“The wisdom of the journeyman is to work one day at a time and he always said that any job even if it took years was made up out of a day's work. Nothing more. Nothing less. “

Cormac McCarthy – The Stonemason (1995)

On 24^th October 1867, the dedication stone of St Andrew’s Church, which was to dominate the landscape of Freeman Street for nearly a century, was laid by Lord Wharncliffe. With the population having increased dramatically during the previous decade, there was now the need for another church in Grimsby to serve the spiritual needs of the thousands of incomers who had been lured to the East Coast by the promise of employment following the creation of the new docks by the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway Company. The new church was intended to contain seats for 1000 people and was set to cost £6000.

By May 1868, the Lincolnshire Chronicle was reporting that:

“On Sunday last the chancel of St Andrew’s church was opened for Divine Service. Two sermons were preached, that in the morning by the Rev. R. Ainslie, Vicar, and that in the evening by the Rev. T.F. Simmons, Rector of Dalton Holme. Collections were made in behalf of the building fund, amounting to £4 17s in the morning and £4 8s 6d in the evening.

The unparalleled increase of the population of this town from 11,000 in 1861 to near 20,000 in 1868, has rendered a second church a pressing necessity. This increase is chiefly among those connected with the fishing trade. Land that a few years ago was only marsh land, and covered with water, is now covered by houses inhabited by working men and their families. To provide for the spiritual necessities of these people an attempt has been made to erect a church in their midst. In October last the corner-stone of St Andrew’s Church was laid by Lord Wharncliffe. The effort was begun in faith, and by faith it has been sustained to the present time. We are happy to state that the chancel is completed, in accordance with the original plan, to which a temporary brick-built nave has been added. By this arrangement accommodation is provided for 400 persons, that is 250 more than could be admitted within the former building. It was thought better to erect this temporary building, free from debt (which though unsightly and shed-like in its external appearance, has within the appearance of a piece of worship) than to defer providing any increased accommodation until all the money required to complete the church could be obtained. To a stranger present at either of the crowded services last Sunday, perhaps the thought would have occurred that the attempt to raise a church was late, but still it was better late than never. Before the building can be finished a further sum of £3000 must be obtained – a large sum it may seem, but not so large but that it would readily be forthcoming could non-residents realise the necessities of the place.”

Over the next few years, funds continued to be raised through talks, concerts and bazaars. In July 1869, the Chronicle carried the news that a bazaar ran for five nights and realized the sum of £1250, but that “about £700 is still required to complete the structure, omitting spire, clock, bells, &c.”

That figure had risen to £1000 by the time a second bazaar, for the sale of “Useful and Ornamental Articles, Needlework &c”, to be held in January, was being announced by John James Trebeck, the Curate. Another £200 was duly raised, but costs were evidently on the rise, as it was again reported that there was still another £1000 to go to complete the building.

By 16 May 1870, the end was in sight, with the church scheduled to be opened and consecrated in September. Up on the tower scaffolding, a young stonemason’s labourer, seventeen-year old Ambrose Adams, was going about his work more than thirty feet above the ground. Ambrose came from a family of stonemasons, with father Ambrose Sr., grandfather Abraham and several of his brothers also in the trade.

The Adams family was deeply rooted in Kirton-in-Lindsey, with the three generations of stonemasons all having been born there. Ambrose Jr. was the second youngest of the eleven children of Ambrose Sr. and his wife Hannah Norton, four of whom were already dead by 1870, leaving him the youngest still living. His surviving siblings were George (b 1835), Henry (b 1837), Charles (b 1841), Frederick (b 1845), Dinah (b 1846) and Hannah (b 1848) and all were married, with the exception of Henry.

The population of Kirton-in-Lindsey was decreasing by the 1860s and, like so many others, Ambrose and his family moved to where the work was. By 1870, the Adams family was living at 49 Albert Street, a few doors down from the junction with Freeman Street and just a stone’s throw from St Andrew’s Church.

On the ground at the mortar heap below the scaffolding was bricklayer’s labourer William Watson. Looking up he saw Ambrose walk along the wall on the tower and heard him shout for four stones of a certain size. The next thing he heard was a rumbling noise and as he looked up again, he saw Ambrose falling to the ground. He had set his foot on a loose stone, lost his balance and fallen through an opening in the scaffolding left for a lift.

The young man’s name may have been derived from the Greek word for ‘immortal’, but death was instantaneous, Ambrose’s skull being “frightfully fractured” as he fell onto loose stones below. The newspapers reported that no blame could be attached to anyone and the jury at the inquest held at the Fishing Dock Hotel in Freeman Street returned a verdict of accidental death. It was the first fatal accident to occur since the building of St Andrew’s Church had begun.

Ambrose’s funeral took place at St James’ Church in Grimsby on 20^th May 1870. Oddly though, records for Ainslie Street cemetery indicate that he was buried on 19^th May. Was he really buried before his funeral took place, or was there simply an error made when recording the dates?

One can only imagine what it must have been like for Hannah and Ambrose Sr, to lose a fifth child and their youngest surviving one at that. News of the tragedy would have reached the family quickly, given that they lived just across the road from the church. How they must have cursed their misfortune. A son and a daughter had been lost in infancy and two daughters in their teens, but Ambrose was presumably a relatively fit and healthy young man for him to be working on the church. Having survived the perils of juvenile illness, for him to die the way he did and in a house of God must have seemed a cruel twist of fate.

The Adams family had already met with a fair degree of misfortune and loss by the time Ambrose died, but there was more to follow. About eighteen months after Ambrose’s death, his brother George and his wife Eliza had a child and the boy was named Ambrose Charles. Sadly, the name was no luckier for George and his family than it had been for his brother, as first Eliza died soon after the birth and then little Ambrose less than a year later, falling victim to convulsions. Both mother and son’s funerals took place in the church where Ambrose had fallen to his death and they joined him in Ainslie Street cemetery, little Ambrose being buried on Valentine’s Day in 1873.

Seven years later, George was laid to rest there too, having succumbed to Phthisis (Tuberculosis) at the age of 45. At least his mother Hannah didn’t live to lose her eldest son as well, having already been taken at the age of 66 by heart disease in November 1879, four months before George.

1879 was a very bad year for Dinah Adams. As well as losing her mother, in March she lost her husband of ten years and father of her two young children, Lowry Smith, to liver cancer at the age of only 34. She remarried two years later at St Andrew’s, but separated from her husband Thomas Gawthorne after 13 years.

Sister Hannah also had marital troubles. Having married George Ashmore in 1866, she had three children with him, but they appear to have parted by the early 1880s and Hannah then took up with butcher Robert Simpson with whom she had three daughters. Despite claiming on the 1911 census that they had been married for 28 years, Hannah and Robert only got around to getting married at St James’ Church on Christmas Day 1897, three years after the death of her first husband. They remained together until Robert’s death from Bronchitis in 1924.

Charles was the next of the Adams siblings to join the growing family gathering at Ainslie Street. A labourer and resident of Kent Street at the time of his death, he died on 4^th January 1887, at the age of 46, cause of death given as softening of the brain. He left a widow, Mary, but does not seem to have had any children.

Ambrose Senior outlived the majority of his children, surviving to the ripe old age of 82, but he died in Brigg Union Workhouse and had been there for some time, so his twilight years were no easier than his decades as a journeyman stonemason. Ambrose was one of four older men, all inmates of Brigg Workhouse, who died within a three-week period and were buried at Kirton-in-Lindsey in January and February of 1892. All were presumably victims of the Influenza, which was rife in the country at the time, and which was reported to have attacked sixty of the workhouse inmates, as well as a number of officials.

In the midst of the doom and gloom of premature deaths, one member of the Adams family did his best to escape to a new life with his family. Frederick Adams had gone his own way for some years, working as a seaman as a teenager, before answering the family calling of stonemasonry. Having married Sarah Brown, a seamstress, in 1864, he moved around with his sons John Henry (b 1865), Frederick William (b 1867), Albert Norton (b 1868) and Ambrose (b 1871) born in Kirton-in-Lindsey, Frodingham, Grimsby and Bradford respectively.

In 1882, the family took a giant leap of faith and emigrated to Canada, arriving in Quebec on 26 June. Engaging in general contracting enterprises in Ontario, Quebec and the Eastern and middle states, by the late 1880s Frederick and his family had, in the best tradition of the Adams family journeyman stonemasons, worked their way from one side of Canada to the other and were in Victoria, British Columbia, with all four sons by then working in the building trade.

In 1893, Frederick Senior was awarded the masonry contract for the construction of the British Columbia Parliament Buildings and sons Fred, Albert and John worked with him on the project. It should have been a career defining project for Frederick, but unfortunately, he had taken on something of a poison chalice, a project that was too large for a man of limited resources. There were labour disputes, Legislative Assembly hearings, delays and stoppages due to lack of capital, and he and the young architect Francis Rattenbury clashed frequently. Frederick came off worst, paying the price for Rattenbury’s underestimation of the cost of the project and then for his rejection of an entire load of sandstone from Koksilah Quarry at Cowichan Station, despite the fact that Frederick, who had been a stonecutter for nearly forty years, believed that only about a sixth of the stone was actually unsuitable.

With the Legislative Assembly siding with Rattenbury, who was evidently doing his damnedest to cover his own backside, and with the architect refusing to release Frederick from the contract, even though it was the former who had moved the goalposts and kept changing his plans, Frederick found himself literally stuck between a rock and a hard place. He was ordered instead to haul thousands of tons of stone by tug and barge from the Haddington Island quarry, which was about 400km further away from Victoria than Cowichan Station and had to pick up the considerable extra expense himself.

There were then issues with getting the stone from Haddington Island and Frederick was so wound up that he physically attacked the clerk of works, threatening to kill him, when he turned up at the quarry to check on how work was progressing. It is clear that Frederick was at the end of his tether and only a week after his assault on the clerk of works, things came to a tragic head.

At 9.30pm, on 22 March 1895, Frederick Adams and six crew members were on board the steamer Velos, which he had hired to bring back yet another load of stone from Haddington Island quarry. The Velos was towing the barge Pilot, which had 24 quarry workers on board. After many delays, the Velos left Victoria harbour several hours late, and apparently at the insistence of Frederick who, threatened by legal action, was under immense pressure to collect the stone and return to Victoria with it.

Unfortunately, the Velos soon found itself in the midst of a gale and very heavy seas and after about an hour and a half the captain made the decision to turn and head back for port. However, turning around with a heavily dragging barge in tow, whilst in the midst of a storm was to prove too much for the tug. As the Daily Colonist reported two days later,

“It was just after Captain Anderson had reached the decision to return that the accident occurred. The captain was himself at the wheel, and the steamer had been put hard over on the port, when suddenly she refused to answer her helm, and almost immediately was caught broadside by a terrific sea and swamped.

Then almost before the extent of the accident proper could be guessed at, the steamer crashed broadside on the ledge of rocks on which the surf was breaking, and the barge, having caught a fierce gust of wind, was coming down like an engine of death to complete the destruction of the hapless steamer.

After that it was a record of terrible suffering for two of the seven aboard the Velos; of death for the remaining five.”

Having earlier had words with the captain, Frederick Adams was last seen going down into the galley and then was seen no more. It was believed that he had either become imprisoned in the galley and drowned or that he had been washed overboard. Either way, his body was never found. It was reported that he had only had his will drawn up on the day of his death and this led to some speculation that it had been his intention to not return from the journey to Haddington Island. There were even suggestions that he had never been on the Velos at all.

The Confederation Life Association could not have taken the speculation seriously for, in early July 1895, they paid out $5000 in life insurance to Frederick’s widow Sarah, who wrote to the local newspaper to express her thanks for their very prompt settlement of her claim. Frederick’s business duly passed to Sarah, who entered into an agreement with another firm to complete the construction of the Parliament Buildings.

In February 1898, the Parliament Buildings were officially opened, but Sarah was not there to see it. Even by putting the best part of 5000 miles between them and their unlucky kin in Grimsby, the Adams of British Columbia could not escape the family propensity for tragedy following tragedy.

On 26 May 1896, Sarah and son Frederick were travelling on a streetcar in Victoria on their way to celebrate the birthday of Queen Victoria. The streetcar was hopelessly overcrowded, with more than 140 men, women and children on board and as it crossed Point Ellice Bridge, the weight proved too much for the poorly designed and maintained bridge and it crashed through into the upper harbour. Fifty-five people, including Sarah and Frederick, were killed.

The Point Ellice Bridge tragedy could have been even worse for the family, as John Henry Adams and his wife Elizabeth narrowly missed out on being aboard the streetcar. However, John Henry and Elizabeth had already suffered a tragedy of their own only six months earlier when their two-year old daughter Annie Gertrude pulled a kettle of boiling water from the stove, scalding herself and dying from shock two days later. It is perhaps no surprise that John Henry, Elizabeth and their other four children moved cross country to Perth, Ontario, away from the scene of so much family tragedy. John Henry worked as a carpenter and later as a photographer in Perth. He died in 1953.

Brother Ambrose and his family also moved away, first to Vancouver, then later to America, initially in Detroit, Michigan, before settling in Los Angeles in the 1930s. He saw out his days there, continuing to work as a contractor, now building homes, and died in 1956. His son Ambrose junior joined him in the family calling. Well, what else would an Ambrose Adams do?!

Albert Norton Adams married Margaret Grant, originally from Scotland, in Canada in 1892. They visited Scotland after the marriage and daughter Alberta was born in Aberlour, Banffshire, but they had returned by British Columbia by the time their second child Alma was born.

Like his younger brother, Albert also moved to Vancouver and in an 1899 directory, he is listed as a bricklayer, next to contractor Ambrose. Sadly, Albert died in 1912 at the age of only 44, whilst in Pasadena, California. His body was brought back to Vancouver to be buried and the insignia on his grave monument shows that he was a mason, the lodge variety that is, as well as a stonemason.

The Adams family had stone in their blood and that blood was spilled because of stone. They left behind them buildings that are a testament to their skill as stonemasons, although sadly St Andrew’s Church, during the construction of which Ambrose Adams lost his life, no longer exists, having been demolished after less than a century in use.

Other monuments to their abilities do still exist however, including the Parliament Buildings (pictured left) in Victoria and an article published in the Times Colonist in January 2018 about the building indicates that Frederick Adams was indeed a victim of Francis Rattenbury’s whims, rather than the cause of his own downfall.

Although two years too late to matter to Frederick, in 1897 the courts decided that there was nothing wrong with the sandstone from the Koksilah Quarry Company and that it had been rejected only because Rattenbury preferred the lighter-coloured stone from Haddington Island. The company were duly paid the full amount of the contract and the stone was used to build a local hospital.

The irony of Rattenbury’s insistence on lighter-coloured stone is that the Parliament Buildings have not been cleaned since they were built and are now covered with “the accumulation of 120 years of soot and dirt from the burning of wood and coal in homes and industries, and the burning of heavy oils at the nearby marine facilities”. If colour was the only consideration, the Parliament Buildings might just as well have been built entirely of the Koksilah sandstone!

The Adams family must have felt great anger towards Yorkshire-born Rattenbury, but it would take decades for Karma to catch up with the man who had made Frederick’s life a living hell. Although widely regarded as a fine architect, his private life was a mess and he was shunned by former clients and associates and forced to leave Victoria because of his mistreatment of his first wife and the flaunting of his affair with the woman half his age who would later become his second wife.

Having returned to England, Rattenbury’s marriage began to fall apart and he experienced financial troubles. Then on 23 March 1935, almost forty years to the day since Frederick Adams went down with the Velos, he was viciously attacked with a carpenter’s mallet by his 18-year old chauffeur, who was also his wife’s lover. Rattenbury died four days later and despite being acquitted of involvement in the murder, three months later his widow Alma stabbed herself six times in the breast before throwing herself in a river. Despite being the creator of beautiful buildings, to the end Rattenbury was also a destroyer of other people’s lives and it was perhaps fitting that for more than seventy years, he was buried in an unmarked grave.

Although it is generally the architect who gets the credit for a beautiful building, if it was left to them to construct it, the building would remain merely a set of plans on paper. As the American author and playwright Cormac McCarthy wrote in his play “The Stonemason”,

“The man's labor that did the work is in the work. You can't make it go away. Even if it's paid for it's still there. If ownership lies in the benefit to a man then the mason owns all the work he does in the world and you caint put that claim aside nor quit it and it don't make no difference whose name is on the paper.”

© Rachel Branson (July 2019}

Sources:

• www.timescolonist.com “Comment: B.C.’s legislature presents a dark face to visitors” (Author Ken Johnson) 5 January 2018
• www.ancestry.co.uk
• www.findmypast.co.uk (including British Newspaper Archive)
• www.deceasedonline.com
• www.wikipedia.org
• www.goodreads.com
• www.genuki.org.uk
• https://pointellicehouse.com/