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James Mackenzie Roberts was my great-great grandfather. He was baptised at Upwey, Dorset on 2 March 1824, the eldest son of Lazarus and Mary Roberts. Lazarus was described as ‘Lieut RN’.
His younger brothers William Pollard and Henry Came both attended the Royal Naval School in St Giles Camberwell, south London, a boarding school for the sons of officers in the Royal Navy and Royal Marines. So it is quite possible that James and his brother Charles Dunrich (who joined the merchant navy) were also schooled here: James would have been nine when the school opened in 1833.
Pupils were not ‘designed exclusively for the Navy’ and, unlike Charles, James never went to sea. Instead he trained as an architect and surveyor. He may have begun his training at the school, as did one of his contemporaries, the Irish-Canadian architect Kivas Tully (born 1820), who apparently studied architecture at the school before going on to a four-year training in architecture in Limerick.
But why did James enter this profession?
One clue might be the architects and surveyors in his mother’s family, the Fookses – James Mackenzie Fooks (1780–1824), his son Charles Berjew Fooks (1804–79) and Charles Berjew’s son, Charles Edward Fooks (1829–1907) all worked as architects or surveyors.
The family historian Graham Fooks claims that Charles Edward Fooks, a close contemporary of James, worked in his father’s survey office south of the river at Camberwell (probably Camberwell New Road). We know James was also in south London at this time, so did his training in architecture and surveying include time spent in the Fookses’ offices during the 1840s? The records leave no clue to that.
It is also of note that, according to the Royal Blue Book, between 1844 (possibly earlier) and 1851, Charles Berjew Fooks, surveyor, had offices at 1 Serle Street, Lincoln’s Inn.
This sketch by Francis Grant (1803–78), in the Museum of New Zealand, may well be a preparatory sketch for an oil portrait of Henry Arthur Hunt. It is captioned (I think) ‘A gentleman & he want 200 (pounds?) / His name is Henry Hunt (Esq.? Government?)’. It could have been done in the 1860s, when Grant was president of the Royal Academy and Hunt was negotiating the prospective construction of new galleries and museums.
Henry Arthur Hunt
Whether or not James spent time with the Fookses, we do know from his entry in the Architects Engineers & Building Trades Directory (1868) that he was a pupil of Henry Arthur Hunt.
Fourteen years James’s senior, Hunt (1810–89) was a leading example of an emerging figure in the building world: that of the quantity surveyor. This involved precise advance measurement of work before construction began, framing competitions and recommending reputable builders: an indication of James’s eventual area of specialisation.
Hunt’s name is linked with many public buildings and road and rail projects in London from the 1830s onwards, including government offices in Whitehall and the new Houses of Parliament.
Hunt had, according to one obituary, a reputation for ‘extreme brevity and dryness of speech in connection with matters of business, though it is said he was an excellent and entertaining talker in private and in congenial company’. He was considered by some to be a little devious in his business practices.
Palace New Road
When the 1841 census was taken, on 6 June, the seventeen-year-old James – his age rounded down to fifteen – was already described as a surveyor, rather than a scholar or pupil. Until later in the century, little distinction was made between architect and surveyor and the terms were often used interchangeably: so in the 1841 census James is a surveyor; but in 1847, when he married, he is described as an architect and in the 1851 census he is listed as both.
Top: Palace New Road and surrounding area, 1850s. Grissell & Peto are marked between Belvedere Street and York Road.
Bottom: Kelly’s Directory, 1841
The 1841 census lists James at Palace New Road, Lambeth, running across the marshy ground just south of Westminster Bridge Road, near Lambeth Palace gardens, on a site later occupied by St Thomas’s Hospital (where in 1890 James would be admitted with a fatal hernia).
He was one of two lodgers at 29 New Palace Road, the other being an Alfred Squire, tailor. The landlord, John Matthews (died 1853), was listed as a clerk in the census but elsewhere his occupation was coal merchant at Belvedere Coal Wharf, half a mile along the busy, noisy, working riverbank, downstream between Charing Cross (Hungerford) footbridge and Waterloo Bridge (more or less where the Royal Festival Hall is now).
Palace New Road was a street of builders, merchants and manufacturers: George Baker, Haward & Nixon, John Fell Christy & Co., Henry K. Hemming. The builder Thomas Grissell also had sawmill premises in Palace New Road. Until 1847 Grissell was in a partnership with Samuel Morton Peto, who was certainly known to James (see below).
Palace New Road, or New Palace Road, 1866. In the centre can be seen the Stangate Saw Mills, premises of Thomas Grissell, of Grissell & Peto, who operated between 1830 and 1847 and built the Houses of Parliament. Next on the left is Ha[y]ward & Nixon, builders. Photograph by William Strudwick.
Across the river on the north bank of the Thames the shell of Charles Barry’s neo-gothic Palace of Westminster (Houses of Parliament) rose from the ashes of the fire that had destroyed the original building seven years earlier. Reconstruction began in 1840 and took over thirty years to complete. Henry Hunt provided Barry with the estimated costs and on Barry’s recommendation he was appointed surveyor. Grissell & Peto were the building contractors.
Grissell & Peto were round the corner from Palace New Road, in Belvedere Street, and Thomas Grissell’s sawmill in the very same street as James’s lodgings. So it is just possible that James worked for Grissell & Peto.
Interestingly, a report on the collapse of Greenwich Pier in May 1843 reads that ‘Mr Roberts from the firm of Messrs Grissell & Peto and several other practical men, on behalf of the different parties connected with the pier’ were brought in to inspect the damage. James was barely twenty years old, but could this be him?
Either way, the association between Grissell, Peto and Hunt might well explain why my great-great grandfather was living in this part of Lambeth. James’s lodgings were also a five-minute walk from Hunt’s and Peto’s residences both in York Road.
There would have been much for the young James to do in bustling Lambeth, when not toiling in Hunt’s office or perhaps at Grissell & Peto. Barge-houses and wharfs lining the busy river frontage at Stangate Stairs (by coincidence, one was called Roberts Boat House) may have provided the opportunity for recreational hire. He surely paid visits to the famed Vauxhall pleasure gardens, just a short walk along the river from his lodgings. Although in decline by the 1840s, Vauxhall was still very much a middle-class pleasure ground. At three shillings or so, entrance offered attractions day and night, inside and out, from fireworks and pageants to refreshment halls and masked balls.
James would have been too young in 1841 for the inns on Palace New Road – the Mitre, the Two Sawyers – but perhaps he visited the horse circus – the ‘hippodrama’ – at Astley’s Royal Amphitheatre, a few paces from his door, on the corner of Westminster Bridge Road? Owned by the circus proprietor and performer Andrew Ducrow, this must have been an alluring venue he would have passed each day on his way to Hunt’s office.
Two days after the census was taken, in the early hours of 8 June, as James slept, fire swept through Astley’s, destroying the circus and killing one person. Among the animals rescued was a zebra. Astley’s Royal Amphitheatre did not reopen until 1844: three years after that the celebrated equestrian Pablo Fanque appeared there in his first London show.
By 1847 though, James, now aged twenty-three, had moved house a mile south to 30 West Square in the parish of St George, Southwark.
West Square
Built in the 1780s, West Square was – and still is – an elegant square of three‑storey town houses off the busy thoroughfare of St George’s Road and adjacent to the infamous Bethlem asylum (now the Imperial War Museum). From here it was a short walk up Great Surrey Street to Albion Place, by Blackfriars Bridge, where James’s brother Henry lodged in 1851 during his time at the census office.
James may well have taken on the lease to number 30 from James May, who was listed at West Square in 1841. May was a coal merchant, like John Matthews, James’s landlord at Palace New Road. Was there a connection? Maybe Belvedere Coal Wharf?
Although Southwark was not a particularly salubrious area, West Square comprised mainly professional households. James’s neighbours included legal attorneys, medical agents, several police constables and, next door, a ladies’ boarding school.
Perhaps James witnessed the Chartist rally on Monday, 10 April 1848, when several thousand radicals and reformists marched over the river and down the Walworth Road, passing close to West Square, and on towards their destination at Kennington Common, where they gathered to be the subjects of the first photograph of a public event ever taken.
Many civilians were recruited as special constables that day. Records show that the magistrate of the Thames Police Court appointed 318 special constables for the parish of St George, so it is possible James may have been among their number.
In the summer of 1851 the Great Exhibition opened in Hyde Park. Henry Arthur Hunt had been responsible for its planning and construction (letters from Hunt to Edgar Bowring, secretary to the Royal Commission for the Exhibition, can be read here). Even if he had no input himself to this vast building project, surely James visited the Exhibition at the Crystal Palace, to view Joseph Paxton’s revolutionary architecture.
[Side note: Much later, fifty years after James had vacated 30 West Square, the house – or part of it, as it was now divided into flats – was occupied by Kate Hill (1870–1916?), a music-hall star in the 1890s, known on stage as Kitty Fairdale. She was the aunt of Charlie Chaplin, who also lived in West Square (at number 39) for a while before America and fame beckoned. At this time Kate Hill’s rooms at number 30 were apparently known as ‘The Kitteries’. So I suppose it is quite likely Charlie Chaplin went through the same front door as my great-great grandfather had fifty years earlier.]
Marriage
In the 1840s, railways were starting to carve up south London and James would have witnessed the construction of Waterloo Station in York Road, which delivered the South Western Railway to an impressive new terminus, raised above the surrounding marshland on a series of arches.
Within the next decade or so, railways would revolutionise life for the mid Victorians. The Eastern Counties Railway, extended to Colchester in 1843, provided a swift way for James to travel back to East Anglia. Although his father Lazarus and younger siblings had moved to Great Yarmouth in 1845, James must have kept close links with the Essex town of Brightlingsea, as at some point he became engaged to a local girl, Phoebe Simson Maria Mason, the eldest daughter of James Mason of Moverons farm, Brightlingsea.
They married on 14 January 1847, at Brightlingsea, and an announcement appeared in the Ipswich Journal on 16 January.
All Saints Brightlingsea, 14 January 1847, James Mackenzie ROBERTS, full age, bachelor, architect, 30 West Sq, St George the Martyr, Southwark, father Lazarus ROBERTS, Lieutenant Royal Navy, Phoebe Simson Maria MASON, full age, spinster, Brightlingsea, father James MASON, yeoman, by licence, both signed ITPO James MASON, Helen W MASON, Mary Elizabeth W MASON, James MASON junior, Mary Jane TILLETT, L ROBERTS, Emma C TILLETT
Precisely nine months after the wedding their first child, my great grandfather, James Francis Roberts (Frank, to avoid confusion with his father), was born at 30 West Square on 12 October 1847. Phoebe and James remained at West Square for the next few years, during which time they had two more children.
Their first daughter, born at West Square on 29 August 1849, was named Phoebe Simson Maria Roberts, after her mother, but also probably known by her middle name, Maria (‘Aunt Maria’, to my grandmother’s generation).
A second daughter, baptised as Mary Mason Roberts (but registered as Mary Ann Roberts and maybe known within the family as Polly), was born in October 1850, again probably at West Square.
When the census was taken on 30 March 1851 a domestic servant, nineteen-year-old Essex-born Mary A. Sallows, also lived with the family. She is listed as blind, deaf or dumb: it isn’t clear which.
A second son, William Mackenzie Roberts, was born at West Square on 8 May 1852. An announcement of his birth appeared in the Essex Standard of 28 May 1852: the Essex Standard because, by May 1852, James and Phoebe and their expanding young family had left London’s urban confines for rural northeast Essex.
Building London
James continued to work in London after the family moved to Essex, although whatever projects he was engaged in at this time are largely unknown. There was much construction work going on around West Square in the 1840s. For example, The Builder for July 1845 announced that a committee had been formed to raise funds to satisfy the ‘great want of schools and church accommodation in Southwark and the adjoining parishes of Bermondsey, Lambeth and Newington’.
So there would have been a need locally for architects and surveyors. In July 1851, James drew up plans in support of an application to convert a former philanthropic chapel in St George’s Road, Southwark into the parish church of St Jude. It would seem however that James’s plans for this were rejected or abandoned. Interestingly, James and Phoebe’s daughter Mary was baptised at St Jude’s on her second birthday in October 1852 (although none of the other children were, as far as I can see).
In 1856, J.M. Roberts of Dedham was listed as a one of five Essex agents for the Western Life Insurance and Annuity Society, of 3 Parliament Street, London. This is an unexpected detail, although Henry Hunt’s private practice, in partnership with Charles Stephenson (later Hunt, Stephenson & Jones), was at 4 Parliament Street, so that might explain the connection.
Also in 1856, Hunt was made the consulting surveyor to Her Majesty’s Office of Works, as reported in The Builder:
We may take this opportunity to mention that Mr. Hunt has been appointed government surveyor of works and public buildings (without being required to give up his private practice), in the place of Mr. Inman, resigned.
Despite this public appointment, Hunt and Stephenson were responsible for designing several large buildings in London in the 1850s. One such project was a row of lodging houses in Vauxhall Row, Lambeth, erected for the Duchy of Cornwall in 1856. Was James involved in this?
The Builder announced, in July 1851, the appointment of two district surveyors in Marylebone. Among the unsuccessful candidates was a Mr Roberts. Was this James? He applied for similar posts later in the decade (see below). They were generally filled by architects and surveyors who were authorised to collect fees for passing plans submitted by others for buildings in their district. Such surveyorships were much sought after as the work could be combined with private practice. There were fifty-six district surveyors in London in 1860.
Over half the architects in Kelly’s 1861 street and trade directory described themselves as architect and surveyor, as James frequently did. Such men were more correctly quantity surveyors, a class of professional that arose from the pressure of the competitive tendering system pioneered by the likes of Henry Hunt.
James certainly appears to have retained his professional relationship with Hunt well into his career. However, apart from his entry in the Architects Engineers & Building Trades Directory, the only place I have found their names mentioned together is in the Bury Free Press, 6 August 1859.
This Suffolk newspaper reported a meeting of the Bury Paving Committee and among the issues raised was the question of applications for the office of surveyor. James was one of three candidates being considered for the post, his address given as 52 Mortimer Street, Cavendish Square. The other two applicants were local men.
The testimonials of the first-named gentleman [James] were those upon which he based his application for County Surveyorship of Essex, in 1856, and were from gentlemen of very high standing, including Sir S.M. Peto, Mr Hunt, Surveyor to the Government Board of Works, &c.
This report is interesting, as it emphasises James’s professional connections, naming two men who had provided testimonials three years prior to this, in 1856.
The names of Hunt and Peto on James’s application would have impressed the recruitment panel. Sir Samuel Morton Peto (1809–89) was a prominent London builder and entrepreneur and, as we have seen already, one half of Grissell & Peto in the 1840s . He was also a Liberal member of parliament (initially for Norwich) and latterly Baronet of Somerleyton Hall in Suffolk.
Morton Peto really made his name in the railways though, expanding the Eastern Counties network into Suffolk and Norfolk and also building lines, bridges and viaducts for other railway companies across England and Europe. A list can be seen here.
‘Mr Hunt’ was, of course, Henry Arthur Hunt. He had worked closely with Morton Peto, who, claimed Hunt, ‘uniformly employed me in preference to any other professional man’.
The position of county surveyor for Essex, alluded to in the newspaper report, did indeed become vacant in 1856 and a shortlist of five candidates was drawn up, from a longer list of fifty-eight applicants. On this occasion James was not on the shortlist though and the post was eventually filled by Henry Stock of Duke Street, London Bridge, who remained Essex county surveyor until the turn of the century. According to his entry in the Directory of British Architects, he was another of Henry Arthur Hunt’s former draughtsmen.
Of the three applicants for the post of Bury town surveyor in 1859, in James ‘they had one gentleman, a county surveyor – a very scientific one as far as prisons and other public buildings, and bridges, were concerned’. However ultimately – perhaps inevitably – the job went to one of the local men, John Croft.
Nevertheless, all this provides a tantalising clue to the kind of work James must have been doing at this time as a surveyor. Most likely his background was in the measurement and costing of public buildings in London, maybe under Hunt and possibly Peto too. He may have also have worked on railway construction.
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