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Above: Caledonia Road Church shortly after the 1965 fire
The great American architectural historian, Henry-Russell
Hitchcock (1903-87) was a particular and consistent advocate for the
architecture of ‘Greek’ Thomson. It was he who wrote that Thomson
designed “three of the finest Romantic Classical churches in the
world” and who described Moray Place as, quite simply, “the finest
of all Grecian terraces.” Hitchcock’s interest in the Glasgow
architect seems to have begun in the 1930s when he commissioned T. &
R. Annan to take photographs of a number of his buildings, including the
precious shot of the remarkable interior of the Queen’s Park Church
looking from the minister’s rostrum towards the entrance and gallery.
In 1950, Hitchcock helped Graham Law with his dissertation on Thomson,
published in the Architectural Review in 1954, and his own high
opinion of Thomson was given in his Early Victorian Architecture
of 1954 and the subsequent Pelican History of Architecture:
Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.
What is less well know is the role Hitchcock played in
saving what remained of the Caledonia Road Church after the arson of
1965. Following that self-induced disaster, Glasgow Corporation was
minded to sweep away the ruins. What dissuaded them seems to have been a
letter from the American historian published in the Glasgow Herald
in 1966. David Walker recalls that Hitchcock had probably been tipped
off about what was going on by Andrew Maclaren Young. Whether or not
shamed by this intervention from a distinguished outsider, the Glasgow
authorities changed their minds and accepted money from the Ministry of
Works merely to stabilise the gutted shell (rather than rebuild and
re-roof the shell, which would have been rather more useful). In
1967-68, Sir Frank Mears & Partners, of Edinburgh (who were also
commissioned to work on the St Vincent Street Church at the same time)
took down damaged stonework and repaired what was left with cement -
thereby hastening the decay of the sandstone. And the contiguous
tenements by Thomson in Cathcart Road and Hospital Street were still
demolished, in 1972-73, leaving the remains of the church as a
meaningless, forlorn and isolated ruin. But at least something was
allowed to stand.
We now print the full text of Hitchcock’s letter. It is
a remarkable document, not least because he was prepared to make a
balanced assessment of the contributions of Glasgow’s two most
celebrated architects. In 1966, however, Mackintosh mania had yet to
emerge, let alone get out of control, and several of Mackintosh’s
buildings would themselves soon be threatened with destruction by the
Corporation.
In 1962, unable to maintain the fabric, the congregation
of the Caledonia Road Church had been dissolved. The Church of Scotland
then sold the building for £3,700 to the Corporation of Glasgow, which
permitted it to be vandalised and the lead stripped from the roof. In
1964, Councillor Richard McCutcheon, the planning convener, announced
that the Corporation must decide between the St Vincent Street and the
Caledonia Road Churches as "the time may come when we may have to
consider putting up a plaque instead of retaining certain
buildings." Yet this was said when the annual conference of the
Royal Institute of British Architects was taking place in the city and
delegates were admiring its buildings, so the architect Bill Howell
retorted that "if Glasgow did not preserve the two churches, the
city would be throwing away buildings of world stature." [Glasgow
Herald, 8th & 9th May 1964. As for the Caledonia Road Church,
“it is in a shocking mess,” Francis Worsdall reported to Thomson’s
granddaughter, Mrs Stewart, on 2nd August 1965. “Vandals and a scrap
merchant had broken in and not a single piece of metal remains. The
organ has been wrecked - much to the disgust of an organ-builder friend
of mine, for it was a good instrument. The lamps had all gone. I was
hoping to have rescued them from the wreck. I did manage to save the urn
[i.e., the Garnkirk Urn] which stood in a niche on the gallery
staircase. It had been smashed into about 50 pieces...”
On October 30th, 1965, to nobody’s surprise, the church
was set on fire. J.M. Reid immediately protested that "the state of
civilisation which allows a city’s most admirable architectural
possession to suffer in this way is not very high... Peace-time Glasgow
now has a record equal to that of the German airmen who destroyed
Thomson’s Queen’s Park Church during the war." [Glasgow
Herald, 1st November 1965] But the Corporation swiftly proposed the
demolition of the gutted shell. What seems to have saved the remains of
Thomson’s first great Presbyterian temple was this magisterial letter
in the Glasgow Herald for 4th March, 1966, from Hitchcock,
writing from Massachusetts as the former president of the Society of
Architectural Historians.
"March 1, 1966
"Sir, - Glasgow in the last 150 years has had two of
the greatest architects of the western world. C.R. Mackintosh was not
highly productive, but his influence in central Europe around 1900 was
of an order comparable to such American architects as Louis Sullivan
and Frank Lloyd Wright.
"An even greater and happily more productive
architect, though one whose influence can only be occasionally traced
in America in Milwaukee and in New York and not at all as far as I
know in Europe, was Alexander Thomson. What was perhaps his most
extraordinary work, the Queen’s Park Church, went in the war but two
others of his churches have, up until now, fortunately survived. The
St Vincent Street Church is the better known of the two, but the
Caledonia Road Church is the finer. Except possibly for certain
English Victorian Gothic churches by Butterfield and his
contemporaries it is without question the most remarkable and the most
distinguished ecclesiastical edifice of the high Victorian decades
before the star of H.H. Richardson rose in America in the 1870s. It is
hard to believe that the city of Glasgow is unable to find ways of
preserving and re-using such a major document, despite the bad record
of London in allowing the destruction of such an equally major
Victorian monument as the Coal Exchange.
"The eyes of the outside world have been focussed on
Scotland in the last few years because of the distinction of the new
town of Cumbernauld and the rebuilding of the Gorbals. Valid as these
programs are as achievements of our own period, it would be tragic if
Glasgow were to lose the work of the architects of the near past such
as Thomson and Mackintosh whose international rating by historians
such as myself has long been of the highest.
"Assurance we must have that our own architecture of
the third quarter of this century has validity, but assurance we
already have that the architecture of ‘Greek’ Thomson in his day
was unequalled elsewhere in Europe or in America. At the top of the
list of his surviving work stands the Caledonia Road Church. In thus
writing I believe I speak not alone for myself but for all those in
America who, longer than elsewhere, have focussed our attention on the
great works of the nineteenth century. We have in America our own
problems of preservation, but rarely are we asked to support the
preservation of individual monuments of the distinction of this
masterpiece of Thomson's.
"H.R. HITCHCOCK
Former President Society of Architectural Historians
111 South Street
Northampton
Massachusetts, U.S.A.”
[The remarkable Coal Exchange by J.B. Bunning had been
demolished in 1962 by the Corporation of London. “Milwaukee” was a
reference to the Layton Art Gallery in that city, designed in 1885 by
the enigmatic Audsley Brothers - William James and George Ashdown -
whose Bowling Green Offices in New York were also strongly Thomsonian
in style.]
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