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My great-great grandfather, James Mackenzie Roberts, does not appear in Blower’s Architects, Surveyors, Engineers and Builders Directory of 1860, which lists London and provincial architects and surveyors, but we know from his correspondence during the Essex church restorations that from the mid-1850s into the early 1860s his headed notepaper bore a London address, as well as his Dedham address at Heath Cottage. The London address was 52A Mortimer Street, Cavendish Square (north of Oxford Street), ‘one door from Great Portland Street’.
His brother, the physician and surgeon William Pollard Roberts, also appears in the Medical Register at 52A Mortimer Street between 1858 and 1867, but like James, who was in Dedham on census night 1861, he was also elsewhere when the census was taken. Presumably W.P. and James lodged in London during the week: census night was a Sunday.
For James, the three-hour commute would have been made by train from Ardleigh or Manningtree to Bishopsgate station. From 1874, a new terminus for the Great Eastern Railway was opened at Liverpool Street, with a cavernous train shed designed by Edward Wilson (1820–77).
Mortimer Street, 1867 (MAPCO)
The Law Courts
It is not clear what work my great-great grandfather was doing at this time, after his restoration of Dedham church in 1862. According to brief notes left by his granddaughter Dorothy Roberts (my grandmother’s cousin), he ‘designed part of the London Law Courts’. This would be the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand. The principal architect of the Courts was George Edmund Street (1824–81), whose winning design led to his appointment in May 1868. (See an account of the competition here.)
In his capacity as consulting surveyor for the Office of Works, Henry Arthur Hunt, under whom James had been a pupil, was largely concerned with the costing and selection of a site for, and the erection of, the Law Courts. Hunt, knighted in 1876 and ‘never afraid of challenging the architectural heavyweights of the day’, was critical of Street’s plans and disagreements arose over the location (The Architect, 14 August 1869, pp. 80–81. See also David B. Brownlee, The Law Courts, p. 180).
I am not sure James actually designed any of the Courts himself, as Dorothy Roberts claimed – this seems unlikely – but it is certainly possible he worked on its construction under Hunt in some capacity. According to the author M.H. Port, he is not listed as a direct employee of the Office of Works, however; nor can he be found among the personnel in the British Imperial Calendar during this period. But could he have worked for Hunt’s private firm, or for one of the other companies involved? Hunt’s estimator and surveyor for the acquisition of the site was George Pownall (1808–93), of the architects and surveyors Wigg and Pownall, so perhaps James worked for him? He was certainly a quantity surveyor at this time.
There were innumerable draughtsmen, surveyors and clerks of works contributing to the Courts and over 1,200 plans and drawings exist and I have not inspected them. The names of many of the individuals involved in the design and construction of this vast project are no doubt lost to history.
[One on record is Lewis Karslake (1844–1912), who according to his DBA entry was another associate of Henry Hunt, working in Hunt’s office for five years. For nine months he also assisted John Raphael Brandon (1817–77) of nearby Clements Inn on his proposed (and rejected) drawings for the Law Courts.]
I am not sure how Dorothy Roberts knew that her grandfather ‘designed part of the London Law Courts’ (she had only just turned six when he died, so presumably not at first-hand) – probably this was a family story passed down to her by her father, James’s son Arthur. But what evidence is there that James was in any way involved?
Really, the only clue I have found is that in 1868, the year The Builder announced Street’s winning bid, James’s entry in Wyman’s Architects Engineers & Building Trades Directory reads:
ROBERTS, James Mackenzie, Heath cottage, Dedham, Colchester, Essex; and 15 Furnival’s inn, London. – Pupil of H. A. Hunt, esq. – His works comprise Restoration of Dedham and Peldon churches, Essex, and various other works.
James’s listing in Wyman’s directory is the only place I have found him at Furnival’s Inn, but it would appear he had an address here, for a time in the 1860s at least. This building was just minutes from both the Carey Street site chosen by Hunt for the Courts and also a short walk from the offices of surveyors Wigg and Pownall in Bedford Row, who as mentioned were involved in the Courts’ construction.
One interesting detail is that the bell projecting from the southeastern tower of the Law Courts was set going in 1883. A feature in the Illustrated London News (29 December) shows James Gandy, another quantity surveyor with whom James could have had dealings, severing the cord that holds the pendulum (see here).
Quantity Surveyor?
In truth, it would appear my great-great grandfather had rather limited work as a self-employed professional, after the two Essex church restorations in the early 1860s.
In London, James was probably more of a quantity surveyor than an architect, although he continued on occasion to describe himself as both (as well as the more specific ‘architect’s surveyor’).
No reputable builder of the 1860s and 70s would tender unless quantities were supplied by a recognised quantity surveyor: a trend largely established by Henry Hunt. This required full working-drawings and specifications from the architect. The surveyor’s charges, usually of around 2 per cent of the construction quote, were added to the builder’s tender, a practice that often attracted criticism (e.g. see The Builder, October 1870).
Such tenders were published in professional magazines such as Building News and The Builder, but the only one I can find mentioning James was for a house in Avenue Road in December 1864, designed by Joel Foster Earle, whose address was also 15 Furnival’s Inn (see here).
Clerk of Works?
James could possibly have had employment as a clerk of works, a role that encompassed inspecting construction work and materials and ensuring value for money for the client. The Office of Works, under Henry Hunt, employed clerks of works to oversee large public building projects (such as the Law Courts).
According to Building News, in 1887 there were nine permanent first-class clerks of works at the Office, each of whom was provided with accommodation, and sixteen second-class, on annual salaries of up to £220. The Office of Works specified the necessary qualifications for a clerk of works to include ‘geometrical drawing, knowledge of materials, designing simple buildings, with specifications and estimates, and working drawings of details of carpenter’s and mason’s work, taking out quantities from plans, measuring and valuing buildings, and modern sanitation’.
Candidates for such a post needed to be over the age of twenty-eight (which James had turned in 1852) and should have been employed for at least five years in the superitendence of buildings and be able to produce satisfactory proof of their efficiency and practical knowledge (Building News, 5 August 1887).
One example of a clerk of works’ role is in a lengthy report in The Builder (1 May 1874), outlining the design and construction of the St Stephen’s Club, a grand structure in the French Renaissance style erected near the Houses of Parliament. [It is of note that Henry Arthur Hunt was later implicated in a mini-scandal, surrounding the money he personally received for the buying and selling of land for the St Stephen’s Club. Questions were asked in the House (Hansard 2 July 1875).]
The report acknowledges ‘Mr. James Roberts, the clerk of works, who courteously described to us every part of the building’. I would like to think this refers to my great-great grandfather, but there was another, older man in London also called James Roberts, a Welshman described in the censuses as an ‘architect and clerk of works’, and I suspect it refers to him. In 1881 this man was at 17 Heygate Street, Elephant and Castle. Coincidentally this was just a stone’s throw from my great-great grandfather’s lodgings in Walworth,.
Walworth
So, to Walworth.
In the 1870 London Post Office Directory, James is listed as a surveyor (not architect), lodging in this part of south London, at ‘35 Olney Terrace, Walworth SE & Dedham, Essex’, a mile from his West Square home of the 1850s.
Olney Terrace was part of Olney Street, a tributary of Walworth Road. It was laid out as a row of middle‑class terraces in the 1840s and was widened in 1865. By the 1870s, the social tenor of this neighbourhood was changing: the clerks and engineers making way for labourers and artisans. Indeed, Charles Booth, in his monumental survey into London life and labour (carried out between 1886 and 1903), described it as follows:
Olney St is a continuation of Lorrimore St and used to be better than it[;] but now, since the rebuilding of Lorrimore St, it is decidedly poorer.
Booth coloured it pink on his map, denoting it as ‘fairly comfortable. Good ordinary earnings.’
Olney Street ran down from the Walworth Road tramlines, under the railway, broadening out into a small triangular area, before narrowing again into Lorrimore Street. What is left of it is now called Fielding Street. It was originally divided into terraces – St John’s Terrace, Olney Terrace, St Mary’s Terrace, Rufus Terrace – but in October 1869 the Illustrated London News announced that Olney Street was to be ‘re-numbered and the subsidiary names abolished’ .
Number 35 Olney Terrace, which stood opposite Montpelier Street (now demolished), must have been renumbered 74 Olney Street, as James was listed at this address as a surveyor in the 1871 census, the lodger of James Stanford, a joiner. He was here until about 1875.
In November 1870 announcements appeared in the Solicitors Journal and Reporter that the freehold of several plots in the street, including numbers 66 to 96, ‘even numbers only’, had been sold for £200 each. This may have been surplus property of the London Chatham & Dover Railway Company, the financial advisor for which was none other than Sir Morton Peto, whose name had been linked with James as far back as 1841.
James may have taken the train into the city from Walworth Station, whose platforms were over Olney Street. The regular tumble of commuters down the stairs was known as the ‘Walworth Shoot’. This image from 1876.
The south London James would have known was bustling with small factories, workshops and trades of all kind. Lodgers from the lower-middle and working classes and families who had often migrated from other inner-city shambles all squeezed into its bricks and mortar.
James’s addresses in the 1870s and 1880s were unusual for a professional architect or surveyor of the day, who may well have lived in Walworth in 1860 but would be expected to reside at the more affluent Norwood or Sydenham by 1880.
If an architect or surveyor were involved in a local estate, he might appear in title-deeds or in other records of such estates. But there is no mention of James anywhere (nor in these Metropolitan Board of Works plans). It is more likely his work continued to take him into central London, quite possibly as an employee of the Office of Works (which administered the construction of large public buildings), or even the Metropolitan Board of Works (which assumed responsibility for urban improvements such as streets and sewerage).
London’s noisy streets and crowded thoroughfares no doubt seemed chaotic by comparison with Dedham’s rural idyll. When the 1881 census was taken, on the night of Tuesday 3 April, James was at 44 Penton Place, Newington, a few paces from his previous lodgings at Olney Street (only two of his children were left to look after the family home back in Essex). He is described as an ‘architect’s surveyor’, but there is no indication if he was employed or working on his own account.
Surrounded by a typically cosmopolitan mix of neighbours – an oilman, a slater, an Italian artist, a paper agent, an omnibus conductor, a church organist, and few born locally – number 44 Penton Place was the home of the Searby family: Benjamin, a grocer, Sophia, his wife, and their five children.
Penton Place, a century on, in 1977
Also lodging at the large and no doubt bustling four-storey house were two clerks (one unemployed), an upholsterer, a cheesemonger’s dealer and a Scottish civil engineer called William Gow. As Charles Booth succinctly put it in his survey taken in the summer of 1899, Penton Place was home to ‘mechanics, labourers, printers’ clerks; none really poor’.
My great-great grandfather is listed in Essex directories of the late 1880s as a ‘farmer’ at Heath Cottage, and indeed he appears to have acquired several acres of pastoral land in and around Dedham. He presumably continued to work as a surveyor though and to journey back and forth between Dedham and London, but the stress of running a home in Essex whilst maintaining his work in the capital must have begun to take its toll.
In 1884 Gladstone extended the male franchise to lodgers paying at least £10 a year for at least twelve months and so, by 1890, for the first time, James appeared on the electoral register in London. His landlord at Penton Place, Benjamin Searby, died in 1882, so this may have been the reason James moved lodgings, as his address in 1884 was just round the corner, at 7 Edward Street (renamed Cavour Street by the time of Booth’s survey and now no more).
This street was described by Booth as comprising ‘some clerks, mechanics and warehousemen working in the City’. Familiar company. James occupied one room, furnished, on the first floor of the modest two- or three-storey house. The street probably wasn’t the most healthy or hygienic: in 1895 the Wellcome Foundation’s annual report listed it as suffering from ‘offensive gullies’ and ‘stagnant water’.
Most of the rooms in Edward Street and the surrounding roads were let at around five shillings per week but as a ‘professional’, and unlike his immediate neighbours in Edward Street, James paid his rent (of £13) annually. The landlord at number 7 was a furrier’s warehouseman named John Stammers. Also living at the house was thirty-year-old Frederick George Hutchinson – registered on the 1881 census as plain George Hutchinson, a packing-case maker – and his family, wife Bertha and daughters Flora (aged eight) and Edith (five). (This was surely not the George Hutchinson who was a controversial witness in the Whitechapel murders investigation of 1888, and a possible candidate for Jack the Ripper himself?)
Death and Funeral
Following his sixtieth birthday, James drew up his will, which he signed on 8 October 1884, describing himself as an ‘architect’ and naming his eldest daughter Maria as executrix and his son George executor – probably because they were the only two of his children still living at Heath Cottage.
In the middle of March 1890, James fell ill with a painful condition. A local physician, Dr Thomas Wilson Lambert MRCS, of 63 Lambeth Palace Road – only qualified six months but no doubt more than fit for the job – confirmed a strangulated hernia. James was admitted to nearby St Thomas’s Hospital. As his conditioned worsened, his son Arthur – he had no other sons living in London – rushed to his hospital bedside. I expect Arthur sent word back to Dedham – to Maria and George at Heath Cottage and Frank at Bounds Farm – of their father’s perilous ill health.
But within a few days, on Palm Sunday, 30 March 1890, James died, at St Thomas’s Hospital: he was sixty-six years old. Ironically, he died on the very spot he had lodged as a youth, back in 1841. Palace New Road had long been built over and London had changed immeasurably in those fifty years.
Perhaps it was Maria who arranged for her father’s body to be returned to Essex, from where it made its final journey, over the Stour for internment with Phoebe in Brantham churchyard.
James Mackenzie Roberts’s ivy-covered grave in Brantham churchyard, 2019, and the memorial card for his funeral.
On his deathbed, James wrote a codicil to his will, dated 23 March. It was witnessed by his landlord, John Stammers, and the other resident at Edward Street, Frederick George Hutchinson. This codicil revoked the appointment of James’s son George as executor (the reasons for this are unclear as he was still listed as living at Heath Cottage when the census was taken the following year). James also wished his eldest son Frank to inherit ‘the old clock’ and his silver – what became of this?
My great-great grandfather left an estate valued at just under £2,000 to his daughter Maria, although as late as 1919 (probably following George’s death in October that year) my great grandfather Frank was also granted £126 11s 6d from the estate. Frank must also have inherited the large photograph of his grandfather, Lazarus, as this was passed down to Frank’s daughter Lizzie following his death (and eventually to Lizzie’s niece – my aunt – in the 1990s).
It does seem that James’s land was fairly extensive at the time of his death: twenty-three acres according to one acutioneer’s advertisement in 1890. He certainly occupied or owned quite a few plots of land around Heath Cottage. In 1874 according to the Ipswich Journal (25 August), he had successfully bid £29 at a Colchester auction for a ‘pightle’ (an East Anglian name for a small triangular patch of land), which was abutting his property.
There was a flurry of property exchanges between James (or his estate) and various other parties, both before and after his death, notably:
James Mackenzie Roberts of Dedham, architect to Frederick William Mott of Meadowlead, Harrow, Middlesex, 13 June 1888.
William Sidney Calvert of East Bergholt, Suffolk, gent. to James Mackenzie Roberts, 29 December 1890.
James Mackenzie Roberts and wife Phoebe Simson Maria to Henry Sidney Goody of Colchester, gent. [a solicitor in the town], 23 October 1891.
The land in question was held from the manors of Overhall and Netherhall in Dedham, although no specific details are given of which precise plots were acquired or surrendered.
Heath Cottage, the family home, was left to Maria, presumably along with most of its contents. When she moved to London to join her brother Arthur and sister Mary, the house was put up for auction by Sexton & Grimwade on 15 August 1890:
Scope and Content: Cottage; Heath cottage with stabling and 3 acres of paddock; 1 acre of pasture land abutting on May’s Lane; 2 acres of arable and garden land abutting on Louse Lane; garden and orchard land on main road from Dedham to Manningtree; 4 acres of accommodation or building land on main roads from Dedham to Ardleigh and Manningtree; garden piece on road to Manningtree; 9 acres of arable land at High Street, all in Dedham.
George may have remained there for a short while (he is the only occupier according to the 1891 census) – perhaps as a tenant of the new owners. But he was soon gone.
Heath Cottage was home to several people in the twentieth century, but no longer any of the Roberts family. In the late 1940s it was renamed. It is still standing.
Sources
As far as references to my great-great grandfather in directories and periodicals are concerned, they are few and far between.
His entry in Wyman’s Architects Engineers & Building Trades Directory (above) provides some valuable information, although frustratingly neither this directory nor any other has thrown further light on the ‘various other works’.
He was not a member of the Architectural Association or the Royal Institute of British Architects (nor, I suspect, the Clerk of Works Association, founded in 1882), so there are no contemporary mentions of him in any of their publications that I have been able to find.
This, plus the absence of his name from the primary professional journals of the day – The Builder, Building News, The Architect – leads me to believe he was primarily an employee rather than working on his own account.
He listed in the Surveyors’ Institution Transactions, Vol. 15, 1882–3 (page 471) as a Fellow of the Surveyors Institution (later the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors), to which he was elected on 27 March 1882 (membership number 784), his address given as ‘Dedham, near Colchester, Essex’. The appointment was also announced in the Essex Herald and the Chelmsford Chronicle. However his fellowship was seemingly short lived as he had disappeared from the list by 1886.
The 1993 Transactions of the Essex Society for Archaeology and History lists nineteenth-century Essex architects using available sources. When it came to my great-great grandfather it asks:
Is James Medows Roberts of Dedham (1886) the same as James Mackenzie Roberts (1868), and are they both (or either) the same as plain James Roberts (1883)?
I think the answer to this is undoubtedly ‘yes’. Such inconsistencies highlight the haphazard way in which professional and street directories were often compiled.
The article concludes that ‘many of these architects are shadowy figures and are likely to remain so’:
Many of those on the list possibly built nothing under their own name, but spent all their working lives as an assistant in another architect’s office. Others, upon closer examination, turn out to be calling themselves architects when they were really practising as surveyors or estate agents, something which was possible then but which was stopped by the Architects (Registration) Act of 1931.
And the confusion continues: his entry in the more recent Directory of British Architects, 1834–1914 (2nd ed., 2001), which repeats his entry in the 1868 directory, also erroneously gives a Norwich address, as well as Heath Cottage, muddling him with a contemporary architect, James Roberts of King Street, Norwich.
No obituary of my great-great grandfather appeared in any of the professional journals that I have found. I suppose there was no one to alert them to his passing. No East Anglian paper or any of the south London locals carried even a mention of his death. He was soon forgotten, it would seem, even to his own grandchildren and their descendants: until this history.
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