Edmund Blacket
Edmund Thomas Blacket was an Australian architect, best known for his designs for the University of Sydney, St. Andrew's Cathedral, Sydney and St. Saviour's Cathedral, Goulburn.
Arriving in Sydney from England in 1842, at a time when the city was rapidly expanding and new suburbs and towns were being established, Blacket was to become a pioneer of the revival styles of architecture, in particular Victorian Gothic. He was the most favoured architect of the Church of England in New South Wales for much of his career, and between late 1849 and 1854 was the official "Colonial Architect to New South Wales".
While Blacket is famous for his churches, and is sometimes referred to as "The Wren of Sydney", he also built houses, ranging from small cottages to multi-storey terraces and large mansions; government buildings; bridges; and business premises of all sorts. Blacket's architectural practice was highly influential in the development of Australian architecture. He worked with a number of other architects of both Australian and international importance: James Barnet, William Wardell and John Horbury Hunt. Among his children, Arthur, Owen and Cyril followed him into the profession. The successful architect William Kemp also trained in his practice.
Edmund Blacket is regarded by descendants of the Blackett family as "a man of the strictest probity with a great love for his profession, who also studied the classics, and was considered the leading authority on Classical Greek in Sydney, loved music, playing the organ at the temporary wooden pro-Cathedral, was a competent wood-carver and an amateur mechanical engineer".
Early life
Edmund Blacket was born on 25 August 1817 at 85 St Margaret's Hill Southwark, London, England, the seventh child of James Blacket and Margaret Harriot née Ralph. His father was a prosperous draper or slopseller of Smithfield, London. The family were Nonconformists, and Edmund's grandfather Edward Ralph, a former clockmaker, had been minister of a Congregational church at Maidstone. Blacket was educated at Mill Hill School, near Barnet, and although he showed an early interest in architecture, spending his holidays sketching and measuring old buildings, his father opposed him taking up the profession.. On leaving school, Blacket went to work in his father's office and three years later, at the age of 20, took a position in a linen mill in Stokesley, Yorkshire. This mill was owned by his father in partnership with a Thomas Mease and operated by Edmund's brothers John and James. However, the Blackets ended the partnership with Mease in July 1837 as they were unhappy about certain financial matters, and by March 1838, the issue was in Chancery.
In about 1837, although lacking formal training, Blacket began work for the Stockton and Darlington Railway as a surveyor. This was the period of rapid expansion of the railways and in railway engineering and innovation. As a railway surveyor one of Blacket's jobs would have been the design of railway stations. He continued in Yorkshire until 1841, taking every possible opportunity to draw ancient buildings and their details, which included spending his 23rd birthday surveying Whitby Abbey.
In June 1841, Blacket was at the family home on Brixton Hill, when his father entered him on the census returns as "Draper". During the same year, he worked for the Archbishop of Canterbury in London as Inspector of Schools, and at that time learnt the craft of making stained glass He spent the year "in misery", being in love with Sarah Mease, the daughter of his father's former business partner. Their marriage was opposed by the families, and having been in love probably from 1837 or earlier, they were finally wed on 27 April 1842 in the medieval parish church of Wakefield, with neither set of parents present. Blacket's diaries indicate that he had become a member of the Church of England and had a great love for the Anglican Liturgy. His brother Henry Blackett became a high church Anglican clergyman. Three of Blacket's sketchbooks from this period of the architectural details of buildings in the United Kingdom are now held at the University of Sydney Library.
On 13 June 1842, Blacket and his new wife left England on the passenger vessel Eden, bound for Sydney, but with New Zealand as their intended final destination. Blacket later wrote, "Neither my Father or Mother would bid me good bye, so my old Uncle offered to see us off." He had letters of introduction to prominent residents of Sydney, including Sir Charles Nicholson, Thomas Sutcliffe Mort and a recommendation to Bishop William Grant Broughton from the Archbishop of Canterbury. Blacket suffered from sea-sickness for the first month, although Sarah did not. After about 55 days the ship called at Bahia in Brazil, where he made sketches of church doors and other items that interested him. He also acquired a marmoset monkey which disturbed his sketching for the rest of the voyage. He spent the rest of the voyage carving a wooden crucifix.
The Eden sailed into Sydney Harbour on 4 November 1842 with Blacket, who kept a shipboard diary, writing that he had never seen such "an exquisite scene". The Blackets were also greatly impressed by the crew of Māori oarsmen in the pilot boat. The first building that Blacket saw in Sydney Town was the simple copper-clad steeple of Francis Greenway's St. James's Church. He went ashore and found lodgings opposite the little Methodist Chapel with its Doric portico in Princes Street. Sarah wrote home that "almost everyone keeps a carriage" and that Sydney Town had just achieved the status of a city, the first mayor having been elected. Blacket was a prepossessing young man, handsome, well-mannered, elegantly dressed and with £600 in capital. He soon found suitable employment and the Blackets relinquished their plans to travel on to New Zealand.
Family relationships
Blacket was an enthusiastic writer, leaving a shipboard journal in the form of an ordinary school exercise book and sending many letters to his family in England, and to his children, particularly his youngest daughter Hilda, to whom he once sent thirty stamps, as an encouragement to write back.In 1849 Blacket assisted his cousin Thomas Blacket Stephens in his immigration to Sydney. Thomas went on to be a prominent citizen and politician of Brisbane, Queensland. Blacket's brother Russell, who joined him in Australia in 1858, ran a school in Wollongong and was the father of Wilfred Blacket, barrister, and great-great-great-grandfather of the Australian poet David Musgrave.
All his other brothers and sisters remained in England, and their descendants include his great nephews Patrick, Lord Blackett and Basil Phillott Blackett. The breach with his parents and in-laws apparently healed. After his father's death in 1858 he wrote to his mother-in-law that "there has never been an instance in which I have failed to receive a letter from him, and in addition he has regularly directed and posted to me the Illustrated London News and Punch." The first edition of the former paper was published shortly before he left England, and would have kept him informed of architectural developments in England.
Architectural influences and development
In England, towards the end the 18th century, architecture was dominated by the simple symmetrical Classical forms of Georgian architecture. This style was transported to Sydney along with the first English settlers and the accompanying military regiments. However, among England's elite there was a growing taste for the picturesque Gothic style. This too was introduced to Australia, and Sydney's convict architect, Francis Greenway, employed it in the construction of the Government Stables with battlements and towers.Changes within the Church of England and an academic interest in the historic styles promoted the formation of the Oxford Architectural Society and the Cambridge Camden Society which, though differing in their philosophies, both promoted the medieval styles—Gothic in particular—as being those suitable for church architecture and its correct liturgical function. The purpose of the architect was seen as being to create designs of such archaeological correctness that they reproduced the styles of ecclesiastical architecture prior to the Reformation, as is demonstrated in the work of the renowned Augustus Welby Pugin.
On his arrival in Sydney, Blacket possessed a small library of architectural books, and he kept abreast of the latest trends by subscribing to journals. Although there were a number of buildings with Gothic details in the colony at the time, in particular the existing south transept of the new cathedral, these structures had strongly Classical elements beneath their medieval detailing. Blacket was the first architect in Australia who truly understood the principles of the Gothic style and who could design a church that would satisfy the august societies of Oxford and Cambridge. Since it was the wish of so many colonials, not the least of whom was the Bishop, to assuage their homesickness by at least attending a church that reminded them of one in Cornwall, Yorkshire or East Anglia, Edmund Blacket was to become a very popular man.
Although probably at his best when designing in the Medieval ecclesiastic styles and the Florentine palazzo style which he employed for commercial premises, Blacket followed the trends of Victorian architecture in London through his subscription and library membership. Some of his later churches, particularly those in brick, were to have a robust quality, often with Early French Gothic rose windows with plate tracery or a simple quatrefoil. Blacket quickly adopted the colonial Georgian form of domestic architecture, to which he then applied a variety of details. He was also introduced to the architectural trends in both North America and Scotland by John Horbury Hunt and James Barnet respectively. From the 1870s his commercial and domestic buildings began to acquire eclectic details and incised ornament.