Jacob Owen
Jacob Owen was a British architect, civil engineer, and public administrator of the nineteenth century. His architectural work is most closely associated with Dublin, Ireland. He also contributed extensively to shaping public architecture throughout Ireland, through his design and oversight of schools, asylums, prisons and other public buildings associated with British rule.
Biography
Early life and training
Jacob Owen was born on 28 July 1778 in Llanfihangel-yng-Ngwynfa, Wales, the son of Margaret Owen of Llanfihangel and Jacob Owen of St Chad's parish, Shrewsbury. It is not known how long Owen's father remained in Llanfihangel. The Montgomeryshire historian E.R. Morris noted he had a peripatetic engineering career throughout Wales and Shropshire.Following an education at Monmouth Grammar School, the younger Jacob Owen was apprenticed to the English canal engineer William Underhill, who was occupied on canal works in Staffordshire. Owen's shift from civil engineer, the profession of his father, to architect was by no means guaranteed. After his apprenticeship, Owen moved south to London where he appears to have worked for the surveyor, Thomas Bush. Architectural historian Frederick O'Dwyer suggests that through Bush's military connections, Owen made the next important move in his career to the Royal Engineers department in the Board of Ordnance where, in 1805, he was appointed to the role of full clerk of works.
Private practice in England
There is little published on the breadth of Owen's work in England. No significant engineering work has been recorded against his name for the Board of Ordnance. Somewhat more is known of his private practice. Much of his output in England seems to have been ecclesiastical and civic architecture, based close to his centre of operations at the Portsmouth Naval Base. He is known to have collaborated with James Adams on the design of St Paul's School, Southsea, in 1825. The school buildings, which were described as 'chaste and elegant' shortly after completion in 1828, were destroyed during the Second World War, along with the neighbouring St Paul's Church. In the late 1820s, he set up an architectural practice with Thomas Ellis Owen, Messrs Jacob Owen and Son. The Owens notable works include All Saint's Church, Portsea and the Crescent Terraces and Anglesey Hotel, Gosport.Owen was actively involved in the Church Building Commission from the 1820s, both as an architect and as a committee member of the Hampshire branch. A number of church buildings attributed to Owen, including Church of the Holy Trinity, West Street, Fareham ; Former United Reformed Church, West Street, Fareham ; the Church of St Francis, Funtley Hill, Farnham ; and St John the Baptist, Rowlands Castle were completed following his departure for Ireland, suggesting that he kept up his English practice for several years after leaving Portsmouth.
Royal Engineers and departure for Ireland
Over the first third of the nineteenth century, Owen rose to prominence in the Board of Ordnance, in part through his close relationship with John Fox Burgoyne. Owen and Burgoyne's association likely began in the 1820s, when Owen took up the role of Chief Surveyor to the Royal Engineers at Portsmouth, then under Burgoyne's command. In 1831, Burgoyne was appointed chairman of the Board of Public Works in Ireland. Existing arrangements between the engineering and architectural divisions of the board were not viewed favorably by Burgoyne and his commissioners. Previously the roles of architect and engineer had been divided between two officeholders, but a reformist impulse amongst the new commissioners and the death of the chief engineer, John Killaly, presented the opportunity to combine the roles. Burgoyne expressed his view that Owen's 'abilities and integrity' made him an ideal candidate for the role of principal engineer and architect in the Board of Public Works, based in Dublin. Beginning in 1832, Owen held the appointment for 24 years. Owen's younger brother, John, also made the move to Dublin in the 1830s, becoming clerk of works and architect in the Royal Engineers in the Ordnance Civil Branch. It appears that John's career was more closely tied to Burgoyne as he returned to England at the completion of Burgoyne's tenure, becoming surveyor to Burgoyne in his later role as Inspector General of Fortifications.Career in Ireland
Owen's architectural work in Ireland is generally, though not exclusively, associated with the Board of Public Works. Owen proved himself a industrious and capable leader in his appointment to the newly formed board of Public Works in Ireland. Burgoyne reflected in 1835 that Owen was 'the most able man for the situation I ever met in my life.' Owen's works for the board include the Carriage and Stable block, Dublin Castle, Arbour Hill Prison, Dublin, the Garda Headquarters, Phoenix Park, Talbot House , and the Criminal Lunatic Asylum, Dundrum among others.For much of his career, Owen had maintained a private architectural practice. He continued to pick up independent private commissions and work from other Crown departments for his first fourteen years in Ireland, thus expanding his mark on the landscape of civic architecture in Ireland. This can be seen in his design for St Patrick's Church, Dalkey and his work for the National Education Commission on Tyrone House and the Model Infant School. O'Dwyer has argued that the Great Famine and subsequent reorganization of public works finally led Treasury to put an end to Owen's free enterprise. However, the increased pressure on the Board's architectural staff, which had led Owen to commission outside architects for some of the Board's major building projects, was a more immediate factor in play. In lieu of his private practice work, his salary was increased by 25 per cent to £1,000.
As the work of the board increased, Owen expanded his role as administrator, and drew on the talents of non-board architects. The result of his efforts can be seen in Augustus Pugin's design of St Patrick's College, Maynooth, and in his collaboration with Decimus Burton at Phoenix Park. One of his greatest impressions on the history of nineteenth Irish architecture can be seen in his supervision of the design of Queen's College at Belfast, Cork and Galway undertaken by Charles Lanyon, Thomas Deane, and John Benjamin Keane respectively.
Reputation for nepotism
On arriving in Ireland, Owen bought with him a considerable family entourage. Owen had married Mary Underhill, the daughter of his former master William Underhill, by whom he had seventeen children, including the naval architect Jeremiah Owen, the theologian Joseph Butterworth Owen and the architects Thomas Ellis Owen, James Higgins Owen, William Henshaw Owen, and Henry Higgins Owen. According to O'Dwyer, Owen set about 'founding a dynasty that would dominate the new board of public works for the first sixty years of its existence.' Four of his sons either won commissions or held posts on the board, while the marriages of architects Charles Lanyon and Frederick Villiers Clarendon into the Owen family increased his sphere of influence in Ireland. Both Lanyon and James Higgins Owen served as presidents of the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland.Contemporaries too perceived a 'dynasty in the making.' Moves against Owen were made within the first years of his appointment. In 1837, Decimus Burton had suggested building villas adjacent to Phoenix Park, reflecting the design of London's Regent's Park. Owen tendered for these blocks, but the plans soon became mired in controversy. In June 1838, a pseudonymous letter was sent to the Lord Lieutenant, the Earl of Mulgrave, accusing Owen and those who worked with him of acts of financial misconduct, and for being 'brother conservatives and Orangemen.' Owen denied these accusations, pointing to the fact that he had never expressed political views in Ireland, that members of his family supported the Whigs, and that he regretted to report 'of all, my greatest sin is that of being an Englishman.' Other accusations relating to the appointment of his children and apprentices as county surveyors followed but no misconduct was found. Called before a parliamentary select committee to assess Owen's examinations for vacancies on the Board, Burgoyne was asked whether Owen was a 'gentleman of considerable experience', to which he responded 'perhaps as much as any man I ever met with.' His son, James Higgins Owen, succeeded his post.
Personality, power and politics
Owen was a polarising figure, making contemporary assessments of his personality hard to reconcile. According to Frederick O'Dwyer, 'His brusque manner, family favouritism, and dominance of Irish public works architecture brought him enemies.' The architect Robert Young's assessment of him as 'vulgar and unmannerly' contrasted diametrically with the writer Thomas Jackson's description of 'the generous and eloquent Owen.'Desmond McCabe has argued that Owen's 'robust and controlling temperament in the conduct of public office' has often distracted historians' attention from assessment of his work. Nevertheless, as historian John Graby has suggested, Owen's public character was in part responsible for his ability to strongly advocate for the professionalisation of architecture in Ireland. 'Strong willed and oblivious to criticism, character traits that had attracted a certain amount of odium and professional jealousy during his term in office as government architect, could now be seen' in the campaign to found the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland 'as a bonus in the fight to re-establish the profession.' Owen served as vice-president of the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland, the Royal Zoological Society of Ireland, and the Institution of Civil Engineers of Ireland, and was a council member of the Geological Society of Dublin. He became an elected member of the Royal Irish Academy in 1838. He wielded his power in Irish public life with determined political calculation. While he was accused of harbouring conservative prejudices, he never entered into political debate.
Networks of family ties were critical to Owen's power but his unprovoked defense of his family's politics in 1838 suggested they were also a subject of some sensitivity. His claim that his family were predominantly Whigs did not play out in later decades. In the 1830s his eldest son Jeremiah Owen campaigned publicly against Whig policy in the Navy; from the 1830s his second eldest Thomas Ellis Owen ran as a Tory candidate in Portsmouth, twice becoming mayor; from the 1840s, his third eldest son, Joseph Butterworth Owen was publicly connected with leading Conservative politicians including Lord Shaftsbury; and his son-in-law Charles Lanyon was Conservative MP for Belfast in the 1860s. Owen's departure from Ireland coincided with the Fenian Rising of 1867. The year before Joseph Butterworth Owen wrote in support of the suspension of habeas corpus for Fenians. Despite his domineering personality in so many aspects of public life, it was perhaps Owen's own political silence, in contrast to so many members of his family, that played in his favour during challenges to his public office.