| Architect Details |
Prince Albert designed main features with William Smith of J & W Smith, architect 1852-6; Anderson Simon & Crawford, continued by Anderson alone after dissolution of the partnership, architects 1902; A Marshall Mackenzie & Son, architects 1911-12; Colonel Herbert Morgan Smail and Mills & Shepherd, architects 1922.
John Smith 1834-8; Law and Dunbar-Nasmith, architects 1986-91.
Frank Lewis Worthington Simon was born on 31 March 1862 at Darmstadt, Germany, the son of David Worthington Simon DD MA PhD. He was educated at Tettenhall College, Wolverhampton and the King Edward VI Grammar School in Birmingham, and was articled to John Cotton in Birmingham in 1879. At the end of his apprenticeship, c.1882, he became an assistant to Jethro Anstice Cossins in the same city before joining the atelier of Jean Louis Pascal and enrolling c.1883 at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts where he spent only one year and was a contemporary of Alexander Nisbet Paterson, John Keppie and Stewart Henbest Capper, sharing rooms with the latter two. After completing the course he spent about a year in Glasgow with Burnet Son & Campbell in 1886 and then a similar period with Wardrop & Anderson: according to his RIBA nomination paper he joined that firm just prior to George Washington Browne's departure. Throughout that period, from sometime before March 1885, Simon had his own studio at 8 York Place from which he made a fine series of drawings of old Edinburgh which formed the basis of his 'Etchings of Old Edinburgh'. He won the Tite Prize in 1887 and commenced independent practice in the following year at 34 St Andrew Square, his first significant commission being a fine house, Outwood, at 8 Mortonhall Road for his father, who had now become Principal Simon. He then formed a partnership with his fellow student at Pascal's, Stewart Henbest Capper, winning the competition for Hope Chapel, Wigan, in 1888. In 1890 Simon came into prominence as the architect of the Edinburgh International Exhibition of that year, working in collaboration with the artist-architect William Allan Carter who also had his own studio at 5 St Andrew Square; in that same year Rowand Anderson and David MacGibbon persuaded thirty well-off individuals to subscribe £1,200 for the formation of the Edinburgh School of Applied Art at the Royal Institution. When classes commenced on 17 October 1892 Simon was its first professor with George Mackie Watson as first assistant, quickly joined by his brother John who had run the Edinburgh Architectural Association classes and by Capper, the last giving the School as a whole a marked Ecole des Beaux-Arts bias in its teaching. All owed their appointments to Anderson's patronage, the Watson brothers also being ex-assistants of Anderson's while Capper was an ex-assistant of his former partner George Washington Browne. Simon moved his private practice to 36 Hanover Street late in 1891 or early 1892. The School of Applied Art was hugely successful in attracting students and later that same year 1892, pressure of work at the School - where the classes were from 8 to 10am - induced Simon to end his partnership with Capper and enter a short-lived partnership with Charles Edward Tweedie. Tweedie's provenance is not yet known but he had a one-year-old son suggesting an age of about thirty. The Simon & Tweedie partnership won the competition for Llanelly Town Hall in 1892 but lost the commission to the local architect William Griffiths. It had more success in Manchester where Simon had won the competition for the Macfadyen Memorial Church, an office being opened in Manchester to build it. The Simon & Tweedie partnership seems to have closed late in 1895 or early in 1896 and in 1897 Simon resigned his chair to concentrate wholly on his practice. About 1898 Simon merged his practice with that of Alexander Hunter Crawford. Crawford had been born in 1865 of the biscuit-making family. He had been articled c.1880 to John Russell Walker and had remained there until 1885 or 1886 when he had moved to London. After a couple of short-term appointments he had secured a place in the office of Ralph Selden Wornum in 1887, from whom he had moved to the LCC Architects Department for six months early in 1891. He had returned to Edinburgh in August 1891 to commence independent practice at 39 York Place. The new partnership of Simon & Crawford was based in Simon's office at 36 Hanover Street. In the following year, 1899, there was a further merger with Rowand Anderson's practice as Anderson, Simon & Crawford. While some clients saw Anderson's age and difficult temperament as a problem - he was then sixty-five - the catalyst may have been the competition for the Glasgow International Exhibition of 1901 for which they prepared an entry. This partnership also proved brief, being dissolved in 1902 as a result of a lawsuit. Simon and Craword then reverted to their previous partnership name, with an office at 10 Randolph Place, Simon's address then being 67 Great King Street.
John Smith was born in 1781, the son of William Smith, architect and builder, Aberdeen. Of the father little is recorded except that he was known as 'Sink'em'; that he had his workshop in Longacre; that he designed and built Gilcomston Chapel of Ease and the houses at the bottom end of Marischal Street, all in Aberdeen. It is not known exactly when he died but it appears to have been between February and November 1812. The son is said to have been sent at an early age to the office of James Playfair (or perhaps he assisted him in some junior capacity at the building of Cairness, Aberdeenshire, but neither the Playfair diary nor the Gordon minutes provide any evidence of it). He cannot have worked long for Playfair who died in 1794, and it is not known which London office he was in thereafter. Around 1804 he returned to Aberdeen with an extensive collection of plans and was nearly lost as his ship entered Aberdeen Harbour in a storm. Circa 1805 Smith designed his first major work in Aberdeen, a large house on Union Street for Patrick Milne of Crimonmogate. Two years later Smith succeeded Thomas Fletcher as engineer to the King Street, Union Street and Union Terrace works and laid out St Nicholas Street to connect it with George Street. By 1860 he had produced the first accurate survey of Aberdeen which was published in the same year. Thereafter he built up the largest business both in architecture and building and cabinet-making in the north-east, with headquarters at his house at 142 King Street, Aberdeen. He was associated with Thomas Telford on the harbour improvements planned from 1824 and was formally appointed superintendent of work for the City of Aberdeen in that same year. In that capacity he attended to such matters as street lighting, cleansing and executions (which are said to have brought gloom to the Smith household for weeks). He was also agent for the Imperial Insurance Company. John died at Rosebank Hardgate, a pleasant 18th-century mansion with a large garden which he inherited from his father-in-law. He had married Margaret Grant, only child of Colonel George Grant of Auchterblair in Banffshire, a marriage which brought useful landed connections, their first home being at Longacre adjacent to the elder William Smith's house and builder's yard. Near contemporary accounts record that she was tall good-looking and aristocratic in demeanour which a family portrait appears to confirm. Smith himself was 'a shy retiring man as well as an able and diligent official'. Most members of their family died early but his son William joined the practice after graduating MA at Marischal College and subsequently sought experience in London with Thomas Leverton Donaldson. He appears to have returned to Aberdeen by 1842 and was made a partner in 1845. His eldest daughter Margaret Grant Smith (died 1857) married Alexander Gibb, the civil engineer, on 17 March 1831. Some biographical details will be found in Lettice Milne Rae's 'Story of the Gibbs.' John Smith's work was in his early years almost exclusively refined neo-Greek, but from 1820 onwards most of his churches and large houses were Tudor Gothic, the latter sometimes with Scottish features as at Balmoral from about 1830. These were closely modelled on William Burn's style with which he had become acquainted at Robert Gordon's, Fintray and Auchmacoy. Brief biographical notices with short lists of principal works compiled by John's son William appeared in the Aberdeen Journal' in July 1852, in 'The Builder' and in the 'Architectural Publication Society's Dictionary'. A great many informative references to his career in Aberdeen will be found in G M Frazer's biography of Archibald Simpson (1790-1847), which appeared as a serial in the 'Aberdeen Weekly Journal' of 1918. A collected copy of these articles is available at Aberdeen Public Library. A fragmentary list of plans and some of his accounts (1807-1832) are in the National Monuments Record of Scotland.
Alexander Marshall Mackenzie was born in Elgin on 1 January 1848, the son of Thomas Mackenzie, architect and his wife Helen Margaret McInnes. His middle name derived from his mother, who was a granddaughter of William Marshall, the Duke of Gordon's factor and a celebrated composer of reels and strathspeys. His father died in October 1854 when he was six. Educated at Elgin Academy, he was articled to James Matthew's Aberdeen office from 1863 to 1868, and remained there as assistant for a year. His elder brother Hugh being already settled in Edinburgh he then found a place in the office of David Bryce, living at 10 Forrest Street. During that period he studied drawing and painting with Robert Innes who had painted a portrait of his father in 1851, and exhibited a selection of his topographical views at the RSA in 1870. This was, perhaps, at least partly in preparation for a study tour of Italy and France undertaken in that year, after which he commenced practice in Elgin at the early age of twenty-two. By 1877, Marshall Mackenzie had amply demonstrated his capacity to gain clients, and Marshall was persuaded to re-admit him as a partner, but in respect of Aberdeen and Elgin-based business only, Lawrie retaining his semi-independent position in Inverness where the practice continued under the name of Matthews and Lawrie. From 1883 onward Mackenzie undertook virtually all of the design work of the Aberdeen office, Matthews being pre-occupied with civic duties as provost, principally on Rosemount Viaduct and the Union Terrace improvements. When William Lawrie died in 1887 his chief assistant John Hinton Gall took over the practice in his own name only and Matthews eventually retired completely in 1893 at the age of seventy-three, leaving Mackenzie as sole partner. Marshall Mackenzie's classical work varied greatly in quality, mainly because of cost factors, working in granite being expensive. According to Herbert Wigglesworth, then his apprentice, a second visit to Italy in or about 1883 inspired the Northern Assurance Building and the Gray's School of Art and Aberdeen Art Gallery buildings, the details of the former suggesting that he had looked as much at modern Italian architecture as at high Renaissance examples. In the latter he adopted a two colour treatment by introducing elements of pink Corrennie granite, apparently in deference to the use of sandstone and brick dressings in Simpson's Triple Kirk opposite, an experiment that was to extend to the neo-Georgian villas he built in the 1890s. Much of his classical work from the mid-1880s onward was in a rather flat pilastraded idiom that lent itself to machine cutting: only at the Parish Council and School Board offices, and at the Manx Bank did he have the budget to adopt a more three dimensional treatment. Marshall Mackenzie's Gothic work was much more consistent in quality. From 1883 onwards beginning with Craigiebuckler, he paralleled Honeyman, Rowand Anderson and Blanc in the adaptation of mediaeval forms to a more liturgical form of Presbyterian worship. Both Craigiebuckler and Ruthrieston were English Gothic in detail, but thereafter he showed a marked preference for late Scots Gothic forms. This development stemmed from his restoration of Arbuthnott Church in 1889, but was also related to the Aberdeen Ecclesiological Society, originally initiated by the Rev James Cooper of St Nicholas East Church, William Kelly, later of Smith & Kelly, and his brother-in-law Charles Carmichael on Kelly's return from London and a continental study tour in 1885. Mackenzie was one of their founder members and his first new-build church in the Scots Gothic idiom was Powis, Aberdeen, 1895, its details drawn from Greyfriars Church, then under threat from the Marischal College extension scheme and which - against his own wishes - he was to be obliged to demolish. Mackenzie was elected ARSA in 1893 although he had exhibited only once twenty-three years earlier, and admitted FRIBA on 30 November 1896 with the influential support of the London architects Alfred Waterhouse, Colonel Robert W Edis, and John McKean Brydon. These events were prompted by royal patronage, initially at the new church at Crathie in 1893 and again in 1895 when the Duke and Duchess of Fife (the Prince of Wales's daughter Princess Louise) commissioned the rebuilding of Mar Lodge. An honorary LLD followed in 1906, marking the final completion of the Marischal College extension scheme, formally opened by King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra to mark the Quater Centenary celebrations. The completion of the Marischal College works brought the practice still greater national fame, but by then the practice had already opened a London office in 1903, a development directly related to Mackenzie's brother-in-law. Mackenzie had married the only daughter of Alexander Cooper of the Elgin legal firm Cooper & Wink, and a granddaughter of General George Duncan Robertson, head of the Clan Robertson. Her brother George Alexander Cooper (1856-1940), later Sir George 1st Baronet, had become an American property magnate. He had also married an heiress, Mary Smith of Evanston, Illinois, the niece of 'Chicago' Smith, and became a major art collector, his dealer being Joseph Duveen. In 1901 the Coopers bought the lease of 26 Grosvenor Square, which made them neighbours to the Earl and Countess of Aberdeen at no 27: they had recently returned from Canada where Lord Aberdeen had been Governor General from 1893 to 1898. The London decorators Howard & Sons redecorated no 26 'under the aegis of Duveen Brothers' probably with some involvement by Duveen's architect Rene Sergent in Paris, the panelling for Duveen's tapestries being made by Anatole Beaumetz. While this work was in progress, Marshall Mackenzie's eldest son Alexander George Robertson Mackenzie (born 1879) - his middle names were those of his maternal grandfather - was working with Sergent in Paris as an improver. Articled to his father in August 1894 at the age of fifteen, 'AGR' took classes at Gray's School of Art, Robert Gordon's Institute of Technology and the University of Aberdeen, and quickly developed extraordinary ability, becoming his father's chief assistant at the end of his apprenticeship in 1898. Nevertheless he felt he needed London experience, and early in 1900 he obtained a place in the office of one of his father's proposers, Colonel Edis, which enabled him to study at the Architectural Association and at the Central School of Arts and Crafts under Lethaby, Halsey Ricardo and Frampton. After his spell with Sergent in 1901 he obtained a place in the London office of Niven & Wigglesworth, Herbert Wigglesworth having been an apprentice of his father's, and passed the qualifying exam in June. He was admitted ARIBA on 17 September 1901, his proposers being his father, Wigglesworth, and his partner Niven. At that date he had travelled only in Normandy and in Holland, but soon thereafter he spent two months on a study tour in Italy before being recalled to his father's office in 1902 to assist with the Marischal College extension. The London office was set up initially to enlarge and remodel Hursley Park in Hampshire, which the Coopers had bought in 1902, the work being carried out in association with Duveen, who obtained the boiseries and the Beauvais tapestries. AGR was put in charge of the London office although the division was by no means clear-cut, his father being in London for a few days every fortnight while the son undertook a certain amount of the design work of the Aberdeen office. Partly from the Coopers' influence and partly from sheer ability, the London practice was very successful, at once securing the £300,000 commission for the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in Aldwych, followed by a still more prestigious one for Canada House, also part of the Strand-Kingsway improvements, which put the Mackenzies in the same league as J J Burnet. The project was deferred but another for Australia House, also in Aldwych followed a few years later and was built. AGR was then elevated to FRIBA on 3 March 1913, his proposers being Leonard Stokes who had become a close friend and with whose son there was to be a future connection, and Niven and Wigglesworth. By that date Gilbert Marshall Mackenzie was also in the London office. Born in 1890 or 1891 and educated at Charterhouse rather than in Aberdeen, Gilbert was articled to the Aberdeen office in 1909 but left in the same year for the University of Cambridge, probably to read modern languages in preparation for study at the Atelier Gromort in Paris in 1911. He returned to the London office in 1912 without taking the Diplome du Gouvernement, recalled to assist his brother with Australia House, and passed the qualifying exam in the same year without completing any apprenticeship and little more than a year's practical experience in total. He was admitted ARIBA in the same year, his proposers being his father, his brother, and another professional friend of his brother's, Herbert Austen Hall. Shortly thereafter he was taken into partnership, the practice title becoming briefly A Marchall Mackenzie & Sons. The Mackenzies suffered severely in the First World War. The long-deferred Canada House project was cancelled, the Union Club and the Royal College of Physicians being eventually bought for the purpose and the commission given to Septimus Warwick. Gilbert was called up and commissioned in the First Battalion of the Seaforth Highlanders in which he reached the rank of Captain. While serving in France he drew and painted life in the trenches. Subsequently he was sent to Mesopotamia where he was killed in action near Kut on 21 April 1916. AGR enlisted as a private in the London Scottish, in the hope that he could transfer to the Seaforths and be with his brother, but was severely wounded and lost most of a leg. He was invalided out and assisted his father with the completion of Australia House, where work had continued throughout the war years. Mackenzie's second son, who had become a solicitor and was a partner in Cooper & Wink and was too old for active service similarly volunteered, but because of his eyesight he had to be content with the Service Corps from which he survived unscathed. Alexander Marshall Mackenzie was elevated to the status of full academician in 1918, and the Aberdeen practice remained as prosperous as ever, but despite the continuing support of the Coopers, the London practice did not recover its pre-war success as Burnet's had done. Although still based in London, by the later 1920s AGR was spending much of his time on the work of the Aberdeen office, where his father was assisted by John Gibb Marr (born 1890), who had originally been articled to Clement George. Marr was taken into partnership on 1 January 1927. Niven and Wigglesworth's practice had also begun to run out of work following the completion of Hambro's Bank in London, and their partnership was dissolved in 1927, partly because Niven had developed other interests. Wigglesworth merged his half of the remaining practice with Mackenzie's. Further consolidation took place in Aberdeen in May 1931 when the Mackenzies merged the Aberdeen practice with that of the cinema and auction mart specialist, Clement George, born 1879 in Macduff, who had been in the office from 1897 to 1907, and had remained a family friend: his senior partner, George Sutherland had died in 1927. The practice now became A Marshall Mackenzie, Son & George. These arrangements were to prove brief. Clement George died on 23 February 1932, followed on 4 May 1933 by Alexander Marshall Mackenzie who had been at the drawing board until within a week of his death, latterly working mostly from Culter House, a great early eighteenth century house with a fine formal garden to which he had moved from the very stylish houses AGR had designed for him at Ladyhill and Loch Coull in 1911. The practice then reverted to its former title of A Marshall Mackenzie & Son. As a result of these deaths AGR determined to strengthen the Aberdeen office, where Marr had had little opportunity for design and still less for the modern design required to keep the practice in business. Leonard Stokes's son David, who had left the Architectural Association in 1930 and set up practice with Peter Fleetwood Hesketh in 1930, had run out of work. His office in Lincoln's Inn was nearby Mackenzie and Wigglesworth's, and shortly after his father's death AGR asked Stokes to take charge of the design work of the Aberdeen office. It was an arrangement on which Marr had not been consulted and with which he may not have been entirely happy: much later he observed that he felt Stokes had been sent up to keep an eye on him. Introducing a London Catholic to Aberdeen society of that time was not without problems, but Stokes found that 'the natives in Aberdeen became friendly in about six months'. Although the Aberdeen office was commissioned to build a large new office for the Halifax Building Society, by 1935 the Mackenzie & Wigglesworth practice in London was at a low ebb: Robert W R Mackenzie (1913-75) of the Perth bleaching (Lumsden & Mackenzie) side of the family was to have joined the office, but in the event there was not enough work to justify him coming. The Wigglesworth and Stokes partnerships were dissolved, AGR returned to Aberdeen and the Stokes 'went back to London without any reluctance.' Culter had been sold but AGR and his wife bought a smaller and completely unspoiled mid-eighteenth-century country house at Bourtie, near Inverurie. It was carefully repaired but not modernised and to the very end of her life Mrs Mackenzie cooked on an open fire. Apart from some country house work, most importantly Candacraig, the business of the post-war practice was mainly conservation work, the National Trust for Scotland being the main client. In 1952 Ian G Lindsay, as Chief Investigator, asked AGR to become a part-time investigator of historic buildings with responsibility for Aberdeenshire, Banffshire and Kincardine, some of the survey work being delegated to a Huntly-born architect he had known in London, Robert J Troup, who, like many other architects at the time, was in need of financial help. Of all the part-time investigators, AGR had the greatest influence on Lindsay's thinking, particularly in respect of group value. He pioneered the concept of conservation areas, listing the fisher towns as single items. AGR Mackenzie and John Gibb Marr remained in partnership until 1960 when AGR retired completely, following a disagreement with Marr, which was regretted on both sides and subsequently made up. Like his father, AGR continued to work up to the time of his death on 20 March 1963, a few weeks after major surgery. He was buried at Bourtie churchyard where a simply inscribed standing stone marks his grave. Marr continued the practice after the dissolution of the partnership in 1960, and it was not until this time that its title was changed to A Marshall Mackenzie & Marr. He closed the practice in 1972, when most of the drawings were dispersed to the firm's clients or to the current owners of the buildings. He retired to Raigmore Tower, Inverness, where he died in 1983.
Herbert Morgan Smail, in later years better known as Colonel Smail, was born on 4 June 1890, the son of Adam Smail, taylor and clothier, and his wife Isabella Mitchell. He studied at the Dundee School of Architecture and Technical College from October 1908 to October 1912 whilst serving an apprenticeship with an unidentified firm in the same town, possibly Mills & Shepherd. On completion of his apprenticeship he moved to Glasgow for further office experience, first with James Miller and then with Peter Macgregor Chalmers, enabling him to study at the Glasgow School of Architecture from 1912 to 1914. He spent the summers of those years travelling in England, France, Belgium and Italy. At the beginning of 1919 he joined an office in St Andrews but in April the same year returned to Dundee as senior draughtsman to Mills & Shepherd, where he was made a partner only two months later, although the practice title remained the same. From about 1933 the practice's domestic manner changed somewhat, Crittall metal-framed windows of distinctive proportions becoming a feature. Godfrey Daniel Bower Shepherd died on 21 December 1937, and William M Guild was taken into partnership after several years of practice on his own account. John Donald Mills kept the practice going through the Second World War, operating mainly from St Andrews, while Smail and Guild were on war service. Smail was elected LRIBA in ****. He worked with Mills on some projects in the office, including 'many works in St Andrews and Dundee University' but Smail's Fellowship Nomination Paper indicates that they mainly worked with separate responsibility for different jobs. Smail was admitted FRIBA in 1952, proposed by John Donald Mills, William Salmond and John Needham. Mills died in retirement at his home, 99 North Street, on 26 January 1958, and Smail died on 7 February 1960, survived by his wife Esma Jane Buttar, whom he had married at St Enoch's Church Dundee in 1923, and his daughter.
John Donald Mills was born at 16 Paton's Lane, Dundee on 12 January 1872, the son of James Smith Mills and his wife Rebecca Donald. He was educated at Morgan Academy and Dundee High School, and was articled to Charles & Leslie Ower from 1888 to 1891. Thereafter he became an assistant in the office of John Murray Robertson, with whom he remained for five years and by whom he was profoundly influenced. During that period he attended classes at the Dundee Technical Institute and University College. In 1896 he sought wider experience with Larner Sugden of Leek, the connection probably being made through the Rev E S Sugden, an Episcopal architect-priest in Dundee who was of that family. He greatly enjoyed drawing and during these early years made numerous sketching tours in Britain and abroad, spending a month in Italy (Milan, Como, Florence, Vicenza, Verona, Venice, Siena and Ravenna) and visiting France (including Brittany) several times, once with London architect George Alexander Thomas Middleton, as well as travelling to Germany (including Dresden and Nuremberg), Austria and Prague. In 1899 Mills returned from Leek to commence independent practice in Tayport, concentrating on domestic work, but in October 1900 he moved to Dundee and formed a partnership with Godfrey Daniel Bower Shepherd with an office at 10 Tay Square. Shepherd was born in Dundee in 1874, and had worked under Mills during his apprenticeship in John Murray Robertson's office between 1893 to 1896. He had remained there as draughtsman until 1897 when he moved to London as an assistant in the office of Alfred Walter Saxon Snell. While there he passed the qualifying exam, but did not immediately seek admittance as ARIBA, moving instead to the office of the London Dundonian James Glen Sivewright Gibson in 1899 before returning to his native Dundee the following year. In their earlier years, Mills and Shepherd seem to have remained closely associated with Murray Robertson's practice as their RIBA nomination papers show that they designed interior work at Ballumbie House and built the stables at Blebo House when Robertson's successor, James Findlay, was overcommitted on University College and Dundee Royal Infirmary projects. Mills was admitted FRIBA in 1906, his proposers being Gibson, David Barclay Niven of London and Patrick Hill Thoms, a friend from C & L Ower's office. Shepherd was admitted FRIBA in September of the following year, his proposers being Snell, Thoms and Gibson. At that date Mills had travelled in Italy, France, Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia, and Shepherd, whose family was well-off, 'in Europe'. The practice quickly made a name for very stylish Arts and Crafts houses and from around 1910 replaced Gillespie & Scott as architects to the University of St Andrews, Mills having settled in St Andrews - initially at Dauphin Hill, and later at 99 North Street. In April 1919 Herbert Morgan Smail, in later years better known as Colonel Smail, joined the practice as chief draughtsman. He had been born on 4 June 1890 and had studied at the Dundee School of Architecture and Technical College from October 1908 to October 1912 whilst serving an apprenticeship with an unidentified firm in the same town, possibly Mills & Shepherd. On completion of his apprenticeship he had moved to Glasgow for further office experience, first with James Miller and then with Peter Macgregor Chalmers, enabling him to study at the Glasgow School of Architecture from 1912 to 1914. He had spent the summers of those years travelling in England, France, Belgium and Italy. At the beginning of 1919 he had joined an office in St Andrews before returning to Dundee to join Mills & Shepherd in April. Two months later he was made a partner, although the practice title remained unchanged; and in the same year the practice moved to a larger house at 9 South Tay Street. As a result of having carried out some garden work at Blair Castle for the Duke of Atholl, the ADC to King George V, Mills & Shepherd came to the notice of Queen Mary and they were commissioned to carry out a considerable amount of garden and estate work at Balmoral in 1922-24. In the 1920s they superseded Lorimer on at least two occasions, Auchterhouse and Fingask. From about 1933 the practice's domestic manner changed somewhat, Crittall metal-framed windows of distinctive proportions becoming a feature. Godfrey Daniel Bower Shepherd died on 21 December 1937, and William M Guild was taken into partnership after several years of practice on his own account. John Donald Mills kept the practice going through the Second World War, operating mainly from St Andrews, while Smail and Guild were on war service. Smail was admitted FRIBA in 1952. Mills died in retirement at his home, 99 North Street, on 26 January 1958. He left estate of £17, 951 5s 4d. Smail died soon thereafter, and Guild closed the Dundee office in 1966, continuing to practise for some years thereafter from his home in Cupar.
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