert Howe planned, Kitchen would have been his man. Similarly, as a probable consequence of the battle with Parsons the plasterer, Sir John Jamison dumped Greenway in favour of Henry Kitchen.

  In the end, Kitchen’s favour with the likes of the Macarthurs, Robert Howe or Sir John Jamison amounted to little. His was a tragic tale. He fished and fawned for a government appointment through what he thought would be the good offices of Commissioner Bigge: ‘I shall feel most happy to accept such remuneration as they [the Colonial Office] may think proper to grant me … I trust however under any circumstances, that I shall ever be found to merit their confidence and patronage’.16

  The government responded with silence. Then on 12
April 1822, less than eight months after his final letter to Bigge, the Sydney Gazette carried a notice of the death ‘after a short and severe illness [of] Mr. HENRY KITCHEN, Architect and Surveyor’. He was just 29. Perhaps his illness was the recurrence of a complaint that had brought him to New South Wales originally, or maybe the shame of failure and debt had proven too much. Kitchen’s creditors continued to pursue him beyond the grave, Robert Jenkins – and subsequent to his own death, his widow Jemima (herself a Greenway client) – seeking letters of administration as the principal creditor of the architect’s estate.17

  Whatever Kitchen’s ailment, it would seem he had time to contemplate his own demise. He drafted a lengthy epitaph in which he noted his architectural lineage from the ‘justly celebrated James Wyatt Esq’. As to his own travails, the deceased was:

  Subjected almost from the hour of his landing in these colonies … to a series of the most relentless and unmerciful oppressions, a severe and sudden illness contracted in the too ardent pursuit of his profession snatched him prematurely to the grave … By these Colonies he is regretted as a professional loss not easily to be retrieved, by his friends as a friend for whom his misfortunes, gentle manners and cultivated genius had contributed to excite the highest respect and regard.18

  His bitter rival would spill no tears at the graveside of that ‘cultivated genius’, though Greenway may have had his eye on the late architect’s library when Simeon Lord put the collected volumes under the hammer at his Macquarie Place auction rooms. Going, going, gone were ‘his Newton’s Vitruvius, his Palazzo di Genova, his Soane’s works, his Suley and his Palladio – [with Lord] making heaven alone knows what play in a rude Lancashire accent with their strange, outlandish names’.19

  As free immigration gathered pace, other architects were bound to try their hand in the colony, a site uncrossed by tracks of privilege and unshadowed by the best of their generation – from the likes of George Dance, John Nash, John Soane, and so on, down. Some, like John Verge and Mortimer Lewis, flourished, while the also-rans such as Standish Lawrence Harris and George Cookney (Harris’s equally short-lived successor as civil architect) followed Mathew into obscurity. They were unknowns at home whose relocation to fresh fields did nothing to compensate for a lack of talent.

  London builder and later farmer, John Verge was lured to Australia as much by the prospect of farming as of building or architecture. He arrived in New South Wales in 1828 and by the early 1830s was building fine Regency-style villas for the gentry of Sydney, from Darlinghurst to Potts Point, easily gathering clients among the exclusives, officials and merchants of a new era, with whom Greenway had scant success. And whereas Kitchen, in his short life, had not progressed past the drawing board at Camden Park, Verge triumphed, building his masterpiece there in the early 1830s.

  Surveyor and architect Mortimer Lewis arrived in Sydney two years after Verge, and as colonial architect from 1835 to 1849 enjoyed a prolific career building gaols, police stations, fine courthouses and so on. Lewis designed Sydney’s first customs house and museum, and supervised construction of Edward Blore’s Government House.

  Among the also-rans, Harris landed in Sydney from Ireland in November 1822, just as the axe was about to fall on Greenway. The newly arrived architect quickly offered his services to the government, and his presence was all Brisbane needed to act. On 15 November, Goulburn informed Greenway in a cold and curt, brief message: ‘By direction of the Governor I am to acquaint you that from the present date your services to the Government will be dispensed with’.20

  Within the month Harris was appointed civil architect on an annual salary of £100 and ten per cent commission on all works under his direction. With pretensions to being a gentleman farmer, Harris was also soon rewarded with a land grant of 2000 acres – rather ironically on the Hunter River, in the same district as his predecessor. How must Greenway have choked on news of such a generous gift to a newcomer?

  Harris’s singular preoccupation as civil architect was his Report and Estimate of Value of Improvements in the Public Buildings of Sydney, Parramatta, Windsor, Liverpool and Campbelltown, prepared at the governor’s request. Harris spent a year surveying, dissecting, drawing and analysing Greenway’s and other buildings.21 Ellis describes Harris as being ‘filled to the throat with professional scorn and jealousy’, and his report, presented with the finest copperplate flourish, was consequently as unfair as it was inaccurate.22 Brisbane was not swayed by such prejudices, and in 1824, after claims for excessive fees, Harris’s services were dispensed with as speedily as they had first found favour. Harris had been dumped without a single building built to his design; his only value was that he made a record of several buildings otherwise lost to history. In parallels with his predecessor, Harris found himself on the wrong side of his creditors, his land sold up, a stint in gaol served for debt, and years later still petitioning government for fees he felt were rightfully his. Greenway must have felt both bitter and vindicated at this latter-day pretender’s ignominious demise.

  For Greenway, the loss of both the security and prestige of his government position cut deeply, and his quarrelsome mood must only have darkened. What he took as the treachery of Macquarie and Brisbane tainted memories of his achievements, and distorted dreams of what might have been.

  Greenway was burdened by debt as the family continued to grow, and domestic life must never have been easy or particularly comfortable. At least his plaintive calls ‘for the sake of a numerous family’ were no exaggeration. Shaped by stubborn pride and clouded judgment, his ludicrous claims for fees were obviously born of desperation. And while not overtly criminal, they displayed all the crazy hallmarks of the Doolan forgery. Imprisonment, transportation and more than a decade of exile had not taught this ageing dog a single new trick.

  The proceedings of the Commission of Inquiry, and a trail of vituperative and self-righteous letters, both provide ample proof of his unfailingly irascible demeanour. Yet such a picture is still only half the portrait of Francis Greenway. We never get far past his professional life, and without a healthy bundle of personal correspondence to pick through, it is impossible to really know how he coped with life’s many difficulties.

  Somehow through it all, Mary maintained her school while tending to her own brood, and that most errant child among them – her husband. Mary had produced seven babies in 18 years and she was approximately 45 at the time of Agnes’s birth in 1824 – worryingly old for a mother in any era. Amid all the turmoil of Francis’s professional life, and the hard grind of raising a large family, the intimate nature of the Greenways’ domestic life can only be guessed at; was Mary’s relationship with Francis one of love and tenderness or, as seems likely, was it also an abusive nightmare at times? The children described him as violent-tempered in his final years, but was he always like that at home? We will never know. And while we can imagine Francis through a single original portrait, alas there is no picture of Mary. This strong and stable woman will always be undeservedly faceless.

  During his years as acting civil architect, Greenway’s private practice was often sufficiently busy for him to neglect his government responsibilities. As his attentions ran fickle, he repeatedly risked the brand of ‘dilatory’ from Macquarie. In 1818, he was building a substantial house on the corner of Macquarie and Hunter streets for the superintendent of police, Thomas Middleton, and in 1820, with Mr Bigge in town and the governor pushing hard, he designed a three-storeyed, five-bayed, grand showpiece of a house for Sir John Jamison in George Street. In 1822, as his dispute with the government boiled, Greenway attended to alterations and additions to the Bank of New South Wales and to merchant Robert Campbell’s Wharf House (both in George Street). The true extent of Greenway’s private practice will never be known and, as Broadbent and Hughes point out, it is much harder to track than his work as civil architect, accompanied as that was by extensive official records. The authors describe the evidence for his private work as ‘scant and fragmentary’, largely rely
ing on newspaper advertisements for tenders and the services of tradesmen.

  With his ties to government severed, Greenway might have been comforted by the thought of private work simply filling the void. For five or six years the work did flow: there were at least two more houses for Sir John Jamison, a significant house in Cumberland Place for Robert Campbell, and one for his nephew of the same name in Bligh Street. Greenway’s clients ranged from Sydney’s small-time speculators and prosperous traders among the mercantile classes, to former colonial secretary John Campbell and Sir John Wylde among the bureaucratic and judicial elite. But whatever their place in colonial society, they were, as Broadbent and Hughes observed, ‘all old colonists, loyal to the old governor, patronising the old governor’s architect’.23 Without sympathetic new blood, or old exclusives somehow wooed against all hope, Greenway’s pool of clients was bound to dry up.

  In January 1824, Greenway resorted to advertising in the Gazette. He might have still had clients, but his debts were mounting, and he took to print not so much to spruik his talents but to threaten his creditors. Whatever his fee agreements with clients – verbal or written – they were being flouted: ‘Mr. Greenway again finds it necessary to publish his TERMS more fully, in Order to guard against future Misconception’.

  He listed those terms – from three to eight per cent – and ended ‘thanking those Friends who have paid him most liberally and honorably [sic]’. But for those ‘who do not immediately settle their Accounts … Measures very unpleasant to himself will be resorted to, to enforce Payment’.24 Not for the first time in Greenway’s desperate life, the bailiffs were about to come a-knocking.

  The advertisement was repeated on 5 February, and in the same issue a notice appeared in the matter of ‘Josephson v Greenway’. Readers were notified of the forthcoming auction ‘on [the] Defendant’s Premises in George-street’. Greenway was in debt to the convict silversmith and moneylender Jacob Josephson, and ‘Chairs, Tables, Bedding, a Pianoforte, &c.’ were to be sold ‘unless the Execution be previously settled’. The auction was set down for Wednesday 11 February, the day on which Greenway’s old foe, Samuel Marsden, was due to consecrate St James’. The debt of ten guineas was met at the eleventh hour, but one wonders if a distraught Greenway could have summoned the composure to attend the opening of his masterpiece.