Journal of the William Morris Society, Winter 1962Notes on Warington Taylor and Philip Webb [by Sydney Cockerell] PHILIP WEBB, to whom these letters were addressed, was one the most distinguished architects of the second half of the nineteenth century. He was born at Oxford in 1831, and early in 1856,when head of G. E. Street’s office in that city, he made the acquaintance of William Morris, then in his 23rd year, and became his lifelong friend and companion. In April 1861 he joined with Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown, Charles J. Faulkner and one Peter Paul Marshall in establishing at 8 Red Lion Square the firm of decorative artists first known as Morris Marshall Faulkner & Co. and afterwards as Morris & Co. In the autumn of 1865 the business was transferred to 26 Queen Square (now demolished) and the Morrises left the Red House, Bexley Heath, which Philip Webb had designed for them, to live on the same premises. It was at about this period that Warington Taylor came into the story. ‘With Morris now continuously on the spot’ writes Mr Mackail in his Life of William Morris ‘the company became little more than a name as far as regarded the direction and management of the business. Rossetti had never taken much concern in the work. After his wife’s death he had been for a long time almost a recluse: now he was living in Chelsea, at the other end of London, and was wholly absorbed in his painting. Faulkner, who [7] had no productive gift, and whose great mathematical ability was somewhat thrown away on keeping the books of the firm, had returned to work in Oxford the year before; but in his vacations he stayed much with his mother and sisters, who had a house in Queen Square a few doors off, and at these times his intercourse with Morris was constant and his share in the conduct of the business not inconsiderable. Marshall had resumed his own line of work (he was a surveyor). Burne-Jones and Madox Brown continued to supply designs for stained glass, and Webb for furniture. But the whole of the production, and, except in glass and furniture, the whole of the designing was now in Morris’ sole hands. All the kinds of work begun at Red Lion Square went on here: and gradually there began to be added other industries which afterwards became the staple production of the firm — weaving, dyeing and printing on cloth. No long time after Red House was given up, it became possible to have supplied it from the works at Queen Square with almost everything necessary to complete its decoration and furnishing. Such is the irony of human affairs. But the management of the rapidly extending business had been just at this time put into capable and energetic hands. To Mr Warington Taylor, business manager of Morris & Company from 1865 until his illness and death at the beginning of 1870, it was mainly due that the business became organized and prosperous. Mr Taylor was a Catholic, of good family, who had been educated at Eton and was afterwards for some time in the Army; but he had been unfortunate in his affairs and was then almost penniless. He was full of enthusiasms in art, more especially in music; he was an ardent admirer of Wagner, whose name then was little known in England, and was also an enthusiastic follower of Rossetti and the Pre.-Raphaelites in painting. He had introduced himself to Morris at Red House, and common tastes, to which Taylor added really great knowledge, confirmed the acquaintance. In 1865 he was earning a scanty livelihood as a check-taker at the Opera House in the Haymarket, and gladly accepted a post under the firm. He was a man of great ability and sweetness of character, incapable of taking care of his own affairs, but shrewd and careful in his management of other people’s business. The intermittent supervision which was all that Faulkner had been able to give to the accounts of the firm since the Easter of 1864 was now replaced by the continuous care of a man who was not only a master of figures, but an expert in business methods. Morris was able to give to designing and manual work the greater part [8] of the time that had been occupied before by employment 1ess congenial to him. In 1867 the firm obtained what was their first really important commission in non-ecclesiastical decorative work, the decoration of the Green Dining Room at the South Kensington Museum. This piece of work, seen as it is yearly by many thousands of persons, was of great value at the time in making known the name of the firm and the specific character of their work. It remains intact now. The original cost was heavy, and the heads of the Department had some scruples about passing the estimate. But their decision was, even on grounds of economy, fully justified. The excellence of the work, apart from its singular decorative merit, has more than repaid its cost. In the long run it has proved (I am allowed to state on the authority of the Directors of the Museum) the cheapest piece of work in the buildings.’ In her Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, Lady Burne-Jones gives her personal recollections of Warington Taylor in the following words: ‘We had known him first in Great Russell Street, but I cannot remember how he came amongst us: a tall, thin man with a very large Roman nose, and an excitable and enthusiastic way of speaking. He had been at Eton, in the same division with Swinburne, and afterwards had become a Catholic, and entered the army, was married and had one child, but had not yet found his place in life. He knew and cared a great deal about the arts. At the time we first made his acquaintance his fortunes were low and his actual position was that of checktaker at Her Majesty’s Theatre — then an Opera House. His strong individuality was not affected by circumstances, however, and was so well understood by Morris and others that as the work of the firm increased they began to consider the question of making him its business-manager. It was no easy thing to find anyone capable of filling the place, but this strange, wild looking Warington Taylor proved to have the qualities wanted. Within a few weeks of his appointment the rumour spread amongst us that he was keeping the accounts of the firm like a dragon, attending to the orders of customers, and actually getting Morris to work at one thing at a time. He must have been happier in some ways during the five years of life that remained to him than he had ever been, for he loved the men he was associated with and the work he had to do. Warington Taylor, the son of a Devonshire squire, was born 25 Aug. 1835. He entered Eton in January 1848 at the age twelve and left in August 1850. He then went to school in [9] Germany and there is a story that he went in top hat and Eton jacket and was therefore an object of much interest to the neighbors. He was about thirty years old when he made the acquaintance of the group of famous men, all older than himself, whom these letters he treats as equals, although his recognition of their worth was evidently generous and complete. It is clear that Taylor suffered from consumption as early as 1866 and that his direction of the firm’s affairs was thenceforth intermittent and largely from a distance, though still of a vigorous nature. His only child, a girl, was then dead. His wife, an attractive woman of humble origin, was beginning to amuse herself with other lovers. She left him to live with one of them in June 1868, but was persuaded to return a month later. She nursed him until his tragic life ended at Turnham Green on Feb. 12 1870. He was buried at St Thomas’s, Fulham. A tombstone was designed by Philip Webb. His final will was made 15 August 1868 (with codicil dated Feb. 1870). The property was all left in trust for his wife Fanny Taylor and was sworn by his executor William Michael Rossetti as under 6000 pounds. This was probably, in part at least, a reversionary interest in the family estate. (See Webb’s letter declining the trusteeship.) Mr Rossetti told me on Aug 4 1915 that Mrs Taylor ‘married again and came to a miserable and shameful end ten or twelve years after Warington Taylor’s death’. Morris and Webb always spoke gratefully and affectionately of Warington Taylor. In the summer of 1866 Burne-Jones was to have accompanied the three of them and Mrs Morris on a trip to France. The birth of his daughter Margaret prevented him from leaving home. On p. 301 of vol. I of the Memorials the scene of the crossing is depicted with Burne-Jones holding the infant on shore and Warington Taylor leaning over the bows of the boat. This may be the only pictorial record of the features of the ‘tall thin man with a very large Roman nose’ who discloses so much of himself in the following letters. Rossetti (‘Gabriel’ in the letters) died in 1882, Faulkner in 1892, Madox Brown in 1893, Morris in 1896, Burne-Jones (‘Ned’ in these letters) in 1898. Philip Webb retired from London and from his splendid architectural activities at the end of 1900, and spent the rest of his days tranquilly in and about a little Elizabethan cottage called (10) Caxtons, with a rent of 15 pounds a year, in the parish of Worth, Sussex. Here he continued to receive his friends, myself among the number, and to talk of old times, until his death, at which I was present, on 17 April 1915. On July 10 Emery Walker and I scattered his ashes on the windswept turf of the White Horse hill in Berkshire, a spot very dear both to Webb himself and to Morris. Morris once declared that he was the best man that he had ever known and there are very few of those who were privileged to know him who would not say the same. Private Diaries Sir, Many of your readers will have been entertained by Mr Harold Nicolson’s article in your issue of January 2nd. No one will doubt that, with his exceptional powers of observation, deduction, and description, and his special opportunities, he is producing a journal that will be valued by posterity, if not so certainly by his great-grandchildren, though these may be thrilled to read that there was a time when he had as many as two eggs for breakfast. My own performance has been on a far more modest scale, and I write for the purpose of reassuring those novices who started a diary on New Year’s Day and have been so frightened by Mr Nicolson’s picture of typewritten sheets upon sheets that they have already abandoned their project. From my 18th year to my 75th I have kept a pocket diary recording my small doings day by day, the weather and letters (11) received. It happens that I have at my command a tiny script, and when anything, of special interest has needed registration, I have been able to write a good deal in a little space. This diary has been written up at any odd moment, and has been kept for my own satisfaction, without any eye on potential great-grandchildren, or onthe general public, or on anyone at all but myself. Mr Nicholson, who writes with such enviable and prolific ease, would find it shockingly meagre. Nevertheless, such an imperfect chronicle has not only been of daily service to me for casual reference to events that may only have been a few days or a few weeks old, and for verifying names and dates, but, after a longer interval, has formed a sort of ladder on which recollection could climb with sure feet. In my old age I find it the most agreeable of pastimes to open one of these small volumes and to accompany my stripling self on some happy continental journey, or his mature successor on a Mediterranean cruise, or a visit to Egypt, America or Australia. And yet these highlights are scarcely more exciting to me than are plain records of everyday occurrences, of country walks, of great discussions, of plays seen and books read, and of first encounters with men and women who have afterwards become dear friends. Memory is kindled by these jottings, incidents half-forgotten suddenly come alive. If I had the literary gift as well as the inclination (two very large “ifs”) I believe I could build up with their aid a narrative that my great-great-grandchildren might care to glance at. At any rate, it would have an authentic basis. That they may ultimately partake of pleasure like that I am now enjoying I would urge all faltering beginners to persist in their good New Year’s resolution, and to use a pen and not a typewriter, if they can write legibly. Unfortunately this is also nowadays rather a large “if.” Yours faithfully, SYDNEY C0CKERELL Sir Sydney Cockerell’s own private diaries fill some 76 volumes and run to approximately two million words. They provide a valuable source of information about his contemporaries (both Mackail and May Morris made use of them in writing about Morris), and enabled him, on many occasions, to satisfy a demand for precision. HOME · LIFE · ART · WRITING · SOCIAL THOUGHT NEWS/EVENTS · JOIN · THE SOCIETY · CONTACT US LAST UPDATE 28 JAN 2008 · PLEASE REPORT BROKEN LINKS TO WEBMASTER @ MORRISSOCIETY.ORG
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