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George Gilbert Scott, jun., and King’s College Chapel
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 April 2016
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In memory of George Gilbert Scott, M.A., F.S.A., Sometime fellow offesus College, Cambridge, who was bom October 8th 1839 and died May 6th 1897. On whose soul Jesus have mercy. So runs the inscription on the tomb in Hampstead Churchyard where, following his mental breakdown and the scandalous activities which alienated both his family and professional colleagues, Sir Gilbert Scott’s eldest son was eventually laid to rest.
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- Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 1994
References
Notes
1 For the significance of Bodley's church, see Hall, Michael, ‘The rise of refinement: G. F. Bodley's All Saints, Cambridge’ in Architectural History, 36 (1993), 103–26 Google Scholar. As an undergraduate, Scott naturally took a close interest in the restoration of the Chapel carried out, after initial controversy, by Bodley after 1864. Because of the slow progress of the work, Scott was asked to replace Bodley as architect, but, in a letter to the Master, the Revd E. H. Morgan, 29 February 1876, he declined, writing that ‘it could not but be viewed by people generally as in some degree a slight upon him and evidence of want of confidence, and although it is perfectly open to the College to act as they think fit, it is not, I think, open to me to profit by the dismissal of my friend’ (Jesus College Archives).
2 ‘New Lamps for Old’ in The Times for 26 March 1875 (further correspondence on the controversy was published in the newspaper on 29 and 31 March and 1 April 1875); Pembroke College Register for 16 March 1875 (Pembroke College Archives). For a wider discussion of Victorian restorations in Cambridge see Stamp, Gavin, ‘The Art of Leaving Things Alone’, Cambridge Review, 99 (28 January 1977), 72–76.Google Scholar
3 Waterhouse to the Master, 17 February 1879 (Pembroke College Archives).
4 Scott to C. H. Prior (brother of the architect E. S. Prior), Treasurer of Pembroke College, 28 March 1879 (Pembroke College Archives).
5 Scott to Prior, 16 January 1879, and 26 April 1880 (Pembroke College Archives).
6 An Essay on the History of English Church Architecture prior to the Separation of England from the Roman Obedience (London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1881), pp. 180–86.Google Scholar
7 Ibid., p. 186.
8 Ibid., p. 111. For Scott's other opinions and earlier writings, see the Cambridge Ph.D. thesis of 1978 on the architect by the present writer, which is to be published by the Cambridge University Press.
9 Carter, Thomas John Proctor, King's College Chapel: Notes on its History and Present Condition (London and Cambridge, 1867).Google Scholar
10 Ibid., p. 184. Carter noted that both Henry Maiden, as he described in his Account of King's College-Chapel in Cambridge of 1769, and James Essex had observed this weathering of the timber.
11 Dr Francis Woodman observes that no major scaffolding was erected inside the Chapel in the nineteenth century and that the restoration of the roof would not have required expensive internal scaffolding, but the rebuilding of the organ by Hill in 1859 and its repair in 1876 could, however, have afforded closer inspection of the vaulting shafts.
12 Pevsner, N., Cambridgeshire (Harmondsworth, 1970), p. 105 Google Scholar. This claim was first made in the first edition of 1954 but in connection with Sir Gilbert Scott, whom Pevsner then mistakenly believed had been responsible for the Essay despite the fact that the book was published three years after his death.
13 Willis, R. and Clark, J. W., The Architectural History of the University of Cambridge, 4 vols (Cambridge, 1886), 1: 494–95 Google Scholar. The discussion of the vault and vaulting shafts was presumably by Willis, althoug in the Preface (p. xxii), Clark stated that when Willis died, ‘the history of the chapel had hardly been begun’. Dr Woodman observes that Willis's ‘cutting back’ of the redundant vaulting shafts could not possibly have been carried out (see note 16 below). Willis's treatise ‘On the Construction of the Vaults of the Middle Ages’ in the Transactions of the Royal Institute of British Architects, 1, pt. 2 (1842), does not refer to the vaulting shaft anomaly in the discussion of the King's fan vault, nor is it noted in F. Mackenzie's Observations on the Construction of the Roof of King's College Chapel of 1840. Similarly, Carter's King's College Chapel of 1867 does not refer to this problem and also maintains that the Chapel was built ‘almost exactly’ as originally designed. As Scott seems to have assisted Carter, this might suggest that Scott made the discovery at a later date.
14 Willis and Clark, 1:629.
15 George Gilbert Scott to John Willis Clark, 26 February 1881, in the Modern Archives of King's College. The book referred to was presumably Cambridge: Brief Historical and Descriptive Notes by Clark which was first published the same year, 1881.
16 Woodman, Francis, The Architectural History of King's College Chapel (London, 1986)Google Scholar. Like Pevsner at first, Dr Woodman in his book confuses Scott with his father and perhaps gives insufficient credit to Scott's Essay, for when he observes that the postulated cutting back of the redundant members on the vaulting shafts was, pace Willis and Clark, a physical impossibility, he ignores the fact that Scott, like Woodman himself (p. 62), argued instead that the choir vaulting shafts were an entirely new construction in the second phase of building.
17 This statement on p. 182 of the Essay was an implicit criticism, in particular, of attributions in Carter's documentary history and one which suggests that the latter's 1867 book does not necessarily record all of Scott's opinions or observations. Mr Graham Chainey points out that Scott's failure to mention Simon Clerk or John Wastell (p. 185) is odd as Wastell's contracts were printed by Maiden in 1769.
18 Printed as Appendix A of Carter's King's College Chapel, p. 82, and dated 2 January 1866. The detailed research required for establishing the original position of the high altar forward of the the east wall together with a recommendation to keep Cornelius Austin's seventeenth-century panelling (but to replace Essex's eighteenth-century Gothick wainscot by hangings or tapestry) imply the younger Scott's authorship of this document. No style was recommended for the proposed free-standing reredos, but it ‘must be of material and art proportioned to the magnificence of the building’.
19 Mr Chainey notes that among the ‘Chapel Vouchers’ is a letter from Scottjun. dated 25 May 1866, enclosing a revised design for the gates, but also that his father wrote the following year, ‘I think I have exhausted my inventive powers in the two designs I have given, but if you will return them, I will do my best to strike out another.’
20 Minutes for 9 February 1864, in the relevant Congregation Book in the College Muniments.
21 Minutes for 5 March 1867, 1 March and 7 June 1870, in the Congregation Book for 1867-75. Byam left £119 15s. yd.; Wayte had given £70. Scott's earlier drawings, together with most of those of the executeu design, were presumably all destroyed in the fire that gutted his chambers in 12 Cecil Street, off the Strand, on 3 September 1870. The four drawings of the King's standards that survive among the George Gilbert Scottjun. collection in the British Architectural Library (along with a rubbing of details of the King's lectern) are all working details of lettering and the friezes prepared for Barkentin at his workshop at 291, Regent Street, London.
22 Carter, , King's College Chapel, p. 79.Google Scholar
23 Scott, G. G., ‘The “Queen Anne” Style’ in Personal and Professional Recollections, original MS, vol. 5, p. 29 Google Scholar, in the British Architectural Library. As published in 1879 on p. 374, this passage was altered by the editor, George Gilbert Scottjun.
24 Scott to Richard Okes, 15 November 1871 and 24 January 1872, in the College Muniments.
25 A printed invitation from Barkentin, sent to the Provost of King's with Scott's compliments, now in the University Library and brought to my attention by Mr Chainey. Dated 6 March 1872, this states that the standards ‘are designed in accordance with the style of the Chapel. No pains or expense has been spared in the execution, and they are carried out with unusual care and completeness’, that they were on exhibition until 20 March, and that ‘Mr BARKENTIN, who is Goldsmith to H.R.H. the PRINCESS of WALES, is also, by Special Appointment, Goldsmith to the Ecclesiological Society.’
26 Scott's Account Book preserved at the British Architectural Library. Minutes of the meeting held on 9 December 1871, in the Congregation Book for 1867-75.
27 Mr Chainey notes that after Sir Gilbert Scott's death, his executor submitted a bill in 1879 for £105 ‘to preparing design for Reredos, designs for rearrangements of the stalls’ but it is not clear whether these were done in connection with the 1866 Report or subsequently. The Bursar, however, replied that, ‘I am not aware that Sir G. Scott was ever consulted upon the subject of a Reredos — the College has never to my recollection had a proposal of the kind formally placed before it. Some years ago Mr Burges was privately engaged by some of the Fellows to submit a design, but nothing further has been done in the matter.’
28 Sir Gilbert Scott's drawings, signed ‘Geo Gilbert Scott’, are preserved among the College Muniments, along with Street's and Burges's 1877 designs.
29 This most controversial recasting, ostensibly undertaken to install Rubens's painting of The Adoration of the Magi in the sanctuary, involved not only the removal in 1964 of both Blow's Edwardian woodwork and the seventeenth-century panelling by Cornelius Austin but also the lowering of the floor in 1968, resulting in the destruction of evidence of the original levels determined by the Founder's Will of 1448 and of the Tudor brick arches which supported the floor as well as the (unrecorded) exhumation of burials from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The architects Maguire & Murray, who subsequently resigned over the issue, had prepared a report on the complex history of the east end of the Chapel but this was suppressed when the college decided in 1965 to place the Rubens beneath the east window. For this extraordinary phase in the building's history — as ruthless and as reprehensible as anything that occurred in Pembroke College in the early 1870s — see Chainey, Graham, ‘A season for crying in the chapel’ in The Independent, 24 December 1992, and subsequent correspondence published in the newspaper on 30 December 1992Google Scholar. Scott's standards, along with the panelling, are said to be in store with the contractors, Rattee & Kett, in Cambridge.
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