Campbell
Douglas, Architect
Campbell Douglas (14 June 1828-14 April 1910) at Kilbarchan where
his father Robert Douglas was
parish minister. His mother was Janet Monteath. Along with the other
members of the family he was educated up to university level by his
father, and according to his last partner, A N Paterson, attended
classes at the University of Glasgow at the age of about 13 or 14.
In 1842 he was articled to J T Rochead who had just commenced
practice on his own account and in 1843 he 'came out' (left the
Established Church) with his father, joining the newly formed Free
Church, which was to be one of his most important clients in his
early years. In 1847 he left Glasgow to widen his experience at
Durham (presumably with Ignatius Bonomi), Liverpool, Brighton and
Newcastle-upon-Tyne where he worked for John Dobson; and according
to the biographical note in 'Quiz' he also spent some time in
Ireland. In 1855 or 1856 he returned to Glasgow to set up practice
but in his earliest years his practice was mainly in Fife, his elder
brother Robert having set up business as an iron founder and
mechanical engineer in Cupar in 1846, and in Kirkcaldy in 1854. The
practice came into national prominence with the commission for the
Scots Gothic Briggate Free Church in Glasgow and the competition win
for the tall-spired North Leith Free Church, memorable for its
elaborate tracery, in 1859. A marked tendency to attract the best
draughtsmen on the market began with the recruitment of Bruce Jones
Talbert at around the same date.
In the autumn of 1860
Campbell Douglas took into partnership John James Stevenson and
shortly thereafter an Edinburgh branch office was opened at 24
George Street where the top floor of the Edinburgh Life Building was
shared with the stained glass artist and decorator Daniel Cottier,
an arrangement which lasted until about 1865. Stevenson was born in
Glasgow on 24 August 1831, the sixth of ten surviving children of
James Stevenson and his wife Jane Stewart Shannan. The Stevenson
family were originally Ayrshire farmers, but James had settled in
Glasgow and had become a cotton broker. In 1843 James moved to
Jarrow to establish Jarrow Chemical Company. His eldest son James
Cochran Stevenson joined him in the business, and became MP for
South Shields from 1868 to 1895. During that period he also owned
The South Shields Gazette and from 1880 to 1900 he was a member of
the Tyne Improvements Commission ending up as its chairman.
Associated with them in the South Shields businesses were two
further brothers, Alexander and Archibald. John James was educated
first at Glasgow Grammar School, and then at the University of
Glasgow in 1845-48 and Edinburgh Theological College - presumably
the Free Church College - in 1852-54 while his father was based in
Jarrow, and also studied for a time at Tubingen, all with a view to
entering the church: although there is no mention of Tubingen in his
RIBA nomination paper, a marked interest in German architecture was
to be evident in his book House Architecture. His father having
retired to 47 Melville Street, Edinburgh in 1854, John James
returned home, a visit to Italy having induced him to change career
to architecture. In 1856 he was articled to David Bryce, but
transferred to George Gilbert Scott's office in London in 1858
before completing his apprenticeship. In 1860 he undertook a second
visit to Italy, on this occasion a sketching tour in the company of
another assistant in Scott's office, Robert James Johnson, later of
Newcastle.
Although the Briggate and North Leith Church, and
still more excellent Scots Baronial Hartfield showed that Campbell
Douglas had real ability he was thereafter content to take on a more
managerial and job-getting role. Stevenson's first-hand knowledge of
Italy made a big impact on the Glasgow scene with his Italian Gothic
Kelvinside Free Church, quickly followed by Townhead Church on
Garngad Hill where the spire was of French inspiration, a
development which may have been related to the arrival in the office
(c.1862) of William Leiper who had travelled in France and had had
experience in the office of John Loughborough Pearson and William
White in London. Another outstanding draughtsman, John McKean Brydon
joined the practice in the following year (1863) and remained until
1866 when he left for William Eden Nesfield's in London.
John
James Stevenson inherited a substantial shareholding in the Jarrow
Chemical Company on his father's death in 1866. Two years later he
withdrew from his partnership with Douglas for what he described as
'an interval in the practice of my profession' travelling and
writing the book eventually published as House Architecture in 1880.
At the end of it he settled in London in 1870, and late in the
following year he formed a partnership with Edward Robert Robson,
whom he had known in Scott's office and who had, like R J Johnson,
also grown up in County Durham. The break with Douglas was wholly
amicable and relations remained close, Stevenson's office becoming
the stepping-stone to London for many of the most promising
assistants from Campbell Douglas's office throughout the 1870s and
1880s, most notably George Washington Browne, John Marjoribanks
McLaren, William Wallace, William Flockhart and Francis William
Troup. Together Douglas and Stevenson formed one of the greatest
teaching partnerships of mid Victorian times. Like Leiper's and J J
Burnet's later, the office at 226 St Vincent Street was a studio
rather than just a drawing office and as Campbell Douglas and his
wife Elizabeth Menzies, whom he had married in 1865, (she was
daughter of Allan Menzies, professor of conveyancing at the
University of Edinburgh, and niece of Charles Cowan, MP, who through
family connections brought the commissions for Westerlea at
Murrayfield and the Cowan Institute in Penicuik) lived upstairs it
had a family atmosphere, William Flockhart recollecting 'the musical
At homes to which his assistants were always asked … the staff was
in turn treated but as a larger family'. 'Quiz' described Douglas as
'a charming host either in town or country [who] sings a good song,
and tells and appreciates the finer points of a good story'.
With the departure of Stevenson, Douglas was for some years sole
partner. Up to 1870 the business of his firm had been almost
exclusively churches and large houses, but with the commission for
the Scottish Amicable Building, first mooted in that year but not
built until 1873, followed in 1872 by that for St Andrews Halls the
practice moved into an altogether different league of major
commercial buildings and public projects. Douglas's phenomenal
success in this field was made possible by the energy and ability of
James Sellars, his partner from March 1872, if not earlier. Sellars
was born in the Gorbals on 2 December 1843, the son of a
house-factor of the same name. He was articled to Hugh Barclay at
the age of 13 in 1857, and remained there until 1864 when he joined
the office of James Hamilton who had a significant practice in
Belfast as well as in Glasgow, and remained there for three years.
Thereafter he assisted in several offices until he joined Campbell
Douglas's office in 1870. He had earned his partnership by winning
the first competition for the Stewart Memorial out of fifty designs
submitted in 1870, and 'awoke to find himself famous': and when the
result was quashed and the competition re-advertised at half the
original outlay he drew even greater attention to himself by winning
that competition also on 31 January 1871. He was admitted to the
Glasgow Institute of Architects in March 1872, his certificate being
signed by Alexander Thomson and John Baird, and in the autumn he
took a brief sketching holiday in Paris and Normandy, which he put
to good use later. This visit probably related to the presence in
the office from 1871 of Charles Alfred Chastel de Boinville, a pupil
of A Guyot and an ex-assistant of Geoffroy of Cherbourg who had
sought employment in Glasgow in the wake of the Franco-Prussian war.
As Chastel de Boinville returned to Paris in 1872 it is possible
that Sellars travelled with him. Sellars went abroad only twice: as
Lindsay Miller observed 'when young he had not the means, when able
no time'.
What Chastel de Boinville specifically contributed
to the work of the practice in the year or so he spent with it is
difficult to establish now, though it is possible that he had some
hand in the spectacular French Gothic spire of the Queen's Park
Church; but his presence coincided with a radical change in the
stylistic direction of the practice in 1871-73. The Scottish
Amicable building and the Claremont Street Wesleyan Church had
cinquecento detailing, but at St Andrews Halls a monumental neo
Greek was adopted. Superficially the design had much in common with
Alexander Thomson's work in its uncompromisingly rectangular shapes
and banded masonry but it also had an even more direct relationship
to the post-Schinkel Berlin School, while much of the smaller detail
was markedly French Beaux-Arts, a tendency still more markedly seen
at Finneston Church and the Queen Insurance Building of 1877-80.
Parallel developments were to be seen in the work of Hugh and David
Barclay with whom Sellars retained close links, and it may be that
they were the other Glasgow practice Chastel de Boinville assisted
in 1871-72, although Leiper's French Beaux-Arts Partick Burgh hall
suggests him as an equally likely candidate.
These
developments in the Campbell Douglas & Sellars and Barclay practices
ran counter to those elsewhere in Britain, their only parallels
being John Honeyman's library and museum in Paisley of 1868 and
James Hibbert's Harris Library and Museum at Preston of 1882, and
probably it was the esteem in which Thomson was held in Glasgow
which made them possible. Also directly related to Sellars's
acquaintance with Chastel de Boinville was the French-roofed New
Club and his unexecuted design for rebuilding the Trades House of
Glasgow which were wholly of French Second empire inspiration and
closer in style to London buildings of the same date. The designs
submitted in the two Glasgow Municipal Buildings Competitions of
1880-81 were similarly a fairly pure French Beaux-Arts, Sellars's
tendencies in that direction probably having been encouraged by the
success of the Burnet practice following J J Burnet's return from
Paris late in 1877. More individual, though still with
French-inspired details, were the Glasgow Herald Building and the
giant City of Glasgow Bank buildings of 1878-80 where giant
Corinthian orders were combined with pedimented attic features of
which were probably of J J Stevenson/E R Robson inspiration.
Throughout this period Douglas's design role is unclear, though he
probably determined the general direction of the practice while
acknowledging that the elevations were the product of Sellars's
'fertile brain and facile pencil', A N Paterson observed that at
least in the earlier years of the partnership the drawings bore many
annotations in Campbell Douglas's handwriting.
Douglas's
practice took a further step in a Beaux-Arts direction when John
Keppie, a draughtsman who worked closely with Sellars was encouraged
to attend the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Born in 1862, the son of James
Keppie a wealthy tobacco importer with houses in Hillhead and
Prestwick, Keppie was educated at Ayr Academy. He was articled to
Campbell Douglas & Sellars c.1880 and, unusually, attended classes
at the University of Glasgow as well as at Glasgow School of Art.
His dossier at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts is missing but he appears to
have joined the Atelier Jean Louis Pascal in 1885 and remained there
until at least the autumn of 1886 when he travelled in Northern
Italy. He was a fine watercolourist and had remarkable success in
the Tite prize competitions, winning its silver medals in that year
and again in 1887. He returned from Paris to the Campbell Douglas &
Sellars office without completing the course in order to assist
Sellars with the firm's entry for the Glasgow International
Exhibition of 1888, the competition for which had been advertised in
January 1887 and was won on 31 March 1887 with a weather boarded
design with galvanised metal domes in a Moorish, probably basically
French colonial, idiom.
In the 1880s Sellars became
influenced by the work of Rowand Anderson, probably through Campbell
Douglas & Sellars's continuing friendship with George Washington
Browne. Interest in the early Renaissance work of Anderson and
Browne showed first at the octagonal Free Abbey Church in
Dunfermline in 1881 and progressed through Scots Renaissance and
Scots Georgian influenced designs to the competition design for
Renfrew County Buildings, close in design to Anderson's Edinburgh
Medical School, and Anderson's College of Medicine in Glasgow which
mixed Early Italian Renaissance and later Scots seventeenth-century
motifs, both of 1888.
Sellars's death was a direct
consequence of the Glasgow International Exhibition. Campbell
Douglas took severely ill and was unable to come downstairs to the
office for months. James Barr, Sellars's civil engineer co-adjutor
recorded that 'twenty-two hours' arduous and unremitting toil was no
unusual event'. At the exhibition site a rusty nail pierced his boot
causing an injury that failed to clear up and was neglected from
want of time. He saw the exhibition through to the opening on 8 May
and was offered a knighthood which he declined, probably out of
deference to his senior partner, observing that 'he couldn't live up
to it': Sellars had in fact always adopted a lower profile than his
senior partner, preferring not to become a Fellow of the RIBA along
with Douglas when the latter was admitted on 9 June 1879, his
proposers being the elder Burnet, Charles Barry Junior and his old
colleague R J Johnson. The final accounts occupied Sellars for the
whole of the summer and were a struggle against failing health,
which a holiday in the West Highlands was too late to improve. He
died of blood poisoning at his house, 9 Montgomerie Crescent on 9
October and was buried on the 11th at Lambhill where a very Greek
memorial by Keppie marked his grave. A portrait of him by Georgina M
Greenlees is in the Glasgow Art Gallery collection.
After
Sellars died, Campbell Douglas's practice gradually dwindled. Keppie
formed a partnership with John Honeyman at the beginning of 1889 and
by agreement with Campbell Douglas he took Anderson's College of
Medicine with him as a setting up commission. Douglas retained the
other work of the practice and took into partnership the less
talented but very competent Alexander Morrison, one of his leading
draughtsmen. The matter was handled discreetly and nothing of what
this unusual arrangement was about became common knowledge. Honeyman
had, however, been more seriously affected than most by the slump in
business after the failure of the City of Glasgow Bank. Family
illness - his second wife and sons had consumption - and living up
to his ship-owner in-laws had drained his finances almost to the
point of bankruptcy. Campbell Douglas seems to have encouraged the
move to rescue him, in the knowledge that the Keppies had the money
to re-found the practice.
Initially the practice of Campbell
Douglas & Morrison had a fair degree of success, winning the
competitions for the public libraries at Ayr and Perth and coming
second to Dunn and Findlay at the Adam Smith Memorial and Beveridge
Halls at Kirkcaldy. Their work was refined in detail if
unadventurous. Recovered in health Douglas resumed his high public
profile contributing a paper on 'The Architectural Education of the
Public' to the Edinburgh meeting of the National Association for the
Advancement of Art in 1889. It sets out his philosophy, includes a
moving tribute to Alexander Thomson and gives more than a hint of
his Free Church radicalism. He was active in both the Glasgow
Institute of Architects and the Glasgow Architectural Association,
of which he was three times President, and was a council member of
the RIBA, becoming Vice President in 1891. His other interests were
foreign travel and botany: and he was a prominent advocate of the
merits of cremation.
In 1901 Campbell Douglas 'found it
necessary' to dissolve the partnership with Morrison who disappeared
from the post office directories in 1906 after a few years of
unsuccessful practice from his home address. The problem is said to
have been Morrison's addiction to drink. But by that date Douglas
was, at seventy-three, too old to carry on the practice alone and he
merged it with that of Alexander Nisbet Paterson within two years.
He took little active interest in the design side of the practice
thereafter and a bad recurrence of a previous illness - presumably
that of 1887-88 - caused him to retire to Edinburgh in 1906.
Aside from his architectural practice, Campbell Douglas was
active in public life. He was a Justice of the Peace for
Argyllshire, and was a member of the Scottish Liberal Club, the
Liberal and University Clubs, Glasgow and the National Liberal Club,
London.
Campbell Douglas died of a bladder disease on 14
April 1910, leaving what was then the substantial sum of £8,023.
Any contributions will be
gratefully accepted
Errors and Omissions
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