Smith, Francis: Impressive legacy of a canny opportunist
Maxwell Craven considers the architectural legacy of builder Francis Smith who “went on the knock” among Derbyshire’s aristocracy.'
Francis Smith was a talented provincial builder whose name is always qualified by “of Warwick” but who boasts considerable links to Derbyshire.
The family had been for some generations in the building trade and had done well. The father had managed to acquire Wergs Hall, near Wolverhampton, along with a considerable amount of land, and Francis himself was born at Tettenhall, in 1672.
Later, he settled in Warwick and, with his elder brother, William, continued the family tradition.
The brothers could both design and build. Furthermore, they were competent enough to design their own buildings from scratch without recourse to a pattern book.
The Smiths were well off, literate and able to mix fairly comfortably with their clients. Work was never advertised for, but obtained by introductions and word of mouth.
The brothers’ first major country house was Stanford Hall, near the Leicestershire-Northamptonshire border, very much in the high roofed William-and-Mary style.
But, before long, they were designing in the current baroque style, epitomised by Calke or Chatsworth, with flat roof and parapets.
Their first serious job in Derbyshire was the creation of a new Kedleston Hall or the Curzon family, starting in 1700. This was for a four square house, in brick, with stone dressings and of impressive size.
A surviving painting makes the point that, if the present Kedleston had never been built, Smith’s house would still have qualified as one of the county’s showplaces.
In 1713, the first of the Cottons to inherit the Etwall estate commissioned Smith to rebuild the old Tudor or early Jacobean house. This took nearly seven years and involved rebuilding the old Hardwick-style towers as classical corner pavilions and filling in between with a symmetrical Georgian facade.
It was also probably in this year that he was commissioned by Derby alderman Francis Cokayne, mayor that year, to design a new Guildhall, an abortive project that I have described previously on these pages.
Cokayne, significantly, was brother-in-law to the ironsmith Robert Bakewell, with whom Smith worked quite frequently in later commissions.
Another local job, probably prompted by their work at Etwall, was the building of a new parish church of St Modwen at Burton, starting in 1719. This delightful English baroque church seems to have been designed by William Smith, but was finished by Francis when his brother died in the middle of the job.
In the early 1720s, the Smiths began the rebuilding of Melbourne Hall, on what was intended to be quite a grand scale, for the courtier Thomas Coke.
The 17th century manor house was turned into the beginnings of a fine classical house. Smith, who worked with a travelling team of trusted artisans, including Derby’s Luke Needham, a plasterer, worked on this occasion with Robert Bakewell.
It was also at this time that Francis worked with the illustrious Scots-born architect James Gibbs at Ditchley Park, the Oxfordshire mansion of George Lee, 2nd Earl of Lichfield.
Although mainly to Gibbs’ design, Smith was the contractor and certainly contributed to its evolution.
A projected house on the Derbyshire-Staffordshire border at Clifton Campville for the Derbyshire baronet, Sir Charles Pye of Hoon, was begun at about this time and would, had it been completed, have closely resembled Ditchley.
Even the large pavilions, intended to be attached to the main house by curved links (which were completed) were ringers for those attached to the Oxfordshire house.
However, Sir Charles died in 1721 and worked stopped, never to be re-started by his two sons.
When the Rev Michael Hutchinson decided, over the heads of his patrons, Derby Corporation, to demolish and replace his fast-collapsing church of All Saints, Derby, he first approached the nobility and gentry of the area for subscriptions to underwrite the scheme. Once assured of adequate funds, he commissioned a design from Gibbs – then the leading church architect of his day – and left Gibbs to hire Francis Smith as contractor.
With everything in place, he then demolished the church and work began. It was May 1723.
Smith was an excellent and reliable contractor, but also a man – later to become Mayor of Warwick where he had settled – with an eye to business.
He subcontracted the day-to-day oversight of the job to Derby builder and architect William Trimmer (whose brother Thomas was engaged on the joinery) leaving him free to drum up some more commissions.
He clearly consulted the subscription list for All Saints and, no doubt armed with local intelligence, “went on the knock”, calling in person on all those gentlemen and noblemen who looked likely persons to be in the market for a new house in what was an economically booming period.
Rowland Morewood, of Alfreton Hall (subscribed £10), was the first to take the bait. Between 1723 and 1724 Smith designed and built him a spanking new medium-sized country seat very much along the lines of those, like Berwick House, Mawley and Kinlet Halls, he had already built in Shropshire.
A particular distinguishing detail in this house – demolished due to mining subsidence in 1965 except for a later, rather ugly, wing – was the use of French quoins or lesenes to mark the angles.
This feature reappears in a bijou villa at Duffield called Tamworth House, also apparently built in 1724, this time for the 3rd Earl Ferrers, who had subscribed a thumping £31 10s 0d to the All Saints’ fund.
In this year, too, Smith began further quite extensive work at Kedleston for subscriber (to the tune of £50) Sir Nathaniel Curzon, to coincide with a revamp of the gardens and park by Charles Bridgeman.
In 1724, too, another grandee called on his services: Nicholas Leake, 4th Earl of Scarsdale, one of the most generous subscribers at 100 guineas.
His huge Tudor mansion at Sutton Scarsdale was transformed magnificently by Smith into a baroque palace of great presence. It was, without doubt, Smith’s finest house – so good, in fact, that for a long time, many commentators believed it was really by Gibbs.
Certainly, the design was based on the latter’s Senate House at Cambridge University, but recent research has conclusively proved that Smith designed it himself.
Tragically, it was unroofed in 1919 and only saved from demolition, 27 years later, on a whim of Sir Osbert Sitwell’s.
Although written proof is missing, the year 1725 saw the replacement of a Jacobean manor at Locko to a design which has Smith’s paw prints all over it.
This was to please millionaire Robert Ferne, who incorporated the Gilbert family’s exquisite Restoration chapel from the previous house.
Although somewhat dwarfed by subsequent extensions, and with its original spectacular entrance hall divided horizontally, it still survives in the possession of the descendants of the Lowes, who bought it from Mr Ferne not long after its completion. Robert Ferne, by the way, gave £10 to All Saints.
Although Smith went on to build six or seven more houses locally in the next decade (he died in 1736), he secured the commissions for most of them while Derby Cathedral (as it now is) was still being built.
The only exception was the next biggest house after old Kedleston and Sutton Scarsdale – Wingerworth.
Here the client was a Catholic and thus not an All Saints’ subscriber, but the job, started in 1726, was probably obtained on a recommendation from the Earl of Scarsdale.
Unfortunately, the magnificent house ended up hemmed in by coal mines and iron foundries and was demolished in 1928 as unlettable.
Only two earlier wings remain, split up as apartments.
The same year as he began work on Wingerworth, Smith also rebuilt the interior and north front of Shardlow Hall for Leonard Fosbrooke – a five guinea subscriber to All Saints’ – and another new house, replacing a much bigger predecessor, at Ravenstone, the most southerly part of Derbyshire (and now in Leicestershire) for Roger Cave.
Amazingly, Cave was not a subscriber at all, being closer to Loughborough’s impressive parish church than Derby’s, but the recommendation of Smith almost certainly came through one of the Derby subscribers, probably his neighbour Sir Edward Abney, of Willesley, near Ashby, then also in Derbyshire.
Not only that, but Francis Smith also re-fronted Willesley at some date, probably around 1725.
The year 1727 saw Smith completing a mainly new house for Samuel Sandars, who had subscribed five guineas to the Derby fund: the very elegant Cauldwell Hall, in the south-west corner of the county, mercifully survived as a special school.
Alderman William Wolley, an ex-mayor of Derby and brash profligate son of our county’s first historian, William Wolley, had subscribed 10 guineas to All Saints. His father had bought Darley Hall, built out of the abbot’s lodgings of the suppressed Abbey of Darley, and Smith built him – at the cost of his solvency – a spanking new house with its entrance front overlooking the river.
Rebuilt by Joseph Pickford for Robert Holden in 1778 and again for the Evanses in the 1840s, this grade II* listed mansion was carelessly cleared away by Derby Council in 1962.
Strangely, Robert Holden’s grandfather, another Robert, then of Aston Hall, Aston-on-Trent, subscribed 10 guineas to All Saints, too, and, although the building of his new house was completed only a year before Francis Smith died, it has been attributed to him.
Holden’s neighbour, Joseph Greaves, had also contributed 10 guineas, and his new house of similar date, Aston Lodge – demolished between the wars – is so similar in its detailing to Aston Hall, that Smith may have been responsible for that, too.
Although the earlier Clifton Campville project remained unbuilt, Sir Charles’ sons, Sir Richard, who died in 1724, and his brother, Sir Robert, had both, needless to say, contributed 10 and 12 guineas respectively to All Saints!
With all this frenetic building taking place more or less simultaneously with other projects outside the Derby area, one wonders how Smith managed it while keeping his reputation for excellence and probity intact.
The aid of other family members helped earlier on by his brothers William and Richard and, later, his nephew Richard and son William.
Also, he picked excellent workmen and paid them well, so they could be trusted to keep a job going under a foreman without trouble.
Finally, apart from his fee, usually collected as a percentage of the final costs, he normally received “a guinea a day and a nag” – the later being the 18th century equivalent of a company car, on which he could constantly tour his continuing projects.
When he died, his son, William, succeeded him building, in Derbyshire, Catton and Radburne Halls, as well as completing the transformation of Melbourne.
When he, too, died in 1747, the business was taken over by his father’s former masons, William and David Hiorne.
The latter designed Foremark Hall in this county and the former, the Derby County Jail in Friar Gate.
The typical Smith house changed from hipped roof William-and-Mary, in the 1690s and 1700s, through the baroque stage into which most of the Derbyshire houses fall.
But, by the time we get to Aston and the younger William’s houses – especially Melbourne and Radburne – the influence of the Whig-favoured palladian style had become apparent with much more sober, formal elevations.
For our area, the 1720s was the period of the greatest fecundity for Smith and his very individual version of provincial baroque architecture, which produced a whole series of impressive and important houses.
Yet, without the commission to build All Saints’ Church in Derby, most would not have been built – at least by him.
The tragedy is that so many have been demolished: old Kedleston, Etwall, Alfreton, Wingerworth, Darley Abbey, Willesley and Aston Lodge, not to mention the un-roofing of Sutton Scarsdale.
Nevertheless, it was not a bad haul for a jobbing builder going “on the knock” to drum up business in a new area!
This article is from the Derby Evening Telegraph and is reproduced online here.
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