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One of the glories of a Paley & Austin building is the sheer quality of the stonework and woodwork that it contains. The excellence of design and execution of tracery, window and door mouldings, stalls, pulpits, glass and metalwork bear witness to the skills of the craftsmen as much as the designers of such work. Indeed, the architect's design may be very sketchy, leaving much to the discretion of the individual craftsman.
In the literature upon Victorian architecture there is much on the architects but little on the men who erected and decorate their designs. This was an era when work in stone, wood, metal and glass was still the domain of the highly skilled craftsmen. We know relatively little of those individuals who worked for Paley & Austin.
Both stonemasons and woodcarvers were employed either by the builder who contracted for the erection of the whole building, such as A. O. Thoms or J. Hatch & Co.; or by smaller specialist firms who sub-contracted for a particular job, such as H. T. Miles & Co. who did the rather strange stonework for Ripley Chapel.
Fred Hadwin is an example of a craftsman who worked for one of these firms, that of A. O. Thoms. He began his 7 year apprenticeship in 1921 aged 15 and was trained by an 82 year old mason who had acquired his skills in a previous generation by the same route. In 1926-7 he was one of ten masons working on St Hilda's, Bilsborrow, who cut and dressed the stone for the church at 3d per hour for a twelve-hour day!
Some of the masons may have been employed by Paley & Austin themselves, working on contract for the firm mainly outside the local area. There are several families in Lancaster who had an ancestor who travelled as a peripatetic mason in this way. These men would either be particularly highly skilled, sometimes acting as foreman masons, or were needed in those parts of the country which lacked a stone working tradition. In the case of Hertford Parish Church the tracery was cut in Lancaster and taken by rail to be erected and fitted on site either by local masons or by Lancaster men.
Much of the woodcarving and wood-working generally was done in Lancaster. James Hatch had an ecclesiastical woodcarving factory in Penny Street, while we know that Gillow & Co. worked for Paley & Austin at St. Margaret's Church, Hornby. So did smaller local firms like C. Blades and Thomson & Jackson. |
