A Forger's Progress Read online

  For Tim and Judith

  A NewSouth book

  Published by

  NewSouth Publishing

  University of New South Wales Press Ltd

  University of New South Wales

  Sydney NSW 2052

  AUSTRALIA

  newsouthpublishing.com

  © Alasdair McGregor 2014

  First published 2014

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Author: McGregor, Alasdair, 1954– author.

  Title: A Forger’s Progress: the life of Francis Greenway/Alasdair McGregor.

  ISBN: 9781742233789 (hardback)

  9781742241821 (ePub/Kindle)

  9781742247021 (ePDF)

  Subjects: Greenway, Francis, 1777–1837

  Architects – New South Wales – Biography.

  Architecture, Colonial – New South Wales.

  Building – Australia – History.

  Dewey Number: 720.92

  DESIGN Di Quick

  COVER DESIGN Sandy Cull, gogoGingko

  COVER IMAGES Convict [Hyde Park] Barrack Sydney NSW, c. 1820, artist unknown, SLNSW: Major James Taylor, The Entrance of Port Jackson and Part of the Town of Sydney, 1823, NLA: Francis Greenway, Plan and Elevation of the Governor’s Stable and Offices at Sydney, New South Wales, 1820, Mitchell Library, SLNSW: Lachlan Macquarie, Memorandum for Mr Greenway, 4 July 1817, Greenway papers, A 1451, Mitchell Library, SLNSW.

  All reasonable efforts were taken to obtain permission to use copyright material reproduced in this book, but in some cases copyright could not be traced. The author welcomes information in this regard.

  This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction: a forger’s progress

  1 Earthly reward: 800 acres and 16 cows

  2 FH Grinway comes to London

  3 A ‘ruinous architectural triumph’

  4 A curious and noteworthy crime

  5 Bristol Newgate: ‘white without and foul within …’

  6 The blighted voyage of the General Hewett

  7 A state of ‘infantile imbecility’

  8 To copy a courthouse

  9 FH Greenway, 84 George Street

  10 Three shillings a day and a government horse

  11 Bright prospect: the Macquarie Tower, 1816–20

  12 Pain and humiliation: the Barrack Square incident

  13 A mansion for the viceroy: Government House, 1816–20

  14 Transportation: ‘an object of considerable terror’

  15 A ‘palace for horses’: the Government House stables, 1817–21

  16 Follies, fountains and fugacious toys, 1818–20

  17 ‘… a neat handsome fort’: colonial defences, 1816–21

  18 ‘… an idea of grandeur’: the Hyde Park Barracks, 1816–19

  19 Walls of spite: St Matthew’s and St Luke’s, 1817–24

  20 Feeding body and soul: St Andrew’s and the market house, 1819–22

  21 Fragments of a plan: St James’ and the Supreme Court, 1819–27

  22 A ‘vile conspiracy’: the Parramatta Female Factory, 1818–21

  23 ‘… for the sake of a numerous family’

  24 From George Street to the ‘City of the World’

  Measurements and currency

  Buildings mentioned in the text

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  INTRODUCTION: A FORGER’S PROGRESS

  An image by 19th-century photographer Henry King shows the wide arc of a stone seawall jutting out into Sydney Harbour. Rowing prams ride lazily alongside, while boatmen sit yarning, perhaps waiting for a fare. From behind the water’s edge, a second stone wall steps back and up – dark and forbidding – and ends in a castellated tower at the left-hand edge of the photograph. While undoubtedly absorbing as a depiction of lost Sydney, King’s image becomes one of fascination when tagged as Bennelong Point, one of the most famous locations in the world. The walls and tower were part of Fort Macquarie, designed by convict architect Francis Greenway, and built by convict labour between 1817 and 1821.

  More than 180 years later, the British art historian Dan Cruickshank stood on Bennelong Point in a scene from his popular BBC television series Around the World in 80 Treasures.1 Of course, Cruickshank had come to see the Sydney Opera House, the obvious candidate as one of his 80 ‘treasures’. But after enthusing over the poetry of the building’s famous shells, the historian nonetheless concluded that Jørn Utzon’s Opera House was flawed, an undoubted masterpiece let down by its compromised interiors. ‘Very sad’, lamented Cruickshank, who then went searching elsewhere for his treasure.

  After considering and rejecting the Sydney Harbour Bridge, Cruickshank settled on a third, ‘much more surprising contender’. He described it as the city’s ‘hidden gem, a charming little Georgian church’. A short walk up Macquarie Street from Bennelong Point lies the Anglican Church of St James, secreted away among the banal, the bland, and the plain ugly of modern commercial Sydney. ‘St James’ may look like any old late Georgian classical church’, Cruickshank admitted, ‘but it tells the story of how Australia was built, of how a noble nation evolved out of a penal colony’. For Cruickshank, it was the historical context of St James’ that was so inspiring:

  When this church was started, the city was less than 50 years old, and more to the point, it was a penal settlement … a sort of shantytown; so this church’s grandeur is astonishing. It is metropolitan in its ambition; it is a declaration really, that one day, this town of convicts, Sydney, would be a great city.

  Well might Francis Greenway, the architect of this ‘little Georgian church’, have snorted agreement at such a claim!

  While Cruickshank’s thoughts on St James’ Church were limited by the medium of television, his essential conclusion is profound. His message appeals to our generation as we continually search for meaning in our past. But Greenway and his sometime benefactor, protector and irritant, Governor Lachlan Macquarie – and his wife Elizabeth – were concerned about a future, one rooted in the transformation of a ragtag place of banishment and perdition into a confident society of emancipists and free settlers. A number of their schemes and dreams were self-indulgent and even silly, ill suited to the needs of the times, but the progressive energy of their vision of a nascent Australia cannot be denied.

  St James’ and Fort Macquarie are examples of Greenway’s divergent architectural styles – one well mannered and classical, the other romantic and picturesque. Such apparent stylistic anomalies were unremarkable for architects of his time – only the prejudices of later ages adjudge them mismatched. The aesthetic of Greenway’s classicism sits well with modern tastes for simplicity and order, yet Victorian-era Sydney – still troubled by the convict ‘stain’ – found his buildings bleak and mean. A mid-19th-century commentator thought the austere, though finely proportioned, convict barracks opposite St James’, ‘quite destitute of any pretensions to architecture’, yet found the recently completed Government House (not a Greenway building) ‘magnificent and imposing’. Ironically, the governor’s new Gothic-revivalist lodgings were designed specifically to complement Greenway’s earlier government stables.2

  But while style and taste shift with each restless generation, the challenge for any architect is to respo
nd sensitively and intelligently to the environment and time in which they work. For a short time Greenway’s star shone brightly in the antipodean sky. He was highly accomplished, though not the genius he might have considered himself to be. His limits were real, and the challenges he faced in New South Wales were particular and daunting, made worse by his tactless and hotheaded nature. Yet, he skilfully overcame paltry budgets, shortages and poor-quality materials, adapting his designs to a restricted palette and limited means. He fought with his convict labour force whose skills were patchy at best, but managed to cajole acceptable work from their unwilling bodies.

  Make no mistake, New South Wales in the first half of the 19th century could still be a harsh place, despite the Macquaries’ beneficence. And while the colony grew and matured, its remoteness remained immutable. For Cruickshank, this only heightens Greenway’s achievements, and the value of St James’ Church in particular. It was ‘absolutely haunting in this barren location, at the other end of the world, a town of pain, where one gets a spectacular church built, a church as good as anything in Britain at the time’.

  As much as my narrative is about architecture, style, and fine buildings rising against the odds, it is far more the story of a man beset by contradictions and demons, a story of crime and self-destruction, punishment, redemption and decay. It is not a pretty story, but neither is it ugly. It is hauntingly sad, yet somehow ennobling. It is the story of the doomed hero, the one who, despite an abundance of talent, squanders his life at the altar of conceit. Greenway’s life might be described as a ‘forger’s progress’, to borrow loosely from William Hogarth and the unfortunate fate of the libertine Tom Rakewell.

  Many times when struggling to understand Francis Greenway I reached for Malcolm Ellis’s account of his life, first published 65 years ago. Of the quixotic Greenway’s character, no one could say it better:

  All his criteria were artistic. Whether he transgressed manmade laws of conduct seems to have been with him a matter of expediency. To flout the absolute basic laws of art and of the Grand Architect of the universe was, however, in his sight a capital crime against the Holy Inspiration.3

  Ellis’s Francis Greenway: His Life and Times, with its wonderfully fastidious, almost obsessive command of original sources, was also an essential companion when navigating a maze of crusty early 19th-century official correspondence. Ellis helped me cut into the officialese of the likes of John Thomas Bigge and Lord Henry Bathurst, replete with the idiosyncratic capitalisation and spelling of the day, and there mine the human foibles and prejudices common to any age. Much of the style of Ellis’s narrative seems to bleed from Greenway’s own era, his characters universally referred to with appropriate formality as Mr Greenway, Mr Bigge, Mr Kitchen and so on. Ellis was a notoriously combative figure himself, and his pithy insights and acerbic wit are perfectly matched to Greenway’s own feisty disposition. In such a context, I make no apology for quoting liberally from Ellis. And from the specific to the broader historical landscape, Ellis’s Francis Greenway was but an offshoot of his magisterial Lachlan Macquarie (1947), a book that remains the definitive work on the era.

  A more recent work without which I am sure my reading of Greenway’s life would never have reached a satisfying conclusion is James Broadbent and Joy Hughes’s 1997 monograph, Francis Greenway: Architect. Not only did the two authors shine a brilliant scholarly light on Greenway’s buildings, his architectural influences and context, but their précis of his life was ever a steady guide when I became lost down the twisted alleyways of early Sydney. Their catalogue raisonné identifies 82 works, either known to be by Greenway, attributed to him or with which he had some association. An invaluable assemblage of painstaking detective work, it was always to hand.

  Of those 82 buildings, less than a quarter are extant today. A few were never built, while most were long ago swept away by a tide of growth and change. The loss of many works of quality is to be mourned, yet despite such destruction, combative Mr Greenway’s spirit lies distilled in a handful of treasured buildings. Distilled but not diminished, he stubbornly lectures us all on the grandeur of scale and the beauty of line, reminding us of what we still have, and what we can never regain.

  EARTHLY REWARD: 800 ACRES AND 16 COWS

  The walls of the small hut were made of rough-sawn eucalypt slabs, and the roof framed in saplings and covered in sheets of stringy bark. There were just two rooms at first, with mud floors and no glass in the miserable openings that passed for windows. Sheets of calico were all there was to keep out the rain and cold. In the middle of the main room was a table made from four planks and secured to uprights sunk into the earthen floor. Two rough benches served as the only seating.

  At Tarro, approximately 15 miles north of the convict settlement of Newcastle, and not far off the road from Hexham to Wallis Plains, the hut stood on a grassy ridge overlooking a tight bend in the Hunter River and a stretch of low cultivated ground growing wheat, potatoes, maize, pumpkins and watermelons.

  William Howard Greenway had built the hut with the help of convict labour some time around 1827 on Howard Farm, an 800-acre grant of land made to his father a few years before. Born in England, William had arrived in New South Wales as a small boy in 1814, and had later become a builder of sorts around Sydney. He worked with his architect father and claimed to have helped with the building of Australia’s first lighthouse. But following the death of his mother in 1832, the Greenway family fortunes went into decline and William left Sydney for good, taking his two sisters and two of his three surviving brothers with him to Howard Farm.

  To accommodate the family, he extended the hut in a rather desultory fashion and added two bedrooms, although rather than a dirt floor, these extra rooms were afforded the luxury of roughly sawn planks for floorboards. And of the original virgin bush that comprised the Greenway land grant, census records show that by 1828 just 30 acres had been cleared, with only half that area under cultivation. A herd of 16 cows grazed the land.

  John Wallace, a young engineer from England who in 1846 married the youngest Greenway sister, Agnes, recalled William as ‘idle and pleasure hunting’. He was unable to stick at business in Sydney, and the hut ‘was all after years and years [that] William had provided for his sisters and brothers’.1

  In his final days, the hut also became the last miserable home of William’s father, Francis – likewise distinguished by the middle name of Howard. Francis was no farmer, and the grant of land had been made to him by the colonial government in 1821, partly in compensation for remuneration forgone, but also to shut him up. Although they never met, Wallace knew Francis Greenway by reputation among the family, describing him as a ‘violent tempered man, dictatorial and quarrelsome’.

  The small hut on the grassy ridge beyond the edge of civilisation must indeed have been a wretched abode for the five children and their father. Again, Wallace noted a ‘violent quarrel when the father came up from Sydney’. And it was there on Howard Farm, in September 1837, that Francis Howard Greenway died at the age of 59, possibly of typhoid fever.

  His passing went unnoticed and unrecorded in Sydney, or anywhere else for that matter. If he was remembered at all at the time it might have been as the choleric associate of the former governor, Lachlan Macquarie, and for their short-lived collaboration in the pursuit of civic progress.

  Even the death of the indolent William in 1894 was marked by an obituary that described him as a ‘most observant as well as an educated man’.2 But for Greenway the father there were no public obituaries, and no crowds to nod in sombre agreement as eulogies were spoken softly over his coffin. Perhaps not even his children cared for their querulous father, as there is no known grave for Francis Howard Greenway. In the absence of a clergyman, the local schoolmaster from East Maitland read the burial service on 25 September 1837.3

  It was a bitterly sad end for a man who had dined at the governor’s table, courted the favour of the English aristocracy, and claimed the illustrious Arthur Phillip as a f
riend and patron. He had exhibited at London’s Royal Academy, immersed himself in the study of the Ancients and worked with John Nash, the most fashionable architect of his day. He had dreamt of a city the equal of any in architectural beauty and refinement, a city of cathedrals and grand public buildings, broad avenues, generous squares and flowering gardens. And in his own completed works he had fought against ignorance and indifference to bring civility and aesthetic good manners to a benighted gaol at the outer limits of the British Empire, only to be repaid with a miserable piece of land in the wilderness. Ridiculed and rejected, he had spent the final years of his life in desperate poverty, an enduringly obstinate and proud yet disillusioned man obsessed with setting the record straight – according to his own lights – and righting the injustices an uncaring world had wrought upon him. But by the late 1820s no one was listening, and he might as well have expostulated to the cows that grazed languidly by the bend of the Hunter River.

  From noble public buildings imbued with the civilising power of architecture to a rude hovel on the barbaric frontier – such was the decline and fall in less than two decades of Francis Howard Greenway.

  He began his life nearly 60 years before in Gloucestershire, as the fourth son among an eventual brood of eight children born to Francis Greenway and Ann (née Webb). Francis was a Mangotsfield man from near Bristol; Ann was from the Cotswolds village of Colerne in nearby Wiltshire. The first four Greenway boys appeared in quick succession: Olive was born in 1775, then twins William and John Tripp in the following year. This latest baby boy arrived soon after and was baptised on 23 November 1777 in the 13th-century parish church of St James, Mangotsfield. He was simply called Francis, after his father; he would add the middle name of Howard himself in adult life. Mary and Elizabeth followed, before two more boys, Daniel and Charles, both of whom died young.

  Francis Greenway senior was a stonemason and builder, one of generations of West Country Greenways, Grinways or Greenaways, steeped for centuries in the ways of quarrymen, architects, builders, masons and weavers. Proud of their formidable skills, the masons of the West Country had some of the best stone in the British Isles to work with – the hard, blue and red pennant sandstones of South Wales and Bristol, and the famous honey-coloured limestone known as Bath stone.