| Architect Details |
James Duncan, but he may have been executant architect for John Bryce, architects c.1880; David & John Bryce, architects 1890 and 1892; A Marshall Mackenzie, architect 1899; A Marshall Mackenzie & Son, architects 1920; Meldrum and Mantell, architects 2003.
James Duncan was born in 1828, the son of George Duncan, a Turriff mason. Nothing is known of his professional training, but he commenced practice in Turriff by at least 1862 when he designed Cuminestown School. He quickly acquired a well-deserved reputation for the planning and construction of farm steadings and had more than forty estates, great and small, as clients. In 1887 his son William Liddle Duncan, born 1870, became an apprentice; he was taken into partnership in 1897. He was admitted LRIBA in the mass intake of 20 July 1911, his proposers including Arthur Clyne and Arthur Hay Livingstone Mackinnon. James Duncan died on 6 March 1907 and was buried in St Congan's Churchyard. His wife, Ellen Liddle, died on 24 November 1917 aged 79. Following his father's death William Liddle Duncan continued the practice under his own name.
In or about 1870 David Bryce slipped on a frozen-over platform at Cargill Station when returning from an inspection of the work at Meikleour House. He broke a leg and never fully recovered becoming subject to recurrent bronchitis. It was probably frequent indisposition that persuaded Bryce to take Robert Rowand Anderson into partnership in 1873, with Bryce's nephew John Junior (son of his brother John) also becoming a partner, the practice title being Bryce, Anderson & Bryce. However at that stage in his career Anderson was primarily a church architect and incompatibility led to Anderson's departure. John Bryce Junior remained in partnership, the partnership title then ecoming D & J Bryce. David Bryce died at 131 George Street on 5 August 1876. John Bryce retained the practice title of D & J Bryce after his uncle's death, completing the work in hand and running a generally similar practice until the early 1890s when business trailed off. He retired in 1908 and died on 22 August 1922, leaving moveable estate of £34,831 19s 6d. After 1908 the practice was continued by John's nephew John Bryce Brechin, son of his sister Davida who had married into the Brechin quantity surveying family. He did not join the RIBA and is not as yet recorded as having carried out any architectural work. His business was perhaps more surveyor than architect. He retired in 1928 when the practice was closed and the drawings dispersed. The large project watercolour drawings prepared for exhibition at the RSA were given to the RIAS which subsequently disposed of them: some are now at RCAHMS. The library, including David Bryce's folio of 'Sketches of Scotch and Old English Ornament' was bought by an American, Joseph Gavarelli, who presented it to George Washington University at St Louis Missouri, in 1932. John Bryce Brechin died in retirement on 18 April 1941. John Bryce II was born in Glasgow in about 1842, the son of David Bryce's younger brother John who died in August 1851 and his wife Annie. John presumably trained with his uncle and remained as his assistant. It was probably frequent indisposition that persuaded David Bryce to take Robert Rowand Anderson into partnership in 1873, with John Junior also becoming a partner, the practice title being Bryce, Anderson & Bryce. However at that stage in his career Anderson was primarily a church architect and incompatibility led to Anderson's departure. John Bryce Junior remained in partnership, the partnership title then becoming D & J Bryce. John Bryce retained the practice title of D & J Bryce after his uncle's death in 1876, completing the work in hand and running a generally similar practice until the early 1890s when business trailed off. He was admitted FRIBA on 13 January 1879, his proposers being Charles Barry Junior, Richard Armstrong (a former assistant) and Edmund Benjamin Ferrey. He retired in 1908 and died on 22 August 1922, leaving moveable estate of £34,831 19s 6d. After 1908 the practice was continued by John's nephew John Bryce Brechin, son of his sister Davida who had married into the Brechin quantity surveying family.
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 Matthews' 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 Forres 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, the year after Bryce's death, Marshall Mackenzie had amply demonstrated his capacity to gain clients, and Matthews was persuaded to re-admit him as a partner, but in respect of Aberdeen and Elgin-based business only, William Lawrie retaining his semi-independent position in Inverness where the practice continued under the name of Matthews & Lawrie. From 1883 onward Mackenzie undertook virtually all of the design work of the Aberdeen office, Matthews being preoccupied 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 Inverness practice in his own name only. 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 Hardy 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 Phoebe Ann Robertson Cooper, 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 - his middle names were those of his maternal grandfather- born 1879, 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 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 him in the same league as J J Burnet. The Canada House 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 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 Alexander Marshall 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 title then reverted to 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.
John J Meldrum set up practice at 40 High Street, Banff as an architect in 1948. He originally trained as a chartered surveyor but turned to architecture at some point prior to this date. In the later 1950s a branch office was opened in Turriff. Meldrum was a founder member of the Banff Preservation Society in 1965. In 1975 Meldrum took Henry (Harry) Mantell into partnership, the name then becoming Meldrum & Mantell. Meldrum retired in 1987 and died in 1990. The practice was awarded an Architectural Heritage Year Award and a Saltire Society Award in 1975 and a Civic Trust Award in 1978.
Alexander George Robertson Mackenzie - his middle names were those of his maternal grandfather - was born 12 March 1879 at Forest Road, Aberdeen, the second son of Alexander Marshall Mackenzie and his wife, Phoebe Ann Robertson Cooper. He began attending classes at Gray's School of Art, Robert Gordon's Institute of Technology at the early age of ten along with his older brother Thomas R Mackenzie and his sister Phoebe who was only eight. Thomas and Phoebe do not seem to have passed any art exams but 'AGR' continued classes until 1899. Articled to his father in August 1894 at the age of fifteen, 'AGR' took classes at 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. He had a spell in Paris, working as an improver with René Sergent, architect to his uncle's art dealer, Joseph Duveen. 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 Britain, Normandy and 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. AGR's father set up a London office, initially to enlarge and remodel Hursley Park in Hampshire, which the Coopers, related to Marshall Mackenzie through his marriage, 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 immediately 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 Canada House 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. 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. AGR's brother Gilbert Marshall Mackenzie 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 Gilbert 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, despite being in great pain as a result of this injury, returned to assist his father with the work on Australia House which had been continuing during the war. Alexander Marshall 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. 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.
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Historic Environment Records (HER)