The Quest for Charles Rennie Mackintosh E-Book

John Cairney

• Herausgeber: Luath Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Like Charles Rennie Mackintosh, John Cairney began his career at the age of 15 at the Glasgow School of Art. He tells of the working life of Charles Rennie Mackintosh as well as the beautiful love story which tragically ended with Mackintosh's sudden death at the age of 60. His wife and co-artist, Margaret Macdonald died three years later.

Leseprobe

JOHN CAIRNEY is an actor, writer and painter. In 1975 he wrote the script which became Mackintosh the Man, a 90-minute Dramatised Lecture Reading, which was later fleshed out by a full cast and shown by STV. When researching this script Cairney found no books on the personal life of Mackintosh and so for the last thirty years has been in pursuit of Mackintosh to reveal the real drama in the story of the man himself.

Also known for his solo performances playing Robert Burns and Robert Louis Stevenson, John Cairney’s work has taken him round the world several times. He appeared at the Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre as Hamlet and at the Edinburgh Festival as Macbeth. He became a household name playing Burns in the eponymous TV series, was This Man Craig for two years and appeared in many well-known series including Dr Finlay’s Casebook, The Avengers and Jackanory. His films include Jason and the Argonauts, Cleopatra, Victim and A Night to Remember. He later studied for a PhD on Robert Louis Stevenson, which was awarded by Victoria University, Wellington, in 1994. He now lives in New Zealand with his wife, actress and writer, Alannah O’Sullivan.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

A Moment White

The Man Who Played Robert Burns

East End to West End

Worlds Apart

A Year Out in New Zealand

Solo Performers

A Scottish Football Hall of Fame

On the Trail of Robert Burns

The Luath Burns Companion

Immortal Memories

The Quest for Robert Louis Stevenson

First published 2004

This edition 2007

ISBN (10): 1-905222-43-2

eISBN (13): 978-1-913025-93-9

The paper used in this book is recyclable. It is made from low-chlorine pulps produced in a low-energy, low-emission manner from renewable forests.

Printed and bound by

Bell & Bain Ltd., Glasgow

Typset in 10.5 Sabon

© John Cairney

To Bob Adams OBE, playwright, wit and good friend, who made a start possible in 1974.

A prophet is not without honour save in his own country and in his own house. And because of their unbelief he did not work many miracles there.

Matthew, Chapter 13 Verses 5 to 7

Doubtless there is a danger to the untrained designer in direct resort to Nature.

For the tendency in his or her case is to copy outright, to give us pure, crude fact and not to design at all.

Still, there is hope in honest error: none in the icy perfections of the mere stylist.

John Dando Sedding

Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface

Introduction

1

1868–1883

The Limping Boy

2

1884–1889

The Apprentice Student

3

1889–1891

Home and Abroad

4

1892–1895

The Roaring Camps

5

1895–1899

Towards a Masterwork

6

1899–1904

A Scotch Dwelling House

7

1904–1906

Who’s for Tea Rooms?

8

1909–1914

Before the Fall

9

1914–1915

Walberswick

10

1915–1919

Chelsea Bohemians

11

1920–1923

The Last Fling

12

1923–1927

Painting a Paradise

13

1927–1928

A London Epilogue

14

1929–1933

Surviving Toshie

Envoi

The Mackintosh Posterity

Notes

End Note

A Mackintosh Chronology

Bibliography

Map: The Glasgow Legacy

Acknowledgements

Make a detailed record of the buildings of that genius, Mackintosh, before it’s too late.

Percy Thomas, President RIBA, 1935

The author wishes to state his obligation to the following in the writing of this book and sourcing of illustrative material:

Douglas Annan, The Annan Gallery

Brian Armstrong, Glasgow City Council

the late Sir Harry Barnes

Colin Baxter

Roger Billcliffe

Clare Brotherwood

William M Buchanan

Jude Burkehauser

Lynda Clark, Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery

John Coleman

Alan Crawford

Robin Crichton

Sarah and Justin Crozier

the late Dr David Daiches

The Earl of Elgin

Murray Grigor

Dr Janice Helland

the late Dr Thomas Howarth

Lesley Johnson

Anthony Jones

Wendy Kaplan

David Kernohan

Jean Lim

Dr Lorn Macintyre

the late Robert Macleod

David McKail

Graham Metcalfe

May Mitchell, Strathclyde Police Museum

Alistair Moffat

the late Margaret Morris

Timothy Neat

Alannah O’Sullivan

Iain Paterson

Dr Sylvia Pinches

George Rawson

Professor Pamela Robertson, Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery

Tom Robertson

Graham Roxburgh

the late Benno Schotz

Ailsa Tanner

Peter Trowles, The Glasgow School of Art

the late Allan Ure

the late Professor Andrew McLaren Young

Janet Copsey and staff, The University of Auckland Library

Stuart Robertson and Patricia Ingram and all at The Charles Rennie Mackintosh Society

Preface

What exactly is the Modern Movement? Was it not the movement started only a generation ago by that remarkable Scotsman, the late Charles Rennie Mackintosh? Ask Continentals about this. You will find that they regard Mackintosh as the arch-apostle of the Modern School just as Karl Marx is regarded as the arch-apostle of Communism.

John Begg, ‘Quarterly’, 1936

AS THE DEDICATION of this volume implies, I was begun on the pursuit of Mackintosh by RW (Bob) Adams in his capacity as Managing Director of the AH McIntosh Furniture Company in the Kingdom of Fife. In the early Seventies, Tom Robertson and Drew Bennet of their design team approached him with the idea of producing domestic furniture ‘after the style’ of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and not, as Cassina in Milan under Filipo Alison had done, as exact replicas. The Fife firm chose to go for a slight variation in the chairs to make them more ergonomically acceptable while at the same time retaining their distinctive and pleasing ‘Mackintosh’ shape. To my mind this was completely defensible and in line with contemporary needs. The question remained: was a facsimile, made by modern methods from original Mackintosh drawings, as the Italian company had elected to do, a genuine Mackintosh chair or not? The Scottish company added its own touch. Significantly, when the Museum of Modern Art in New York mounted its Furniture by Charles Rennie Mackintosh Exhibition in 1974, all the furniture shown was by Cassina.

When I first came to do the research on Mackintosh as a vehicle for performance I had nothing to go on but a book by Thomas Howarth, the letters from Port Vendres kept by Glasgow University, and miscellaneous articles in old architectural magazines and periodicals. It was a slim field of resource by any standards. I got the Howarth book from the library and was given access to the letters and the lectures because the late Professor Andrew McLaren Young of the Fine Arts Department of the University thought that a script to be performed by an actor, even if he were a graduate of that same university, was an ephemeral affair and did not constitute commercial publication in the strictest sense. However, he insisted that his young assistant, Roger Billcliffe, look over my shoulder – just in case.

Nowadays, all researchers of Mackintosh stand on Roger’s shoulders, or at least seek the hand of Pamela Robertson, who was then a very young Miss Reekie. I was fortunate to have both at hand to help me in adapting a script, which became Mackintosh the Man, a 90-minute Dramatised Lecture Reading for three actors, with triple-screen audio-visual illustrations created by Graham Metcalfe and Roland Kennedy, and directed by Murray Grigor. This was first presented by Shanter Productions at an Architectural Seminar sponsored by the McIntosh Company at the Adam Smith Centre, Kirkcaldy on 6 December 1975 by permission of its manager Chris Potter and the Kirkcaldy District Council. As this was the first seminar ever held in Scotland on the subject of Mackintosh, it might be in order to list the complete programme for the day and those taking part:

11am

Beveridge Suite

Coffee with display of Mackintosh and McIntosh furniture.

11.05

Welcome on behalf of Kirkcaldy District Council by Councillor R King.

11.30

Cinema

Opening remarks by RW Adams.

Screening of Mackintosh – short documentary-film by Murray Grigor.

NOON

Theatre

A Critical Forum on Mackintosh and his Work.

Chairman – Dr Maurice Lindsay of the Scottish Civic Trust.

Speakers:

Robin Haddow – Mackintosh, the Architect.

Henry Hellier – Mackintosh, the Designer.

Emilio Coia – Mackintosh, the Artist.

1pm

Lunch

2.30

A Study in Form – by Murray Grigor

A visual exploration of Mackintosh design on triple screens with synchronised soundtrack.

3

Comment by Murray Grigor.

3.30

Roger Billcliffe introduces John Cairney in Mackintosh the Man with Rose McBain as Margaret Macdonald and John Shedden as Narrator and others.

4.30

Comment by Anthony Wheeler, Past President RIA (Scotland).

4.45

Closing Remarks and Vote of Thanks by RW Adams.

The reception from a packed audience of Scottish architects was encouraging and further performances of the reading took place in the following year in Glasgow, at the Martyrs’ School, the Art School, the Glasgow Art Club, Queen’s Cross Church, and at Hill House, Helensburgh. A television version, fleshed out by a full cast, was later shown by STV in 1979, but all it did was to convince me that the real drama was in the story of the man himself. There is everything in it – a great love story, personal complications, professional conflicts, triumphs and disasters and an engulfing tragic ending.

At the end of the Second World War, Mackintosh the Man was obscured by Mackintosh the Architect, and even more so by Mackintosh the Designer and Decorator. The Saatchi and Saatchi Mockingtosh had still to appear and the original prospector, Thomas Howarth, was still panning for gold with his doctoral thesis on an unknown Glasgow architect. This turned into a seminal book – Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Modern Movement – in 1952 and made his name and fortune. From Dr Howarth’s solitary trek, the road to Mackintosh has broadened into a mighty highway, and I, for one, relish now being on the path he first mapped out. Generally speaking, however, in terms of the dramatic, Mackintosh has not a long pedigree.

Murray Grigor, another genuine Mackintosh pioneer, was first in the field in 1967 with his documentary film for Films of Scotland, and this may have precipitated the initial Mackintosh interest. There was also a centenary tribute paid on 7 June 1968 in a radio documentary compiled by George Bruce from material supplied by McLaren Young. Dr Lorn Macintyre adapted the letters as a playreading for John Shedden and Anne Lannan at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow in 1985. In 1987, Alistair Moffat, himself a Mackintosh author, produced Tom Conti and Kara Wilson in a television feature based on the Mackintoshes for Channel Four in London, and ten years later, Wigwam Digital from Bellshill in Strathclyde produced a compact disc entitled Charles Rennie Mackintosh – Art, Architecture and Design, a multimedia documentary on the life and work. More recently, in July of 2003, a radio play, The Chronicle, by John Hancox, was broadcast featuring Alex Heggie and Juliet Cadzow. If one also includes a Japanese comic strip about him, that is the complete summary of Mackintosh in performance.

It hardly amounts to a theatrical tradition, yet, 30 years ago I was as intrigued by the prospect of playing him in front of an audience as I am now pleased to present him to the reader as the central character in his own biography. For what a character he was.

A strange, solitary boy, a wickedly handsome youth, despite a drooping left eye, a volatile man, who always resented being born with a twisted left foot that gave him a life-long limp. An ostensible failure in his chosen profession, he yet matured into a considerable painter. This was a soul’s journey of enormous intensity and he showed himself at every stage to have the courage and humour to survive it all. He was no saint, and was undoubtedly his own worst enemy, yet he achieved a final serenity that was as full as it was unexpected. His tragedy was that he could have done so much more in his life, but his triumph was that he did just enough to be rated by many as a genius and others as a hero.

Today, however, Mackintosh has become an icon and the study of his work has become an industry. Tom Howarth’s book has been reprinted, and there has even been a book about Tom Howarth and Mackintosh. The letters are now in the public domain and to date there must be a hundred books on the market about Mackintosh the Architect – Mackintosh the Artist – Mackintosh the Designer – but none, as far as I could find, based solely on Mackintosh the Man. So there was obviously a niche – hence this book.

According to friends, Mackintosh was not a tall man, but he had presence. It is this presence I have sought throughout. I want to identify with this ordinary Glasgow man with the extraordinary artistic talent, here shorn of the myths that have enshrouded him since his lifetime and free, at last, to be himself. In this way, he will be appropriately returned to his roots. And in Glasgow, at first, he was not without honour – as we shall see.

For this book, I have made heavy recourse to the scripts I have already written and performed on Mackintosh, but only as basic research and a narrative guideline. As far as possible, I have taken every advantage of contemporary Mackintosh scholarship and have fully acknowledged this fact wherever possible. Where I have inadvertently failed to do so, I should be glad to have the omission pointed out for any future editions.

Finally, let us bear in mind what Professor Nikolaus Pevsner, the architectural historian and one of the first to write about Mackintosh, said of him: ‘I never knew Mackintosh personally but all of those who knew him, and I approached many of his friends and contemporaries, spoke of him with light in their eyes’.1

Let us hope then, that the light will never go out on the man that was Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

Introduction

Our workmen are grown generallie to such an excellence of device … that they sine pass the finest of the olde.

William Harrison

CHARLIE MACKINTOSH FIRST made an impact on his home town by having a team of men from his father’s bleaching works at St Rollox go round the Glasgow tenements from close to close and door to door collecting urine at a penny a gallon. He carefully supplied the carriers with hydrometers to ensure that they got an undiluted product from the citizens. This scheme worked so well that as much as 3,000 gallons was delivered to the factory each day. Ammonia was distilled from this liquid stock and when this was added to leftover tar from the Glasgow Gas Company, naptha was produced, which in turn led to the discovery of rubber and eventually, by 1823, to the Mackintosh overcoat.

I mention these facts because when the name Mackintosh is mentioned outside Glasgow, until recently at least, it was always the raincoat man and not the architect that people first thought of. There were some, it must be said, who thought at one time of the latter as nothing more than a piss-artist but that is no more than a specious connection between the two famous Glasgow namesakes born almost exactly a hundred years apart.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh is either the greatest-ever Scottish architect and water-colourist of genius or a capricious interior designer with a flair for unstable furniture. Or he is all of these things. Mackintosh is a myth – an almost impenetrable figure in the history of Scottish art and architecture. So many strands have gone into its weave that it is difficult to pick out the tartan thread that links Robert Lorimer to Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson or James Gibb to James Sellars, or all four to the Adam family, father and sons, and from all of these to the subject now to be considered – Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

The Caledonian connection is something that is pursued in this biography of that Scottish enigma. For above everything else, he was Scottish, and a Glasgow Scot at that. This fact will be seen as permeating his every attitude and underlying his every act through the ups and downs of a chequered professional and personal life. For him, the Scottish tradition was not a fixed point of convention but a living reference. A dead past is academic. A living past is now.

The first Scottish building was a fortress – it had to be – and it was this stone war-house, gradually domesticated over the centuries, sheathed in its rough coat of harling, that offered the plainest of fronts to the outside world. High walls surrounded a basic tower and this was the basis of the style called Scotch Baronial, that crude cradle that nursed so many of Scotland’s great architects and inspired them to their life’s work. Mackintosh was no exception.

There have been Scots, people not long dead, and known to me, who knew and admired Mackintosh in his lifetime, yet within a decade of his death in 1928 he was virtually a forgotten man. Especially in his own city. When he died in a London nursing home, he had been living in the South of France for the previous four years of his life, every bit as much of an exile as that other Victorian Scot, Robert Louis Stevenson, had been in the South Seas nearly 30 years before. Paradoxically, Mackintosh was almost as contented and self-realised as that famous writer was in the end. Stevenson was cut off in his prime at only 44, just as he was coming to a complete understanding of his powers with the written word. Mackintosh lived longer but to all intents and purposes he too had been cut off in his prime and was obliged to leave his chosen profession and native city at almost exactly the same age as Stevenson died at, for a self-imposed exile that was to last till his death.

Nowadays, he is seen not only as an architect, but as a considerable painter, and as a most ingenious innovator of a unique furniture style. More than that, he is the complete artist, and it was his contribution to the ‘new art’ that gave him his place in the records and accorded him a particular kind of genius that one can only describe as Scottish i.e. awkward, uncategorisable and often, self-defeating. The Scottish genius is one who has ostensibly failed but succeeds in the end by a combination of a particular doggedness allied to a kind of application where as much pain is given as taken.

What is not in doubt, however, is that he has been wholly justified by what he left us in his work, whether on paper, canvas, wood or stone, and it is this that is his real testimonial. This is the man whose life and work is remembered in these pages. Recreated from letters, records, lecture notes, anecdotes, sayings, relevant gossip and recollections, in short, from any source, is the fixed impression of a charming taliped who limped awkwardly through his 60 years. Whether in Glasgow, London, the North of England or the South of France – wherever he lay down his drawing board or set up his easel in the last decade of the 19th century and for almost the first three decades of the 20th – the man is there in all that he does. It is a mark of his atypicality that he seemed to grow in stature as an artist in direct ratio to his decline as a professional man, and, in the end, he emerges as an icon.

To properly understand him we must first appreciate that he had an impediment – literally. He was born with a club foot due to a twisted sinew at birth. In medieval times, this was held to be the mark of the devil, and babies so born were often strangled or drowned immediately. On the other hand, it has also been believed that such births were unusually favoured, especially in an uncommon attractiveness of face. Lord Byron had this, and Sir Walter Scott, and the late Dudley Moore in our own day; Mackintosh was the same. Whether good looks compensated for a physical fault at the nether end of their person is a moot point, but there is no denying that, psychologically, the limp must have affected Mackintosh hugely, especially in adolescence, and no amount of swagger with a stick could conceal his awareness of his disability in manhood. Too little account has been taken of this condition when considering his volatile behaviour at points throughout his life. The emotional disturbance caused by this disadvantage in his earlier years could not help but affect his mature personality.

In trying to understand him, it will also help to understand the world he was born into on that summer Sunday in 1868. His Glasgow was then the second city of the British Empire. The ‘dear green place’ was perhaps not quite so verdant or spacious as it had been for Daniel Defoe in 1725. With its four main streets stretching from the Cathedral down to the River Clyde via the Tolbooth and the Salt Market, it offered the old University on the left and the Merchant City to the right. Defoe recognised even then – ‘a city of business; here is the face of trade’. He also noted ‘a large distillery for the distilling of spirits from the molasses drawn from the sugars which they call’d Glasgow brandy.’ Defoe was also assured that – ‘they send near fifty sail of ships every year to Virginia, New England, and other English colonies in America’ An English engineer officer, Captain Edward Birt, visited Glasgow in 1726 and commented – ‘Glasgow is, to outward appearance, the prettiest and most uniform Town that I ever saw; and I believe there is nothing like it in Britain.’1

On the other hand, the American novelist, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who visited Glasgow just over a hundred years later, walked the same streets with his wife and was horrified by what he saw – ‘The High Street and still more the Salt Market, now swarm with the lower orders, to a degree which I have not witnessed elsewhere; so that it is difficult to make one’s way among the sallow and unclean crowd and not at all pleasant to breathe in the noisomeness of the atmosphere.’ He might agree with Captain Birt that indeed ‘there is nothing like it in Britain.’ Thomas Carlyle was even more trenchant, calling the great city ‘a murky simmering tophet.’2 For Henry James it was ‘a seat of learning’ yet for John Stuart Mill it was forever ‘tainted with the stench of trade’.

The contrast between these various comments is underscored by the contrast between the buildings then extant. Such a contrast is present in any large conurbation to some extent but it was especially so in Victorian Glasgow. It was a mean city indeed to the south and east, but to the north and west it was generous and spacious to a fault. The Clyde, winding its way from Lanarkshire through to Greenock, separated social factions as if they were warring tribes – which in a sense they were. The native poor far outnumbered the new merchant rich. They always do. The comfortable industrialists, safe on the high ground where they lived in Palladian splendour, left the dreadful tenements by the riverside to the rats and cats and their fellow Glaswegians, whose lifestyle owed more to Hogarth than Palladio. However, extensive municipal works by the authorities from the mid-19th century onwards did much to change this. As the dredging of the river brought increased trade right into the city centre so did the provision of parks and green spaces within the municipal boundaries give the overcrowded citizens a chance to breathe. The ‘dear green place’ was in some sense restored and, to its credit, this is a work that the present City of Glasgow carries on to this day. Who would ever have thought then that Glasgow would one day host a National Garden Festival as it did in June 1988.

In Victorian times, however, it must be admitted, it was difficult to breathe in Glasgow. It was by then a dear green smokey place. As Oxford had its spires, so Glasgow had its chimneys, the tallest of these being ‘Charlie Tennant’s Lum’, which at one time was the highest chimney in Europe, belching out its fumes from the St Rollox bleach works far below, and joining, as if in sulphuric chorus, with the hundreds of others to create a lowering canopy that was as toxic as it was dark. Twilight always came early to Glaswegians. The cloak thrown over Defoe’s Glasgow was nothing less than a coughing cupola – one is tempted to write ‘coffin-cupola’ because its effects were deadly. Small wonder that Glasgow then boasted the highest death rate in Britain.

Gradually, however, improvements were taking place in living standards and in all matters of public health and hygiene. The fresh water supply was extended by the building of a reservoir to the north of the city at Loch Katrine and ever since, this facility has provided the best drinking water in the country. The new tenements, too, were being built to a much higher quality and architects of the calibre of Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson, Robert Rowand Anderson and John James Burnet were engaged to provide housing, which not only accommodated the workforce invading the city from the Highlands and Ireland, but also stood as visible evidence of Glasgow’s betterment. Glasgow was booming and it was not shy about showing it.

In 1866 work had begun on Sir Gilbert Scott’s design for Glasgow University. He had begun on this while he was also working on St Pancras Station in London and, frankly, it would have made little difference had the railway station been built on Gilmorehill and the university sited in London as there is much of a muchness about both Gothic designs. The Glasgow City Chambers in George Square date from around the same era but even this edifice, despite its munificent marbled interior, still stands as a bit of everything, architecturally.

As a boy born at the Townhead, Mackintosh would have looked down from his tenement eyrie in Parson Street over the Glasgow Necropolis, shadowed as it was by St Mungo’s Cathedral. This perhaps laid his lifelong fascination with churchyards and tombstones. He would have hirpled down the same High Street where the old university had now become a marshalling yard, and he would have seen the solitary Tolbooth standing at the Tron Gate as a reminder of the city seen by Defoe. The Salt Market still vomited its cosmopolitan citizenry from crowded closemouths and ships still packed the Clyde at the Broomielaw, except that few now showed sail. Their funnel smoke added to the chimney smoke and this helped create the soot and grime already beginning to work its way into the brand new sandstone rising up at every other street corner.

The young Mackintosh couldn’t have failed to notice all this or to feel the general excitement pervading the place. One can only suppose that he would have sensed it as he passed the brand new City Chambers on his apprentice’s walk to John Hutchison’s drawing office and that, observant as he was, he would have taken it all in as he climbed up West Nile Street en route to the School of Art, then housed in Rose Street. Small wonder that this introverted youth with a talent for drawing later developed a notion of becoming an architect. New building work was going on all around him and one can only assume that all this must have made an enormous impression on such an imaginative, solitary boy. He had only ever wanted to be an artist. An artist-architect was merely an extension of this first ambition. However, as we shall see, it did not happen all at once.

His boyhood was difficult and he did not make things easy for himself. He might have been called a problem child but his problems were all of his own making and, in his own way, he found his own solutions. This is a less well-known period of his life but it is a vitally important one. It was at this time that he took the first decisive step on the journey that was to bring him his particular immortality. Many excellent and perceptive writers have made their comments on all the different Mackintosh aspects since Howarth marked out the original playing field so I do not need to add my stone to their very considerable cairn. Instead, I have gone behind the monument to seek out the man.

Personally, I am like Mackintosh in that I, too, grew up in the East End of Glasgow and have spent most of my professional life outside of Scotland. It is this awareness of common roots which is the dynamic that drives the narrative and gives the subject a particular Celtic energy, together, of course, with its concomitant waywardness. These personal links do not, in any way, make this a better book, but simply provide a native insight, and allow as good a guess as any about a life that might have been so very different. Mary Newberry Sturrock, a trusted rememberer of the architect through much of his life, commented on his wasted genius – ‘He died a forgotten man,’ she said.3

Perhaps so, but he is well remembered now. Particularly today by those who themselves, are not artists or architects. Thanks to this popular acceptance, he is heading towards a status with the Scottish nation, or at least the Glasgow part of it, that is not unlike that accorded to Burns. We know most everything about Burns but we know relatively little about Mackintosh. What I do know is that Burns survived his mythos. So will Mackintosh, but as John McKean memorably put it, ‘There are powerful silences in this story’.4

CHAPTER ONE

The Limping Boy

1868–1883

Let Glasgow Flourish

This motto of the City of Glasgow sits today beneath an armorial shield, which shows a wee bird on top of a tree, from which hangs a bell on the right; and below, across the base of the tree trunk, a fish balances a ring on the end of its nose. The full wording of the motto should read Let Glasgow Flourish by the Preaching of the Word, but in these more secular times, the injunction to spread the Gospel is omitted. The bird perched on the top is undoubtedly a Glasgow sparrow full of impudent song, sung with a Glasgow accent. The tree represents the builder, or the growing thing that comes up from its roots to touch the sky, and the fish is the religion or God-sense that underpins every act of man, whether he likes it or not. And the ring represents the world’s reward – because there never has been an artist, except Fra Filippo perhaps, who didn’t work for money.

The emblems relate to historical myths and legends concerning St Mungo and the beginning of the city, but the overall design is pertinent in that it sums up neatly the various aspects of our man, the enigmatic Mackintosh – builder, artist, man of feeling and Glaswegian. The injunction to ‘flourish’ is especially apt. If it means ‘to bloom’, it also means ‘to make ornamental strokes with the pen’, ‘bold strokes to create a showy splendour’. This could be said to apply to the subject at hand. The link from ‘bloom’ in one sense to flowers as ‘bloom’ is also easy to understand, for both the beginning and end of his life were marked by his love and enthusiasm for all growing things in Nature – even cabbages.

This was probably due to his father, William McIntosh (sic – his son later changed the spelling of his name to Mackintosh, for reasons which will be explained later), who, although in the police all his life, was a passionate gardener. He filled their Dennistoun tenement flat with flowers and vegetables produced from a sooty allotment which he rented in the grounds of Golfhill House nearby. From his father’s obsession, young Charlie was to develop a life-long love of flowers as well as a botanical awareness of their structure and an aesthetic appreciation of their beauty – all of which was to inform his adult work in design and form. It is no exaggeration to say that the future artist-architect was born in a Victorian garden allotment and a great deal of credit for this must go to the father, William, the police clerk with the green fingers.

Inspector William McIntosh, as he was then, was a remarkable man by all accounts.1 He was born in County Cavan, Ireland, of Scottish parents, Hugh McIntosh, a distiller from Paisley, and Marjory Morris, a fisherman’s daughter from Methil in Fife. The potato famine of 1845 drove them from Ireland, as it did so many others, and the McIntoshes returned to Scotland. Eventually they settled in a tenement flat at 94 Glebe Street in the Townhead district near the centre of Glasgow. After working as a clerk in a city office, William joined the City of Glasgow Police as a constable in 1858, at the age of 22. He was tall and well built and had a good head on his shoulders. He rose up through the ranks and was already on the promotions list when he married Margaret Rennie from Ayr. They wed at McIntosh Street in Dennistoun, the home of one of her relatives. In 1865, Lieutenant McIntosh, now father to a son, William Junior, and two daughters, Isabella and Martha, was appointed Captain, and Clerk to the Chief Constable of Glasgow. The young family was able to afford a higher rent and they moved to a more spacious flat in Parson Street, a block away from the old family house. It was here, on 7 June 1868, at No 70 (now demolished) that their fourth child and second son, Charles Rennie McIntosh, first saw the light of day.

It would have been a gloomy view, even from a top flat, as their tenement looked out onto the bulk of the Royal Infirmary, which overlooked the Glasgow Necropolis and effectively hid Glasgow Cathedral in the High Street. In 1874, Chief Constable Smart promoted Captain McIntosh to Inspector and installed him Chief Clerk in the new Police Headquarters at South Albion Street, where McIntosh was to spend the rest of his police career. He moved his family a mile or so west along Alexandra Parade (as it is now called) to 2 Firpark Terrace in Dennistoun; an even better flat in a much better district. And it was here that William found his ‘Garden of Eden’, as his children called it, in the grounds of Golfhill House.

Golfhill House was the one-time mansion of the estate of that name, bought by Mr (later Sir) Alexander Dennistoun in 1856 to form, with other estates such as Whitehill, Haghill, Craig Park, Broom Park, Fir Park, Meadow Park and Wester and Easter Craigs, that district between Alexandra Parade and Duke Street which now bears his name. James Salmon, grandfather of James Salmon (the Wee Trout),2 was instructed to create appropriate properties for the new suburb and in 1864 Dennistoun added Annfield and Bellfield to his domain. As a result, whole streets of imposing houses, terraces and tenements were built in the area and still stand to this day, proudly bearing all the old estate names. In 1880, Golfhill House and its garden must have been very convenient for William McIntosh at the end of a hard day in the police office. He spent as much time as he could cultivating his beloved flowers, as well as vegetables for the table. With a house full of children he had plenty of mouths to feed and with so many youngsters running around most of the time, he was probably glad to get out to his garden for a bit.

The McIntosh children were eleven in all but, as with most Victorian families, especially in the towns and cities, only seven survived into adulthood, and of these, one, William Junior (Billy), the first son, ran off to sea and was killed in South America. The others were all either older or younger sisters to Charlie; two above him, Isabella (Bella) and Martha, and three below, Margaret (Meg), Ellen and Agnes (Nancy). Small wonder he was spoiled. He grew up as a little prince among all the women in his life, doted on by his quiet mother and virtually waited on by his big sisters. It would appear that Margaret Rennie McIntosh hardly rose from her bed during her 23 years of marriage. When she wasn’t pregnant, she was ailing with something or other and was to all intents and purposes a semi-invalid, but her family worshipped her and her quiet influence seems to have made the household, for the most part, a happy one.

The bond between Margaret and her only son in the house was deep. Charlie appears to have inherited her frailty as well as her dark good looks. He was certainly not boyishly robust but there is no question that Charlie was her darling. This may have been because he had been born with the damaged foot. Or did she know the Highland superstition that such a genetic defect only comes with every seventh generation, bringing with it a gift that is cursed? Or had his merely been a bad delivery? For whatever reason, Charlie was always regarded as special in the family. Even so, apart from a noticeable limp, the foot defect was to give Charlie a decided chip on his shoulder.

In addition, an injury to the muscles of his left eye, supposedly sustained while playing in goal during a schoolboy game of football played in heavy rain, resulted in a severe chill, which developed into rheumatic fever, which he was a long time in shaking off. The whole episode left him with a slight droop in the left eye. While it did not affect his vision it gave him as he grew up a slightly malevolent appearance, which some, especially the girls, were later to find attractive.

For these physical reasons no doubt, he was self-conscious outside the family, and even with them was often petulant and hot-tempered, and he would fly into loud rages when he didn’t get his way over the most trivial of things. This was manifest not only in the house but also when he first went to school at John Reid’s Public School in Dennistoun in 1875. Reid had been a major landowner in the area and the school was one of his benefactions, but there is no record of Charlie’s having enjoyed it much. Especially not wet football matches. Most of us can remember our classmates at primary school but Charlie McIntosh seems to have been an exception. He made few friends as a boy because he didn’t need any. Right from the very beginning he was a loner. While he had his mother at home and a ring of sisters around him, all held together by a strong father, he had no need of anyone else.

His relationship with his father was not as open as it was with his mother, despite the father’s natural concern for him. There would always be a slight distance between them, if only because of the son’s bias towards a delicate mother, but it must also be said that a limping boy, who was remote and aloof, wasn’t the ideal son for an active, healthy, sports-loving policeman. God-fearing and strict as he was in his household, William McIntosh was, nevertheless, gregarious and efficient in the outside world. His exemplary record in the police was proof of this.

He was a very physical man as his love of and skill at most sports available to him indicates, yet he was not without sensitivity as his genuine love of gardening shows. As he tended his garden of an evening, he must often have mused to himself on why he had such sons. Billy had left home early to go to sea. Nothing more was heard of him until he was reported dead after an incident in a South American port. This is just one of the many Mackintosh mysteries: Billy was never mentioned again in the family. Charlie was different and his father knew it. For all their long hours together in the Garden of Eden, with Charlie drawing everything from cabbages to crocuses while his father dug and delved, there is no evidence that they talked much or built up a strong relationship beyond the usual father-and-son deference. William, a keenly intelligent man, must have known early that he had an unusually gifted son – but what to do with him, that was the problem.

Charlie’s mother was all for letting the boy find his own way in his own time. He wasn’t like an ordinary boy. His was a special case in her eyes. To the father, there were many worse cases than Charlie out on the streets earning a living, or at least making a life for themselves, to whom a limp would seem a luxury. The trouble was that all the boy wanted to do was draw. He drew anywhere and everywhere and at all times. He withdrew into a sketchbook and seemed to live only in its pages, so that, at times, nobody could get near him. The sisters accepted that that was what Charlie did – he drew things on paper. That’s what worried his father.

William McIntosh deserves some sympathy. He was genuinely concerned about Charlie’s often idiosyncratic behaviour. What would it lead to? He couldn’t just scribble his way into manhood. William was just as concerned about his wife. She wasn’t strong in anything except her trust in God and her upright husband, and her supreme confidence in her awkward son; whatever was bothering him, she was sure he would soon grow out of it. According to the doctor, all the boy needed was long walks in the fresh air. Charlie was only too happy to comply. He got out of town as often as he could and went wherever the horse-tram would take him. For any Glasgow boy, plain street spaces were only a penny away, but fields and green acres were tuppence-coloured at termini like Airdrie or Paisley, Milngavie or Cambuslang. It was only a matter of choice, depending on the weather.

The boy seemed to be a law unto himself. There was no doubt he liked his own company best. He would make his way along the street or the road or the lane, taking it all in. It was as if he were always looking for something. Even on the annual summer trip ‘doon the watter’ to the Clyde coast in the last two weeks in July when most of Glasgow’s working class decanted into Ayrshire, he was always wandering off on his own instead of taking part in the family’s normal holiday activities. The McIntoshes, it would seem, did not travel light for the Glasgow Fair Fortnight, as it was called. They brought all the family pets; the two cats, a hedgehog, a tortoise – even a goat to provide milk for the younger children.

One year the girls made a great fuss about a pet lamb they adopted from a nearby farm. There were tears when they weren’t allowed to bring it back to Glasgow. There weren’t normally many tears in the McIntosh household, and if there were, they were usually brought on by the mother’s favourite son. While he may have seemed totally self-centred, indolent or downright lazy, he was never completely unlikeable. When required, he had all his mother’s charm, and even some of his father’s outgoing nature when the occasion called for it, but, in the last resort, he knew he could always rely on his big sister, Bella, even though she was sometimes embarrassed by his ‘arty’ ways. There had never been an artist in the family before.

For the most part, however, he was quiet, almost to the point of taciturnity, but he was a boy before he was anything. He bitterly resented his limp and the frustration it caused in him occasionally. At times his feelings would just boil over. The truth of the matter is that as a young male he was more likely holding back an enormous pent-up energy. This would explain the sudden explosions of rage. Recent medical research has shown that there are physical and psychological reasons for this kind of behaviour in young boys, and the noted Mackintosh commentator John McKean has already pointed this out in Charlie’s case.3 He deals with it comprehensively in his book, Charles Rennie Mackintosh – Architect, Artist and Icon (2000), and his findings indicate that Mackintosh may have suffered, if only to a lesser degree, from a development disorder which has become known today as Asperger’s Syndrome.

Dr Hans Asperger was an Austrian who, in 1944, published a paper describing the behaviour pattern of young males of normal intelligence who exhibited autistic or dyslexic tendencies to varying degrees, resulting in reading or writing difficulties and a marked lack of social skills. Dr Asperger wrote:

It seems that for success in science or art, a dash of autism is essential. For success, the necessary ingredient may be the ability to turn away from the everyday world, from the simply practical, an ability to rethink a subject with originality so as to create in new, untrodden ways, with all the abilities canalised into one speciality.4

This fits the young McIntosh exactly, for all his boyish interests were fused through the pencil in his hand. Asperger also noted that such young boys seem to think in pictures. Their retention is visual rather than verbal and this can lead to an inventive and creative way of thinking. They tend to live in their own world and see the outside world differently from others. In Dr Tony Attwood’s guide to Asperger’s Syndrome, he says of sufferers: ‘They are a bright thread in the tapestry of life’. Vincent Van Gogh and Michelangelo are said to have manifested this condition, and it might also be said of Charlie McIntosh that he had similar symptoms.

Later studies have now shown that people with Asperger’s Syndrome will never look others in the eye and can be clumsy in general movement. Mackintosh’s left eye was inclined to be lazy so he would be reluctant to hold anyone’s gaze, and his limp might have made him seem clumsy, but these were physical traits and not due to any emotional deficiency. So the question of any high-functioning autism in his case is one on which the jury is still out.5

In 1877, he began at Allan Glen’s High School, a private establishment for the sons of tradesmen and artisans. It is hard enough for a new boy at any boys’ school, but one with a limp and a slight squint doesn’t have to look for trouble. Charlie, however, soon learned to take care of himself in his own way. His secure home base gave him the assurance that he was able to carry into the classroom. He was saved by being good at drawing. Schoolboys are always impressed by unexpected skills, and those not good at games soon learn to survive as clowns or entertainers. Charlie’s defence was his skill with a pencil and this would have impressed his fellow-pupils even if it were only displayed under a desk lid and not on the blackboard. To be known as ‘a good drawer’ gave him a place, a status, and he would have grabbed it – if only in self-defence.

In any case, the Asperger’s factor could have given him an indifference to superficial popularity and his absolute honesty was a sturdy if awkward shield on every occasion. To his teachers, he must have been a puzzle – outwardly normal but, as we now know, in a ferment inside. To them he must have appeared slow, if not backward, and one of them remembered only his abnormally bad temper. It was no surprise that he did not attain any scholastic heights because he made no great attempt to seek them. He was working his own way out of boyhood, and was travelling by an atypical route.

However, he was lucky that Allan Glen’s was progressive. In addition to the normal subjects, it also ran a Technical Workshop which encouraged pupils like Mackintosh to develop skills in woodwork and metalwork, putting his drawing to good use in learning to set out scientific diagrams and data. The usual leaving age for the boys was fourteen, but for those whose parents could afford it, two more years were offered in more specialised subjects. Charlie used these extra years to good effect in the Technical Workshop, and it was probably there that the seed of an idea about becoming an architect was born.

One must bear in mind that he had few conventional outlets open to him at the time. He hadn’t the physique for manual work, nor the inclination for academia. He would never make a policeman like his father, nor did he want to be a minister of the Kirk – as his religious mother might have hoped. An ‘ordinary’ job in a shop or an office held no attraction at all. All he could do was draw. So he would wait for a job that would put a pencil in his hand. Architecture would do that, but it was a very remote possibility indeed. Where did one of his background start? He did not know anyone who was an architect or anyone who knew anyone who was an architect. All his father’s friends were policemen or publicans. There may have been Masonic connections as Freemasonry was a large part of police life then, but Charlie would have known nothing of this. All he knew was that he was a McIntosh. McIntosh of Mackintosh, the Clan Chattan, the family of the Cat. His family had two cats. He liked cats. He drew them well. And when did you see a cat that didn’t do exactly as it wanted to do – and when it wanted to do it? He empathised with that. In the same way, he knew that a cat had nine lives, and here he was, hardly started on his first. It was 1880, and he was in his third year at Allan Glen’s. It was a deciding time for young McIntosh, but he had plenty of time yet. Meantime, he would cover more sheets of paper with his scribbles and wait to see how things turned out.

His birthdate being on June 7, he was born under the sign of Gemini, the twins, an air sign signifying one given to ideas and self-expression through change. Astronomically, it is the third sign of the Zodiac, whose prominent features are the twin stars, Castor and Pollux. If we consider him then as Castor, his Pollux was a young English girl with a Scottish name who had just begun studying art at Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire. Margaret Mempes Macdonald was the daughter of John Macdonald, a lawyer turned mining engineer, who had moved from Glasgow to work in England, where he met and married a colleague’s sister, an Englishwoman, Frances Grove Hardeman, in Tipton, Warwickshire.

They had five children, three boys and two girls. Margaret came after the son and heir, Charles, on 5 November 1864, making her four years older than Charlie McIntosh. Their backgrounds could not have been more different. The McIntoshes were upwardly-mobile working class, the Macdonalds were static, upper-class professionals with several generations of money in the family. They had continuing roots in Glasgow because of the Macdonald brothers’ law practice, which was still maintained there, and the presence of Grandmother White’s two maiden daughters, Margaret’s great-aunts, Janet and Agnes. This family framework was to be a formidable influence in the years to come.