How Shall We Sing the Lord s Song in a Strange Land? Architectural Communication in the Victorian Church at St. John s College, Auckland,

Transcription

1 How Shall We Sing the Lord s Song in a Strange Land? Architectural Communication in the Victorian Church at St. John s College, Auckland, by Emily Elizabeth Turner A Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Trinity College and the Historical Department of the Toronto School of Theology In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Theology awarded by the University of St. Michael s College Copyright Emily Elizabeth Turner 2014

2 How Shall We Sing the Lord s Song in a Strange Land? Architectural Communication in the Victorian Church at St. John s College, Auckland, Emily Turner Master of Arts University of St. Michael s College 2014 Abstract For nineteenth-century Anglicans, architecture held a special place in the life of the church, expressing ideas of faith morality and culture; nowhere was this more important than in the British colonies. This thesis examines the role of architecture as a tool for communication in the growing Victorian church through a case study of St John s College, Auckland, established by George Augustus Selwyn, the Bishop of New Zealand and Melanesia, in This study identifies the strategies employed to make the College complex speak to its students, the Church and the outside world and shows the ways in which this architecture contributed to the theological and ecclesiological message of the Church. The building program at St. John s College not only established a material presence of the Church of England in the South Pacific, but became of central importance to the realization of Selwyn s goals for his mission. ii

3 Acknowledgements I would like to sincerely thank Dr. Alan Hayes for his assistance, feedback and encouragement throughout this project. Thanks must also be given to Dr. William Kervin and Dr. David Neelands for their comments. I would also like to acknowledge the assistance of most helpful staff the Alexander Turnbull Library at the National Library of New Zealand, Wellington, and The Kinder Library at St. John s College, Auckland. iii

4 Table of Contents Acknowledgements iii List of Figures v Introduction. 1 1: A Rural England of Yore : Selwyn the Gothic Revival and the Church of England in New Zealand : St. John s College and Its Architecture from Te Waimate to Auckland 23 3: Sourcing St. John s College: Symbolism, Inspiration and Implications 52 4: The College Outside of Bishop s Auckland: The Key and Pivot of Pacific Christianity 76 Conclusion.. 96 Figures Bibliography iv

5 List of Figures All Figures are appended after the main body text, commencing on page 102. Figure 1: Than Church, near Caen Normandy. From A.C. Pugin, Architectural Specimens of Normandy (1828). Figure 2: Caroline Abraham. Temporary Encampment at Purewa. Pencil sketch, n.d. Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries, I-W1851. Figure 3: Te Waimate Mission House Photographed by the author. Figure 4: Church of St. John the Baptist, Te Waimate. c From Illustrated London News, 6 January Figure 5: G.A. Selwyn. Encampment at Purewa, [ca. 1845]. Watercolour. 148 x 222 mm.. Alexander Turnbull Library in the National Library of New Zealand, Wellington, New Zealand, A Figure 6: William Bambridge. St. John s College, c Pencil drawing after G.A. Selwyn. Cotton Journal, vol. 9. Alexander Turnbull Library in the National Library of New Zealand, Wellington, New Zealand. Facsimile of a copy held at the Dixson Library, New South Wales. Figure 7: Caroline Abraham. Panorama of St. John s College Auckland, c Part 1: panels 1 and 2. Tinted lithograph of original watercolour. 170 x 493mm. Alexander Turnbull Library in the National Library of New Zealand, Wellington, New Zealand, A a-1. Figure 8: Caroline Abraham. Panorama of St. John s College Auckland, c Part 2: panels 3 and 4. Tinted lithograph of original watercolour. 170 x 493mm. Alexander Turnbull Library in the National Library of New Zealand, Wellington, New Zealand, A a-2. Figure 9: Caroline Abraham. Panorama of St. John s College Auckland, c Part 3: panels 5 and 6. Tinted lithograph of original watercolour. 170 x 493mm. Alexander Turnbull Library in the National Library of New Zealand, Wellington, New Zealand, A a-3. Figure 10: Caroline Abraham. Panorama of St. John s College Auckland, c Part 4: panels 7 and 8. Tinted lithograph of original watercolour. 170 x 493mm. v

6 Alexander Turnbull Library in the National Library of New Zealand, Wellington, New Zealand, A a-4. Figure 11: Long Classroom, Mission Bay/Kohimarama, Photograph. Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries, Figure 12: Sampson Kempthorne. St. Stephen s Church, Judges Bay, Drawing from Cotton Journal, vol. 8. State Library of New South Wales, a Figure 13: Sampson Kempthorne. St. Thomas Church, Tamaki, Drawing from Cotton Journal, vol. 8. State Library of New South Wales, a Figure 14: Sampson Kempthorne. Bishop s House, Photograph by William Beattie, n.d. Auckland War Memorial Museum, DU S Figure 15: Sampson Kempthorne. Kitchen, Photograph. c Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries, Figure 16: [Frederick Thatcher and Sampson Kempthorne]. Kitchen, interior, Photography by author. Figure 17: Frederick Thatcher. Holy Trinity, Te Henui, c Photograph c.1860s. Collection of Puke Ariki, New Plymouth, New Zealand, A Figure 18: St. Andrew s Church, Greensted-juxta-Ongar, Essex, 11 th century. The Builder, VII, Figure 19: Frederick Thatcher, CMS Chapel, Marataei/Waikato Heads, Sketch by Richard Taylor. Alexander Turnbull Library in the National Library of New Zealand, Wellington, New Zealand, E-269-q Figure 20: G.A. Selwyn. Sketch of unidentified buildings [1843?]. Cotton Journal, vol. 10. State Library of New South Wales, a Figure 21: Caretaker s Cottage. Photograph c Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries, Figure 22: Frederick Thatcher. Paris House, Detail of Caroline Abraham Panorama, part 4. Figure 23: Frederick Thatcher. Hunter House, Detail of Caroline Abraham Panorama, part 4. vi

7 Figure 24: Frederick Thatcher. Holland House, Detail of Caroline Abraham Panorama, part 3. Figure 25: Frederick Thatcher. North Elevation for the Workmen s Cottage c Kinder Library, St. John s College, SJT1/19.2/3. Figure 26: Frederick Thatcher. West Elevation for the Workmen s Cottage c Kinder Library, St. John s College, SJT1/19.2/3. Figure 27: Frederick Thatcher, [Boys Dormitory, c. 1846?]. Cotton Journal, vol. 9. State Library of New South Wales, a Figure 28: Frederick Thatcher.[ Hospital], Photograph, n.d. Auckland War Memorial Museum, DU Figure 29: Frederick Thatcher. Hospital Elevations c Kinder Library, St. John s College, SJT1/19.2/1. Figure 30: William Cotton. Sketch of St. John s College Hospital Plans [1846?]. Cotton Journal, vol. 11. State Library of New South Wales, a Figure 31: Frederick Thatcher. Native School Complex Block Plan, Kinder Library, St. John s College, St. John s College Plans I. Figure 32: Frederick Thatcher. Master s House, Front and North Elevations, Kinder Library, St. John s College, St. John s College Plans IV. Figure 33: Frederick Thatcher. Master s House, East Elevation, Kinder Library, St. John s College, St. John s College Plans III. Figure 34: Frederick Thatcher. Master s House, Upper and Lower Story Ground Plans, Kinder Library, St. John s College, St. John s College Plans, [no number]. Figure 35: Frederick Thatcher. College Chapel, Front. Photographed by the author. Figure 36: John Kinder. St. John s College Chapel. Monochrome wash. 1870s. 255 x 360 mm. Alexander Turnbull Library in the National Library of New Zealand, Wellington, New Zealand, B Figure 37: Frederick Thatcher. College Chapel, interior towards the altar, Photographed by William Beattie, n.d. Auckland War Memorial Museum, DU S vii

8 Figure 38: Frederick Thatcher. College Chapel, interior towards the pulpit, Photographed by the author. Figure 39: Frederick Thatcher. Hall, exterior, Photographed by author. Figure 40: Frederick Thatcher, Hall, interior, Photograph, c Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries, Figure 41: Long Classroom, Kohimarama. Ink drawing, Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries, Figure 42: Frederick Thatcher. Printing Office, c Photograph c.1900 (?). Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries, Figure 43: Frederick Thatcher. Carpentry Shop, c Photograph, n.d. Auckland War Memorial Museum Library, DU S Figure 44: P.F. Robinson. Design No. 7: The Workhouse. Village Architecture (1837). Figure 45: P.F. Robinson. Design No. 1: The Swiss Chalet. Designs for Ornamental Villas (1827). Figure 46: George Truefitt. Design No. 1. Designs for Country Churches (1850). Figure 47: Cambridge Camden Society. St. Oswald s, Lower Peover. Illustrations of Monumental Brasses (1846). Figure 48: Frederick Thatcher. St Barnabas Parnell, Drawing, c Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries, Figure 49: Frederick Thatcher. St. Mark s Remuera, Watercolour by John Kinder c Alexander Turnbull Library in the National Library of New Zealand, Wellington, New Zealand, A Figure 50: Frederick Thatcher. All Saints Howick, Photographed by the author. Figure 51: Rangiatea Church, Otaki, exterior, Photograph c Alexander Turnbull Library in the National Library of New Zealand, Wellington, New Zealand, PAColl (New Zealand Free Lance: Photographic Prints and Negatives). Figure 52: Rangiatea Church, Otaki, interior Hand-coloured lithograph by R.K. Thomas, c.1852, after Charles Decimus. viii

9 Alexander Turnbull Library in the National Library of New Zealand, Wellington, New Zealand, B Figure 53: Interior of St. Andrew s College Chapel, Kohimarama. Mission Life, September Figure 54: St. John s Church, Winnipeg,Manitoba, Church Missionary Intelligencer, ix

10 Introduction This is the glorious temple in which the Spirit of God Dwells; the universal Church of Christ; the temple which has the whole earth for its pavement; the mountains for its pillars; heaven for its roof; the host of angels for its ministers; and all mankind of every nation for its worshippers. 1 These words were spoken by Bishop George Augustus Selwyn upon the arrival in his new diocese on 30 May Appointed by the Colonial Bishoprics Fund (CBF) in 1841, Selwyn s new diocese was the newly annexed colony of New Zealand, as well as Melanesia. Sent to serve as a Bishop for the settler and indigenous populations, he had ambitious goals for his new diocese. However, as his thanksgiving sermon demonstrates, one of his greatest preoccupations was architecture, a concern most clearly reflected in the buildings of his educational institution, the College of St. John the Evangelist Auckland, usually known as St. John s College. Perhaps the most important aspect of Selwyn s endeavour in the new colony, the College, which served Maori, Melanesian and settler communities, used a curriculum that incorporated theological training with technical skills learned through physical labour to evangelize the region, train new clergy and advance the cause of the Church abroad. But the College had another tool for evangelism at its disposal: its architecture. Constructed between 1845 and 1850, the College used accepted nineteenth-century architectural forms, modified to suit the colonial environment, to communicate ideas about the church in New Zealand as well as in the larger more global context. Through its building program, Selwyn hoped the College would spread the Word throughout the Pacific. The architectural language used in his thanksgiving sermon shows that, in his mind, the material fabric of the Church was an integral part of the presentation and understanding of the Christian faith and practice. The 1 G.A. Selwyn, Thanksgiving Sermon Preached by the Right Reverend Bishop of New Zealand on His Arrival in His Diocese (Paihia: Church Missionary Society Press 1842), 5. 1

11 2 building program at the College shows the idealistic vision he had for his new episcopate by using symbolic forms that were used, disseminated and understood throughout the British Empire in order to communicate ideas about faith, culture and identity. Through the use of symbolic English architectural language, the architecture at St. John s College communicated ideas about the Church of England in New Zealand in the middle of the nineteenth century. Driven by Selwyn who believed that architecture was a fundamental part of the development of a new branch of the church, the language it used was global, symbolic and ultimately derived from accepted English precedent. Colonial conditions dictated how these accepted forms would be used but, by 1850, the College complex not only established a material presence of the Church of England in the South Pacific, but articulated through adapted English architectural language the role of the Church in the region, its connection to the larger global network of Anglican mission and the historical and theological continuity that Anglicans, specifically High Churchmen like Selwyn, believed was inherent to the Church. First established at Te Waimate in 1842, the College relocated to Auckland in The Auckland site, under the leadership of Selwyn and with the architectural expertise of architects Sampson Kempthorne and Frederick Thatcher, is where the Bishop s architectural vision came to fruition, more or less, as he and his architects struggled to reconcile English architectural and theological values with the colonial reality. Using the resources available to them, from pattern books to architectural periodicals, the College as constructed reflected both the desire to implant English architecture on a distant shore, but also the realization that New Zealand was not England; it is unique to the conditions in which Selwyn found himself and to the colonization efforts of New Zealand during the 1840s. The complex also reflected Selwyn s mandate and desire to spread the Church throughout the new colony and into the South Pacific.

12 3 Selwyn and St. John s College are such an excellent case study of the growth of symbolic Christian architecture during the middle of the nineteenth century because of the wealth of available primary source material. The period in which the College was built was a period of growth in imperial endeavours and in evangelical missions, but it was also a period defined by an incredible network of individuals and organizations communicating across the globe. 2 Selwyn was a prolific correspondent, communicating with political and religious organizations in England on a regular basis, as well as with his family who he kept well informed of his progress on the other side of the world. Many of these letters were published by organizations involved with the New Zealand mission, specifically the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel which controlled several Anglican periodicals and magazines, in order to raise funds for overseas. 3 As such, Selwyn wrote often and he wrote a lot, giving a significant amount of detail into his successes and his next steps in establishing the Church in the new colony. St. John s College was a major expense; as such, it featured heavily in this correspondence. Furthermore, Selwyn had many friends in important positions in church and government who were very willing to paraphrase his personal letters in pleas to donors to contribute funds for the mission. Similarly, many of Selwyn s sermons were published, ready for the English public to read. Correspondence was the most direct method for garnering support, most importantly financial support, a fact of which Selwyn was well aware and exploited. Selwyn was not the only member of his mission to correspond with friends, family and associates in England. Most of his staff in New Zealand wrote regular letters, many of which survive. One important exception is Thatcher, who designed most of the College buildings, who 2 Anna Johnston, Missionary Writing and Empire, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), Rowan Strong, Bishop Selwyn and the British Empire: Imperial Network and Colonial Outcomes, in A Controversial Churchman: Essay on George Selwyn, Bishop of New Zealand and Lichfield, and Sarah Selwyn, ed. Allan K. Davidson (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2011), 164.

13 4 rarely wrote anything down with the exception of a few surviving plans for college buildings, invaluable for an architectural analysis. On the other hand, some of the most important primary sources come from the hand of Selwyn s chaplain, William Cotton. Cotton s journals, stretching over twelve volumes, cover the years from 1841 to 1848 and provide valuable insight to the day to day running of the mission as well as many of Selwyn s goals and schemes for the College. 4 Cotton also had a particular interest in architectural matters. Images of College buildings he included in his journal along with Thatcher s surviving plans are augmented by a wide variety of drawings, paintings and sketches of the College complex; most of these align reasonably well with those provided by Thatcher and Cotton, but there are discrepancies, complicating analysis. Information did not solely flow one way, however. Selwyn may have been going to Britain s furthest colony but that in no way meant that he was prepared to be intellectually isolated from theological and architectural developments at home. Before his departure for New Zealand in December 1841, he amassed a large collection of books to form a library for the Church and College that included a huge array of texts on architecture, as well as on religion and theology. Throughout his episcopate, this library grew as his friends and associates regularly forwarded him newly published texts on these subjects, many of which would later influence the design of the College. 5 Of particular importance were the periodicals to which Selwyn subscribed, especially The Ecclesiologist, the leading proponent of the High Anglican architectural movement to which the Bishop strove to adhere. Selwyn was determined that New 4 The original copy of Cotton s Journal is held by the Dixson Library, in New South Wales. Several copies of the journal exist including the one consulted for this study at the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington (hereafter ATL). It should also be noted that Cotton alternated between consecutive numbering of pages and dating entries, making citation somewhat inconsistent; as such, some citations will give a page number and some a date, depending on the journal volume and how the entries are organized. William Cotton, Journal of a Residence in New Zealand, 12 vol. ATL qms (hereafter Cotton Journal). 5 Ian Lochhead, British Architectural Books in Colonial New Zealand, Turnbull Library Record 34 (2001),

14 5 Zealand should not be a distant architectural or cultural backwater but rather a vibrant, wellintegrated part of the Church of England at large; the library he amassed and the publications he received ensured that the Church in New Zealand was a player in the architectural movements of the day with a massive collection of printed source material. In contemporary scholarship, the College s building program has been discussed as a facet of New Zealand s early architectural development. Studies by Margaret Alington, C.R. Knight and Jonathan Mane-Wheoki have, for the most part, traced the technical and stylistic development of the complex and suggested some of the sourced to which Selwyn and Thatcher looked in order to adapt English architectural styles to difficult colonial conditions. 6 While Knight s study provides a foundational look at the chronological development of the style, the other authors offer insight into the College architecture within the larger scope of Victorian architectural movements, but focus on the technical and the narrative over the symbolic. However, these and other works have usually focussed on the College chapel to the detriment of the other buildings, which were just as important to Selwyn s overall vision. The most valuable text that discusses the role of the College chapel as a method of symbolic communication is a recently published book by G.A. Bremner, Imperial Gothic: Religious Architecture and High Anglican Culture in the British Empire c (2013). 7 With several pages devoted to the College, Bremner stipulated that nineteenth-century English churches, both at home and abroad, were able to communicate theologically across a global scope. Although abbreviated, his exploration of the topic provides an excellent springboard for this study. Drawing on this 6 Margaret Alington, An Excellent Recruit: Frederick Thatcher, Architect, Priest and Private Secretary in Early New Zealand (Auckland: Polygraphia, 2007); C.R. Knight, The Selwyn Churches of Auckland (Wellington: A.H. and A.W. Reed, 1972); Jonathan Mane-Wheoki, Selwyn Gothic: The Formative Years, Art New Zealand 54 (1990): 76-81; Jonathan Mane-Wheoki, Selwyn the Ecclesiologist In Theory and Practice. In A Controversial Churchman, G.A. Bremner, Imperial Gothic: Religious Architecture and High Anglican Culture in the British Empire c (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).

15 6 collection of scholarship, this study will continue to analyze the complex in light of larger architecture and theological trends, and suggest some of the strategies employed to give the architecture communicative value in the middle of the nineteenth century.

16 1: A Rural England of Yore : Selwyn, the Gothic Revival and the Church of England in New Zealand When Selwyn set out to build a theological college in a fledgling colony, his primary concern was stylistic, not utilitarian. At its core, Selwyn believed the College should not only be a roof over head for students and teachers but an active part of their education through the symbolic and communicative value that Christian architecture held. As such, he focussed heavily on staying within a firmly defined set of stylistic rules of a very specific English architectural movement: the Gothic Revival. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, the style was firmly linked to Church construction and High Anglican Christianity by As a revivalist movement, it sought to integrate forms and features from medieval churches into modern ecclesiastical architecture. Although the style was used across the Church of England, it was more popular with High Church Anglicans because they associated the historical and liturgical background of medieval design to what they perceived not only to be the golden age of English Christianity, but also the period that lent their church validity in the modern world. 8 Many clergy and architects, including Selwyn, were intimately involved with the movement, developing what they called the science of ecclesiology, or proper church construction. 9 However, the main influences for British and colonial church builders alike were A.W.N. Pugin and the Cambridge Camden Society. Pugin, an architect and author, forged through his writing a deep spiritual and symbolic connection between Christianity and medieval style architecture; the ideas he espoused were 8 Bremner, Imperial Gothic,14-15; Michael Alexander, Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), xxii. 9 Unless otherwise explicitly stated, the term ecclesiology will be used in accordance with its nineteenth century usage, the construction and decoration of ecclesiastical architecture, as opposed to its current usage, the study of the Church. 7

17 8 massively influential. 10 In his 1843 text, An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England, he wrote: Whilst we profess the creed of Christians, whilst we glory in being Englishmen, let us have an architecture, the arrangement and details of which will alike remind us of our faith and our country an architecture whose beauties we may claim as our own, whose symbols have originated in our religion and our customs. Such an architecture is to be found in the works of our great ancestors. 11 Pugin, who was actually Catholic, saw medieval architecture as the best material expression of Christian beliefs because of its development within the context of pious pre-reformation Christianity. The idealization of this period in church history was particularly prevalent during the mid-nineteenth century, because of the idealization of the Middle Ages by many High Church Anglicans; what Pugin did was amplify this stance by extending it to architecture. Consistent with nineteenth century ideas about the inherent communicative value of architecture, Pugin believed that Gothic architecture not only looked Christian, that was directly associated with historical styles used by the Church, but could also communicate Christian theology, ideology and moral principles to the wider populace. 12 Through their symbolic forms, Gothic churches could convince people to become better Christians. This theory of medieval architecture set up the Gothic style as the only acceptable aesthetic for Christian architecture because of the very specific ideology that Pugin asserted the style could communicate. His texts were widely disseminated and read by British and colonial clergy and architects, including Selwyn who took copies of at least two of Pugin s texts with him to New 10 For a full overview of Pugin, his work and his influence, see Rosemary Hill, God s Architect and the Building of Romantic Britain (London: Allan Lane, 2007). 11 A.W. N. Pugin, An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England (London: John Weale, 1843), Pugin, Apology,

18 9 Zealand. 13 However, while Pugin s texts were theoretically comprehensive, they offered little in the way of practical advice. That role fell to The Ecclesiologist. The Ecclesiologist was the periodical of the Cambridge Camden Society (CCS), later the Ecclesiological Society, an architectural club initially formed by a group of Cambridge undergraduates with an interest in the restoration of medieval churches. 14 First published at the end of 1841, The Ecclesiologist provided advice on both the restoration and construction of Gothic Revival churches, pointing eager architects, both amateur and professional, towards models for emulation and criticizing what the CCS considered to be poorly built examples. Its contributors also expanded on Pugin s theoretical framework and dispatched very specific advice on the symbolic and historic meanings of construction materials, architectural forms and ground plans. Although the Society eventually expanded its list of acceptable medieval models that architects could look to for inspiration, the 1840s were marked by a deep seeted rigidity that manifested itself in the desire for pedantic imitation of fourteenth-century English churches. 15 The ideal church, which consisted of a nave, chancel and porch, translated the aesthetic of this period directly into the modern context with little regard for the needs of the modern parish. Throughout the 1840s and 1850s, one of the principal arenas in which the CCS found the greatest demand for assistance and advice was the colonies, in effect making the Gothic Revival a global style with considerable influence across the British Empire. The upsurge in High Anglican clergy sent out to minister to colonial and mission congregations effectively allowed the CCS to assert their architectural influence in every area in which the Church of England had a presence. New Zealand was, in fact, the flagship for the involvement of the CCS in the 13 William Cotton to Sarah and Phoebe Cotton, 9 Sept. 1844, Selwyn Papers, M a, Kinder Library, St. John s College, Auckland (hereafter SJC). See also Lochhead, British Architectural Books, On the name change, David Brownlee, The First High Victorians: British Architectural Theory in the 1840s, Architectura 15 (1985): Michael Lewis, The Gothic Revival (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002)

19 10 colonies. In the initial issue of The Ecclesiologist, the Society enthusiastically wrote that Selwyn had enquired about designs for his new diocese. They reported that one model of a parishchurch will at present be sufficient Norman is the style adopted; because, as the work will be chiefly done by native artists, it seems natural to teach them first that style which first prevailed in our own country. 16 Stone was represented as the acceptable, permanent medium for construction although a temporary wooden edifice may serve at present, as the colony developed its financial and material resources. Selwyn was made a patron of the Society, a nod to his interest in architectural matters. Not only that, but both of the chaplains who accompanied him, William Cotton and Thomas Whytehead, were intimately involved with the movement through the CCS. Whytehead s interest was such that he was a founding member of an analogous society at Oxford, the Oxford Society for Promoting the Study of Gothic Architecture (OSPSGA). 17 Due to this interest, the Cambridge Society reported the impending publication of designs furnished by the Committee for a new church to be erected in New Zealand 18 in early Selwyn had also taken with him plans for Than Church near Caen in Normandy. 19 Neither set of plans survive although there is a well known engraving of the latter by Pugin s father, A.C Pugin (Figure 1). Selwyn had little confidence in the abilities of the architects in New Zealand to translate the Gothic style in a new environment and, in the early years of his episcopate, he relied on the expertise of the CCS, admitting to his close friend from Eton, Rev. Edward Coleridge, I have written the Cambridge Camden Society for some working drawings of good old churches If I can get them, I will use no other, propitiating the Colonial Architects by the usual per-centage for 16 Parish Churches in New Zealand, The Ecclesiologist 1 (1841): Mane-Wheoki, Selwyn the Ecclesiologist, Notices, The Ecclesiologist 1 (1842): New Zealand, The Ecclesiologist 1 (1841): 31.

20 11 the superintendence alone. 20 Supplying New Zealand with proper Gothic churches was his primary concern. An 1844 letter to Coleridge outlined his vision for church architecture in the region: I greatly want some working drawings of existing parish churches, merely representing the Church as it was intended to be; the plainer and the simpler the better, provided the outline be good. Small sizes, or if large, with good chancels, such as could be built first in the form of chapels. 21 Construction as a developmental process, as Selwyn outlined to Coleridge, was the most realistic course of action in a colonial setting with undeveloped economic and social structures. Building in a style that was not compatible with the prevailing medieval aesthetic, however, was not acceptable, a deeply rigid attitude towards construction displayed by many High Anglican clergy during this period. The work of Pugin and the CCS carried several important implications that would affect Selwyn s actions in New Zealand and ultimately the construction of the College. The development of a symbolic system of church architecture, articulated by Pugin and promoted by the Society, meant that colonial clergy and missionaries could use architecture to communicate Christian ideology; for missionaries, who were actually trying to convert people, this was very attractive as it provided another strategy for evangelism. There was another aspect to this system as well because of the perceived links between civilization and Christianity; many missionaries and clergy, including Selwyn, made explicit links between conversion and the growth of civilization, or European-style societal practices and values, among non-european people. 22 Thus, because of its direct association with an important period of Christian history, Gothic 20 Selwyn to [Coleridge], 22 July 1843, Selwyn Papers, MS273, box 4, vol. 1, Auckland War Memorial Museum Library Archives (hereafter AML). 21 Selwyn to Coleridge, 16 April 1844, Selwyn Papers, MS273, box 4, vol. 1, AML. 22 Howard Le Couteur, Anglican High Churchmen and the Expansion of Empire, Journal of Religious History 32 (2008): 194.

21 12 architecture could also communicate the civilized culture associated with the English Church. This fundamentally shaped how the practice of church building was approached. There was a caveat, however, and it would be one that Selwyn had to wrestle with. The symbolic framework of the movement was built on revivalism. In a practical sense, revivalism dictated that every building constructed within the framework of the movement had to have medieval precedent in order to speak this Christian language. This was the reason that Selwyn relied so heavily on the CCS in his early episcopate. In the construction of the College, the need for historical precedent was probably the single most important factor in the stylistic choices made in the architectural plans. It was important to Selwyn that his College be more than utilitarian; it also needed to speak. As such, each form he employed had to be carefully chosen to say something about the Church and its mission abroad. There were other factors shaping the influence of this ideology on the College. The New Zealand mission and the Gothic Revival directly corresponded to each other chronologically, making it the natural movement for Selwyn to turn to. But Selwyn s desire to use a style of architecture that communicated both Christianity and Englishness was buoyed from two other arenas: the role and mission of the Church of England in the global context and the colonization of New Zealand itself. Selwyn is an ideal representative of High Anglican clergy abroad during this period. Highly idealistic and incredibly energetic, he wanted to expand the Church through institutionalized education and the introduction of so-called church principles, which included British culture along with Christian theology. 23 Another of Selwyn s associates, W.E. Gladstone, 23 C.J. Wee, Christian Manliness and National Identity: the Problematic Construction of a Racially Pure Nation, in Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age, ed. Donald E. Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 67; Allan K. Davidson, Useful Industry and Muscular Christianity: George Augustus Selwyn and His Early Years as Bishop of New Zealand, in The Use and Abuse of Time in Christian History: Papers Read at the 1999

22 13 had written that the object of colonisation is the creation of so many happy Englands. 24 Selwyn and many of his contemporaries in the Church would have said the object of mission was essentially the same, only they were saving souls as well. Selwyn s goals for New Zealand were always ambitious. Speaking at a meeting of the Windsor and Eton Church Union on 1 November 1841, soon after his consecration, he enumerated his objectives: Plant our church in New Zealand, that centre of missionary operations; bless its inhabitants with the same privileges which we enjoy at home; let it be supplied, by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, with means of planting clergy in every future parish of that island, and then the Church Missionary Society may send forth its emissaries to all the isles which stud, like stars of the firmament, the boundless waters of the Pacific. By their means the standard of the Cross may be planted on each rocky isle: and God grant that the multitude of the isles may be glad thereof! 25 Designating New Zealand as a centre for missionary activity in the South Pacific seems to have been a consistent vision for Selwyn, who was often called the Apostle of the Pacific. 26 Intertwined with this vision was both the creation of a missionary college as a central institution, what he called the key and pivot 27 of the whole scheme, to mould the mission to his own liking and his role as a missionary bishop. Selwyn saw his role as an evangelist, an episcopal leader, and an administrative and philosophical centre for a vast missionary enterprise that rotated around a single theological institution, run by him, that could supply his vast diocese with likeminded men who could preach the gospel and build the Church. Summer Meeting and 2000 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society, ed. R.N. Swanson (Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 2002), 289; Le Couteur, High Anglican Churchmen, W.E. Gladstone, Our Colonies, Address Delivered to the Members of the Mechanics Institute, at Chester, 12 November 1855, in Gladstone and Britain s Imperial Policy, ed. Paul Knaplund. (London: George Allan and Unwin, 1927), G.A. Selwyn, Notes of a Speech at a Meeting of the Windsor and Eton Church Union (London: Richard Clay, 1841), Missionary Bishops, Colonial Church Chronicle 9 (1855): G.A. Selwyn, A Charge Delivered to the Clergy of the Diocese of New Zealand at the Diocesan Synod in the Chapel of St. John s College, on Thursday Sept 23, 1847, (London: Rivington, 1849), 107.

23 14 Central to Selwyn s approach was what he believed a so-called missionary bishop actually did. The idea of the missionary bishop was best articulated in 1835 by George Washington Doane, the Bishop of New Jersey, in a sermon at the consecration of Jackson Kemper as the Bishop of Missouri appropriately entitled The Missionary Bishop. Selwyn knew Doane and appears to have been influenced by this idea, as he used the term for his role in New Zealand throughout his episcopate. 28 In his sermon, Doane defined the role of the missionary bishop within the expanding church, not just as an episcopal office but as a genuine leader in the missionary endeavour on the front lines of conversion and the expansion of the Church of England: This is what is meant by A MISSIONARY BISHOP a Bishop sent forth for the church, not sought for of the Church going before, to organize the Church, not waiting till the Church has partially been organized a leader, not a follower, in the march of the Redeemer s conquering and triumphant Gospel sustained by the alms whom God has blessed both with the power and will to offer to him of their substance, for their benefit who are not blessed with both of either of them sent by the Church, even as the Church is sent by Christ. 29 Doane saw the role of the missionary bishop as that of an Apostle, each, in his proper sphere, sent out to feed the Church of God, 30 and a central player in introducing the gospel to the unenlightened, a pastor and an evangelist, an idea that proved to be immensely popular. 31 The missionary bishop concept continued to garner attention throughout the rest of the decade and was taken up by Samuel Wilberforce, a High Churchman who became Bishop of 28 George Washington Doane, Introduction to Letters from the Bishop of New Zealand to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, (N.P.: N.P. N.D.), George Washington Doane, The Missionary Bishop: The Sermon at the Consecration of the Right Reverend Jackson Kemper, D.D., Missionary Bishop for Missouri and Indiana (Burlington NJ: J.L. Powell 1835), Doane, The Missionary Bishop, Timothy Yates, The Idea of a Missionary Bishop in the Spread of the Anglican Communion in the Nineteenth Century, Journal of Anglican Studies 2 (2004): 54.

24 15 Oxford in In an 1838 letter to his friend, Sir Charles Anderson, Wilberforce suggested that missionary bishops were present in the early church: This is the way [through episcopal leadership] in which in primitive times the world was converted; and if episcopacy, a native clergy, a visible communion, the due administration of the Sacraments, Confirmation etc., etc., - if these things be really important, then how can we expect full success till we send out missionary bishops...? 33 Like the Gothic Revival, the Church of England was in the throes of mining its past for identity and assurance that its mission was the true one, making the idea of a missionary bishop powerful ideological fodder by grounding contemporary practice in the early church. After the Catholic Emancipation Act in 1829, the Anglican Church was going through a period of identity crisis as it grappled with defining its role in a society where it no longer held a religious monopoly. 34 As such, the Church began to look for a time in history when it was a strong part of the socioeconomic fabric of society; it found this time in the Middle Ages and in the early church and, as a result, made conscious efforts to look back to that period throughout the nineteenth century as it sought to redefine its place in the world. Selwyn could identify his position within the Apostolic tradition, not only through apostolic continuity, but also through a direct correlation between the work he was doing and the achievements of the Apostles. The view that the Bishops who superintend Missionary labourers and converts, should be, like the Apostles of old, the leading missionaries the Apostles 35 was held and disseminated throughout his episcopate. Consequently, the college he hoped to establish was part of a larger apostolic tradition that 32 Yates, The Idea of a Missionary Bishop, Wilberforce to Charles Anderson, 31 Aug. 1838, in Life of the Right Reverend Samuel Wilberforce, D.D. Lord Bishop of Oxford and Afterwards of Winchester with Selections from His Diaries and Correspondence, ed. AR. Ashwell (New York: E.P. Dutton and Company, 1883), R.J. Smith, The Gothic Bequest: Medieval Institutions in British Thought, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), Missionary Bishops, 170.

25 16 stretched back to the early church, because of Selwyn s role and the perceived continuity of English Christianity. While this view of mission was appealing, its approach to history was fundamentally flawed. Although the Victorians had a good grasp on the chronological development of the English past, this Anglican identity building relied on a shadowy constructed history where the early British church and the medieval church occasionally ran into each other and were idealized as a single historical unit. Analogizing Selwyn, and his mission in general, to both the early and English medieval churches made sense within this framework. Selwyn also was not the first evangelist in New Zealand, despite how he saw himself as the missionary bishop. Although he saw himself as venturing into untapped wilderness, the evangelical Church Missionary Society (CMS) had maintained a presence in the Bay of Islands since Their mission focussed on the transplantation of English agricultural skills and basic education through small mission stations. 36 This strategy was based on the idea that the introduction of European technical skills, like agriculture, would predispose the Maori to adopt Christianity. 37 That Christianity and civilization went hand in hand correlated well to Selwyn s mission and the idea of physical labour as part of the Christian enterprise may have shaped the development of the College. Education was very important to the CMS, as it was for Selwyn. Besides establishing several day schools in the Northland, the CMS had founded a short-lived residential school for young Maori men in Parramatta, New South Wales in Divorced from their communities, these young scholars were taught practical skills through and industry based curriculum and 36 Angela Middleton, Missionization in New Zealand and Australia: A Comparison, International Journal of Historical Archeology 14 (2010): Eugene Stock, The History of the Church Missionary Society: Its Environment, Its Men and Its Work, vol. 1 (London: Church Missionary Society, 1899), 206.

26 17 experiential based learning by living in a British colonial community. 38 They would then return and introduce these skills, and Christianity, to their communities. Although the school was closed in 1826, the idea of exemplar scholars as agents within their own communities continued into the Selwyn era through his educational scheme at St. John College. In 1847, Selwyn preached a sermon in the College chapel entitled An Idea of a Colonial College, in which he laid out part of his vision for the role of the College in the region. He made it clear from this sermon that he saw the College as a central institution in the output of missionaries and teachers for the mission, with New Zealand playing a role akin to the one played by Britain in the global context, and St. John s to the educational centres of the old world: From a land replenished with faithful Ministers and godly Laymen, the stream of the Gospel will flow forth from the dark islands that lie under our northern sky, the nearest to the sun, but still far from God. Then may this island become the Britain of the Southern Hemisphere, - the centre of the Gospel light to evangelise the southern Seas. Here is the seed within it is the oak God will water it, and give it increase; but we must guard it, lest the boar out of the wood waste it, and the wild beasts of the field devour it. 39 The idea of New Zealand as analogous to Britain, literally a Britain of the Southern Hemisphere, was not Selwyn s own. This phrase specifically was one that was used repeatedly to describe the newest addition to the Empire and fundamentally shaped how people viewed it. 40 The colony was consistently perceived in an idealistic and utopian fashion in English dialogue. Selwyn was not going to any colony, but rather one with the potential to be exactly like the parent country. New Zealand was: a colony in short that shall be an entire British community, and not merely one formed of British materials, - a community that shall carry 38 Rachel Stenfield, The Parramatta Maori Seminary and the Education of Indigenous Peoples in Early Colonial New South Wales, History of Education Review 41 (2012): G.A. Selwyn, The Idea of a Colonial College: A Sermon Preached in the Chapel of St John the Divine, Bishop s Auckland (Eton: 1848), Rebecca Durrer, Propagating the New Zealand Ideal, The Social Science Journal 43 (2006):

27 18 away from the soil of Great Britain the manners, the institutions, the religion, the private and public character of those whom they leave behind on it; and so carry them away as to plant them in the new soil where they settle. 41 This idealised vision persisted long after the harsh realities of colonial life were very clear. The 35 th Report of the Colony in 1858 stated optimistically: New Zealand shall take her place as the offspring and counterpart of the Parent Isle, as the Insular Mistress of the Pacific, the Britain of the Southern Hemisphere. 42 It was represented as a veritable promised land, often discussed as a modern day Canaan, a land of milk and honey. 43 This idealistic vision affected the Anglican mission s approach to the new colony, and Selwyn was no exception. 44 By positioning New Zealand as analogous to Britain, he felt as though the direct transfer of British institutions and their architecture was realistic and desirable. Selwyn, at least during the initial days of his appointment, subscribed to the notion of New Zealand as promised land type destination, describing it as that land of promise, New Zealand a land literally flowing with milk and honey. 45 While the reality of actually living in a newly colonised settlements made Selwyn acutely more realistic, the idealism of this statement translated into his hopes for his ministry and the growth of the New Zealand Church, and St. John s College, as the central player in the growth of the church in the Pacific region. Selwyn specifically associated the transplantation of Christianity to New Zealand with the evangelization of Britain and identified himself within the line of evangelists who enlightened the British people centuries earlier. In his consecration speech, he said: 41 Edward Gibbon Wakefield, A View on the Art of Colonization, with Present Reference to the British Empire; In Letters Between and Statesman and a Colonist, (London: J.W. Parker, 1849), th Report of the Colony, 27 May 1858, quoted in J.S. Marais, The Colonisation of New Zealand (Oxford: Oxord University Press, 1927), Miles Fairburn, The Ideal Society and Its Enemies: The Foundation of Modern New Zealand Society, (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1989), Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, Work in the Colonies: Some Account of Missionary Operations of the Church of England (London: Griffith and Farran, 1865), Selwyn, Notes of a Speech, 8.

28 19 There was a time when they who planted the Church of Christ in this country [England], then a wilderness and a strange land... looked up at the wide forests, and the rude inhabitants of Britain, as we now look upon the woods and the people of New Zealand, as a noble field for Christ s enterprise. 46 For Selwyn, modern New Zealand was analogous with sixth-century Britain and he with St. Augustine of Canterbury, or at least the great evangelist s direct descendant. Selwyn was not the only one to make this connection; along a more secular vein, the writer Charles Hursthouse noted that an Englishman in New Zealand is virtually in a young England. 47 This idealist vision was difficult as New Zealand in no way reflected industrial Britain, but, in the minds of many, it did look like what they perceived early medieval Britain to have looked like, a so-called rural England of yore 48 that was vast, rugged but ultimately could be tamed. Replicating the development of Christianity in Britain simply could not work, because of the vastly different context in which Selwyn found himself, but the desire to do so fuelled the fire behind Selwyn s vision, by painting New Zealand as a younger version of Britain, ready to take on the institutions of the Church of England, including, of course, a facility for the training of ministry. The College institution that Selwyn hoped to build functioned within this larger frame work, focussing the mission and acting as a catalyst for continued expansion into the South Pacific as well as the consolidation of Christianity within New Zealand itself, drawing from the entire population of his diocese. Selwyn s idea of a comprehensive educational system that groomed candidates for ministry was germinated before his appointment to the New Zealand see. In 1838, while a fellow at St. John s College, Cambridge, Selwyn published the provocatively titled pamphlet Are 46 G.A. Selwyn, How Shall We Sing the Lord s Song in a Strange Land? A Sermon Preached in the Cathedral Church of Exeter on Sunday Dec. 12, 1841 Previous to His Departure from England (Exeter: P.A. Hannaford, 1842): Charles Hursthouse, New Zealand or Zealandia, vol. 2 (London: E. Stanford, 1857), E.H. McCormick, The Happy Colony, Landfall 36 (1955): 307.

29 20 Cathedral Institutions Useless? A Practical Answer to this Question, Addressed to W.E. Gladstone, Esq. M.P. in response to larger, major questions about the role of the cathedral system circulating within the church. The ideas Selwyn expounded in this text are not wholly his own and were drawn from a variety of sources that supported the cathedral system. His text addresses the various roles and responsibilities of the cathedral as an institutional fixture of the English church, including in the field of education. 49 These views were taken directly from E.B. Pusey s text Remarks on the Prospective and Past Benefits of Cathedral Institutions in the Promotion of Sound Religious Knowledge (1833). 50 Selwyn discussed an education system that would support young scholars through their formative years, their university training and into their pastoral career, providing them with employment within the jurisdiction of a single bishopric. This comprehensive vision of a sponsored educational system was the backbone of the idea that he transplanted across the world to form the philosophical background of St. John s College. In New Zealand, the implementation of this sort of cathedral educational system would involve the selection and training of promising candidates from within the mission s catchment area who, after the completion of their education, would form a set of colonial clergy who could fluidly work within the region as missionaries, pastors and teachers. St. John s College, the central and only cathedral school within the See, had to fill both the role of cathedral school and theological college, and as the centre for assigning new graduates to their respective fields; the College was, in short, Selwyn s entire system under a single institutional umbrella that would train young candidates for ministry in the region. He recognized that, in educating local youth, he 49 G.A. Selwyn, Are Cathedral Institutions Useless? A Practical Answer to this Question, Addressed to W.E. Gladstone, Esq. M.P. (London: John W. Parker, 1838), Allan K. Davidson, Selwyn s Legacy: The College of St. John the Evangelist Te Waimate and Auckland (Auckland: College of St. John the Evangelist, 1993), 11; Roger Jupp, Nurseries of a Learned Clergy : Pusey and the Defense of Cathedrals, in Pusey Rediscovered, ed. Perry Butler (Oxford: SPCK, 1983):

30 21 could gain a generation of educated Christians who understood the South Pacific mission field and could work productively within their own communities. He was adamant that we cannot consider our work accomplished til every dialect in the South Sea has its representative at our Missionary College, 51 such that he could provide not only a path to faith for both the individuals and their communities, but also a method for educating new clergy for his diocese which would, in turn, expand evangelism. Focussing on youth and training clergy in-house was practically very sound. However, in tune with the romanticization of the medieval, Selwyn also saw his school as a self-supporting and semi-monastic. 52 He was very interested in early monasteries as centres of learning and religion and hoped to emulate that in his own College. St. John s was not just to be a comprehensive system for educating youth and ordaining clergy, but rather an insular community from which to disseminate Selwyn s principles; the idea of incorporating physical labour into the curriculum also jived well with the monastic ideal. While relatively unrealistic, it speaks to the ideals towards which the Bishop strove and the standard the College had to live up to. All of these ideological undercurrents certainly shaped the role and formation of the College. They also gave the architects a lot of work to do and a large message to communicate. Ideally, Selwyn wanted the College s architecture to communicate the arrival of English Christianity, and the associated culture it brought with it, in New Zealand. Not only that, it needed to show a church descended from the successful evangelism of early Britain combined with the ideal piety of the Middle Ages, as well as a strong, confident mission based on High Church principles. Essentially, for Selwyn, the architecture of the College needed to 51 Selwyn, A Charge, Grant Andrew Phillipson, The Thirteenth Apostle : Bishop Selwyn and the Transplantation of Anglicanism to New Zealand, , (PhD diss., University of Otage, 1992), 141.

31 22 communicate everything about the English Church and Christianity in New Zealand. Despite the ability of Gothic Revival architecture to communicate in this way, his vision was quite unrealistic, given the fact that he was operating in a colony with very limited infrastructure, and never truly achieved as envisaged. Departing England in December 1841, he knew little of the country that awaited him or how vastly different it was from what he hoped it would be. However, his efforts in an attempt to establish a comprehensive church educational facility that communicated not through its material structure very much embodied the missionary spirit of High Church Anglicans in the middle of the nineteenth century and of the New Zealand mission in particular. As Selwyn set out to accomplish these goals, he did not foresee the difficulties he would face or how his architectural standard would have to change. The complex as finally constructed actually possessed the ability to communicate many of these ideas, more or less, but it was visually so divorced from anything Selwyn might have envisaged in 1841 that it is hard to imagine exactly how that meaning is embodied. Decoding the symbolic structures of the College requires first a look at the development of the institution, and the parallel development of its buildings, both as they were intended and how they were actually built.

32 2: St. John s College and Its Architecture from Te Waimate to Auckland The construction of St. John s College did not begin until 1845, nearly three years after Selwyn first set foot in his new diocese; nevertheless, his ideas for its development began significantly earlier. Initially arriving in Auckland, the Bishop made his base at Te Waimate, near the Bay of Islands, where he would stay for the next two years. Te Waimate had been established as a mission station by the CMS in 1831 and continued to be an important base for their operations. The initial months of Selwyn s episcopate set the tone for the rest of his mission as he sought to combine the role of missionary and bishop in a practical and energetic way to serve the Maori church, at that time under the jurisdiction of the CMS, and the rapidly growing settler church. 53 During this period, his energy, philosophy and ambitious agenda became abundantly clear. Establishing a theological college and school was a central priority, even in these early days, one which would embody the principles of religio, doctrina et diligentia that Selwyn so vigorously espoused. 54 By stationing himself at Te Waimate, Selwyn hoped to strengthen the CMS mission in the North through episcopal support; the station also provided a convenient base for his exploration of the diocese. Selwyn knew how important it was to a good working relationship with the CMS as the evangelical organization had a strong presence in New Zealand and had been seminal in the dispensing of a Bishop to New Zealand after its annexation because of the CMS commitment to Maori rights a value that Selwyn shared. 55 The Bishop also wanted to sow the seeds of a rudimentary College to serve to region and Te Waimate was the obvious 53 Allan K. Davidson, Selwyn as Missionary and Colonial Bishop, in A Controversial Churchman, Davidson, Useful Industry and Muscular Christianity, Allan K. Davidson, Culture and Ecclesiology: The Church Missionary Society and New Zealand, in The Church Missionary Society and World Christianity, , ed. Kevin Ward and Brian Stanley (Grand Rapids MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 2000),

33 24 choice. There was a set of buildings at the station in which Selwyn could establish such a college, as well as a Maori day school, run by the CMS, teaching basic catechetical and literacy skills. 56 He admitted to Coleridge that the temporary establishment of the College was, at least in part, due to his desire to wait until the capital of the province was established, so that he could ensure the permanent school was close to it. 57 He was also very much aware of the need to begin ordaining men to serve both settler and Maori communities, as both he and his CMS associates were severely lacking in staff; this issue was one that plagued many mission stations. 58 As such, the College was established almost immediately and put under the jurisdiction of Whytehead, until his death in March Whytehead was the ideal candidate to run the school; like Selwyn, he was heavily invested in the academic tradition and saw theological colleges and their associated school system as the natural successors of monasteries. 59 The young chaplain was also particularly concerned with ideas surrounding the maintenance and continuity of tradition from the early church and with architectural development, due to his association with the CCS and OSPSGA. 60 He was to be the first principal of St. John s College when it became a more permanent establishment, an appointment nullified by his death. His death probably deprived Selwyn of one of people most capable of establishing a collegiate institute along the lines that the Bishop envisaged, and shaping its architecture to fit the mission s ideological foundations. 61 Selwyn wrote to Coleridge in 1842 describing his goals for the temporary establishment: The mode of life will be Collegiate I intend to merge my own establishment in the Collegiate 56 Knight, Selwyn Churches of Auckland, Selwyn to Coleridge, 7 August 1844, Selwyn Papers MS273, Box 4, vol. 1, AML. 58 Selwyn to Fanny Selwyn, 4 July 1843, Selwyn Papers, M1095, 6.22.c, SJC; Broughton to Coleridge, 1842, Selwyn Papers, M b, SJC. 59 Thomas Whytehead, College Life: Letters to an Undergraduate (Cambridge: John Thomas Walters, 1845), 3. This text was published posthumously from Whytehead s writings. 60 Warren C. Limbrick, The Poetical Missionary: The Reverend Thomas Whytehead, , Turnbull Library Record 11 (1978): Allan K. Davidson, Colonial Christianity: The Contribution of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel to the Anglican Church in New Zealand, Journal of Religious History 16 (1990): 179.

34 25 plan. 62 Drawing very explicitly on his experiences at the schools where he had received his academic training, Eton and Cambridge, he worked to create a centralized school system that encompassed Maori catechists and lay workers as well as English men seeking ordination. There was also to be a primary school for children, conducted upon the plan of Eton. 63 The institution also focussed on integration of the monastic practices of discipline, prayer, study and physical labour into collegiate life, the last of which Selwyn called useful industry. Selwyn hoped that the inclusion of physical labour in the curriculum would both allow the school to be selfsupporting and provide technical skills to those students ultimately unsuited for the ministry, although it is not clear to what extent the industrial program was put in place before Theological students most definitely were employed in the field to fill vacant missionary and clergy positions, even before their ordinations. One of the main restrictive factors in the early establishment of the College, and the mission in general, was limited infrastructure and minimal funding to develop it. Selwyn proceeded with that in mind, noting that he intended to erect some small wooden chapels in Auckland until such time as stone ones could be built. 64 The long standing CMS presence was certainly helpful in that regard, but Selwyn often imagined a situation like that of the Church fathers proselytizing in the wilderness. As such, he prioritized accordingly, focussing on relaying the Word, not on building churches. 65 One of the most interesting features of Selwyn s early years as Bishop was the Church-tent (Figure 2). Presented to Selwyn by Cotton s father prior to their departure from England, this structure was, for all intents and purposes, a complete parish church in a transportable form. On 29 July 1842, Selwyn wrote to the Society for the Propagation 62 Selwyn to Coleridge, 27 July 1842, Selwyn Family Papers, MS-Papers-01-09, ATL. 63 Selwyn to Coleridge, 27 July 1842, Selwyn Family Papers, MS-Papers-01-09, ATL. 64 Selwyn to Coleridge, 27 July, 1842, Selwyn Papers, MS273, box 4, vol. 1, 31, AML. 65 Bremner, Imperial Gothic, 31.

35 26 of the Gospel (SPG): Divine Service was performed in the Church-tent presented to me by Mr. Cotton, which is completely fitted with Communion-table and desks, and will contain three hundred persons. 66 A willingness to use this equipment demonstrates Selwyn s ability to adapt to the colonial conditions, and the acknowledgement that architectural development was not the most important aspect of his mission. His priorities were conducting worship properly; constructing permanent architecture could be postponed if necessary, despite his obvious and early interest in erecting suitable churches for New Zealand. His willingness to adapt to the conditions at hand led him to use the buildings at Te Waimate as the first architectural expression of the College. Although they were not Gothic, the English character of the station gave it a definite appeal. The mission house (Figure 3) and church (Figure 4) drew directly from the Georgian tradition that had already been established in Australia and northern New Zealand, using moderately pitched roofs, horizontal weatherboard and minimalist features to preserve a reserved and sober aesthetic preferred by many evangelical missionary organizations. Selwyn wrote his mother: Seen from a distance, the Waimate presents the appearance of an English village, with a White Church and Spire, and comfortable houses and gardens. 67 However, the attitude of the CMS towards architecture did not align with Selwyn s High Church principles, nor with those of his staff, a problem that often occurred when High Church clergy and leaders met with an established Low Church tradition in the global mission field. 68 The Low Church, or evangelical, branch of the Church of England had a tendency to focus on scripture and preaching over ritual and hierarchy in their practice; because the Gothic Revival was heavily associated with what was essentially a Catholic past, the CMS often avoided it, favouring simplicity in architecture that reflected their churchmanship. Cotton 66 Selwyn, Letters from the Bishop of New Zealand, Selwyn to Mrs. G. Selwyn, 30 July 1842, Selwyn Papers, MS273 box 4, vol. 1, AML. 68 Bremner, Imperial Gothic,

36 27 observed that The desirableness of a more ecclesiastical mode of fitting the Ch. [Church] is very evident, 69 where Sarah Selwyn, the Bishop s wife, was somewhat more derisive, calling the church at Te Waimate an apology for a church. 70 The Bishop himself was considerable more diplomatic, admitting that the church was superior to any other in New Zealand. 71 At this preliminary stage, the overall English aesthetic was probably enough to please Selwyn who, as he conducted his initial tours throughout the new diocese, was coming to understand exactly how little European architecture there was in the new colony. The residential aspect of the school was very important to Selwyn. He hoped that this method would assist his Maori students in learning English and in becoming more civilized and Christian by removing them from their communities. 72 He believed that this sort of training would assist the indigenous population in their transition to becoming citizens in a Britishcontrolled state; through the understanding of language, religion and culture, they could become well integrated, educated and productive members of New Zealand society. He wrote: It is most important to bring up the rising generation to complete adoption of English habits; for which the purpose of boarding schools is essentially necessary. 73 This did not mesh well with the general policies of the CMS which, by the 1840s, was attempting to integrate some aspects of Maori culture into the Christian practice of their new converts; in particular, the CMS wanted worship and education to be conducted in the Maori language, not in English. 74 This key difference in ideology was one of the fractures between Selwyn and the CMS in ensuing years. But, for a 69 Cotton Journal 3, Sarah Selwyn to Unknown, August 1842, Letters from Bishop Selwyn and Others, qms , ATL. 71 Selwyn to Coleridge, 27 July 1842, Selwyn Family Papers, MS-Papers-01-09, Selwyn Family Papers ATL. 72 Davidson, Selwyn s Legacy, Selwyn to CMS (published letter), 3 November 1842, in Church Missionary Society, Views of the Bishop of New Zealand Respecting the Church Missionary Society s Mission in New Zealand (London: Hatchards, Seeleys and Nisbet, 1843), Davidson, Culture and Ecclesiology, 215; Warren E. Limbrick, George Selwyn as Bishop of New Zealand: Recovering Apostolicity in a Colonial Church, in A Controversial Churchman, 45; Peter Williams, Not Transplanting : Henry Venn s Strategic Vision in The Church Missionary Society and World Christianity, 148.

37 28 mission focussed on instilling British cultural values, the English backdrop of Te Waimate provided an excellent location for expressing these values in material forms, although it was not the ideal Gothic complex Selwyn would have preferred. The influence of the English school system on the College began immediately. Soon after his arrival and just after the College s opening, he wrote: St. John s College is now open with seven students all duly arranged in caps and Gowns and a goodly sight they are in Church. 75 Continuity between the educational system at home and the one he hoped to establish in New Zealand applied not only to beliefs and ideology, but also on aesthetics which served as a reminder of the Anglican tradition he hoped to grow in both of the communities he served, a material reminder of a theologically and culturally united faith. The curriculum also reflected this desire for continuity, where theological students were required to study subjects like New Testament Greek, as they would have had to do in England. The requirement to learn Greek as a prerequisite for ordination was a major issue for the CMS who saw this as unnecessary for their New Zealand context, especially for Maori converts who, realistically, were never going to use it. 76 Selwyn, with a characteristic de-emphasis on local culture, held his Maori students to such high British standards of education that it was nearly impossible for their ordination to occur. This obsession with English standards that defined the early cultural climate of the College transcended curriculum to all areas of academic life and followed the College community to Auckland, where these ideas were even more strongly emphasized. 75 Selwyn to Unknown, [1842?], Correspondence and Papers, SJC 001/2.00/2, SJC. 76 N.M. Benfell, Bishop Selwyn and Mission Policy in Colonial New Zealand, The Reformed Theological Review 45 (1985): 45; Williams, The Ideal of the Self Governing Church: A Study in Victorian Mission Strategy (New York: Brill, 1990), 21.

38 29 Te Waimate ultimately proved unsuitable and the move to Auckland occurred in late Selwyn underlined several times that I have never spoken of the Waimate as more than temporary residence, 77 but he had clearly intended to stay in the north for at least several more years, despite its remote location. 78 Increasingly strained relations between Selwyn and the CMS over a raft of issues including the level of episcopal control over missionaries, Maori land claims and the end goal for the indigenous church certainly ushered the move along with more rapidity than expected. 79 Selwyn also felt he should be nearer to the growing settler population that was in need of his ministrations and which had begun to complain that he was too remote to serve them. 80 In any case, the move to Auckland allowed Selwyn to begin planning for a permanent college, with architecture that suited his philosophy and mission. Coleridge wrote to donors: The College having been in operation for more than two years, at the Waimate, where the buildings were all of wood and of which the tenure was only temporary... [Selwyn] feels that the time has now arrived for making an endeavour to erect suitable Collegiate buildings [in Auckland] and give permanence to an Institution which it is hoped may be hereafter the nursery of the Ministry and the centre of sound learning and religious education in the Islands of New Zealand. 81 With a trust left to the College by Whytehead, Selwyn purchased the parcel of land that became known as Bishop s Auckland, five miles outside of Auckland proper. 82 This location was ideal because, although it was close to Auckland, the area around the College was virtually unoccupied. Selwyn reported to the SPG that The position of the College is everything that we could wish, as it is accessible from the town by both land and water, and yet not so near as to be 77 Selwyn to Coleridge, 16 April 1844, Selwyn Papers, MS273, vol. 1, AML. 78 Selwyn to Venn, 10 April 1844, Selwyn Papers, MS273, box 6, vol. 6, 152, AML. 79 Davidson, Selwyn s Legacy, Phillipson, The Thirteenth Apostle, [Coleridge?], St. John s College New Zealand (Eton: 1845), [Coleridge?], St. John s College, 1.

39 30 subject to continual interruptions. 83 As such, St. John s had the potential to function as an isolated, semi-monastic and self-supporting community while simultaneously holding strong ties to the local community, a relationship that Selwyn felt very strongly about. 84 No buildings were erected when the majority of the community arrived in Auckland and a temporary campus was set up at Purewa, below the College site until such time as residential buildings were constructed at the campus proper. Sarah Selwyn later wrote that at Purewa Huts were put up, and a great barn served as Schoolroom and Hall. Here the party remained til Autumn (our spring) of The Purewa settlement was relatively primitive. Living quarters were originally tents, but were quickly exchanged for raupo huts when the weather became inclement. The church-tent that had been used for Selwyn s initial services several years before was resurrected to serve as chapel and a venue for social events. 86 The barn-like structure was later transported up the hill to the College proper to serve as a barn. A watercolour by the Bishop painted around the beginning of 1845 shows a large frame structure, but little else is known about it (Figure 5). Yet even as the community resided at Purewa, the Bishop and two architects, Samson Kempthorne and Frederick Thatcher, worked towards the realization of Selwyn s ideal campus. It is easy to focus on the chapel alone to the detriment of the other buildings in the complex and the chapel has been, both historically and in contemporary scholarship, the primary point of discussion. 87 However, Selwyn viewed the College as a single ecclesiastical unit, in the same way as a buildings in a monastic complex functioned separately but ultimately came 83 G.A. Selwyn, New Zealand Part 1: Letters from the Bishop to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, vol. 20 of The Church in the Colonies (London: SPG, 1847), Selwyn, Idea of a Colonial College, Sarah Selwyn, Reminiscences, , ed. Harry Bioletti (Auckland: H. Bioletti, 2002), Davidson, Selwyn s Legacy, See for example, Bremner, Imperial Gothic, 50-53; Mane-Wheoki, Selwyn the Ecclesiologist,

40 31 together as a unified whole. He consistently emphasized the unity of the campus, materially and spiritually in his letters and sermons; a central concern, one which was disappointed, was erecting all of the buildings in a congruent style to allow the buildings to function as a single, cohesive unit. 88 His desire for unity in the College complex was evident even in the earliest planning stages. Cotton reported that, in 1845, Selwyn was developing the architectural ideas for the College while still in residence at Te Waimate and had not only the groundplan of the whole establishment drawn up, but also a beautiful general sketch of his idea of the whole. 89 All of the buildings were in the same style, and each drew on the same historical tradition in order to impress upon the viewer the sense of a unified complex expressing a single ideal, not a miscellaneous set of buildings. The sketch to which Cotton referred is included in the Cotton journal and provides an insightful look at the idealistic mode under which Selwyn was operating (Figure 6). Illustrating a college close laid out in a quadrangle formation, the drawing seems very unrealistic given that, at the time of its conception, Selwyn had been in New Zealand for several years and should have known that the colony had neither the resources nor the financial stability to support such a large endeavour;. Nevertheless, it draws from his preconceived notions of what a collegiate school and theological college should look like, reflecting his experiences at Eton and Cambridge, reduced to a smaller scale. The use of a Gothic aesthetic is also consistent throughout the image, although there is no floridness to the complex. Instead, Selwyn focussed on the pitch of the roofs, the use of pointed archways for windows and doors and the general proportions associated with collegiate Gothic in England. A significant amount of buttressing is also present in the image; whether this is a purely aesthetic choice to emphasize the medievalism of the structures 88 Selwyn, Church in the Colonies, 12; Selwyn, Idea of a Colonial College, Cotton to Sarah and Phoebe Cotton, 9 Sept. 1844, Selwyn Papers, M a, SJC.

41 32 or a response to the New Zealand winds, an issue of which Selwyn was well aware, is not clear. All of the buildings in Selwyn s scheme are stone construction. This idealised vision of the College gives insight into the aesthetic that Selwyn hoped to achieve and shows his desire to construct a campus that was not only internally unified, but also expressed continuity with similar institutions in England. Surprisingly, every building in Selwyn s initial scheme was constructed by 1850, although none to the model to which he originally aspired. That none of the buildings was what Selwyn wanted must have come as a blow, but nevertheless demonstrates the difficulties in translating this sort of vision to the colonies. An analysis of the architectural development of the College is also difficult because only three of the buildings the hall, the kitchen and the chapel are still standing. One of the most valuable resources for analysing the College complex is Caroline Abraham s panoramic watercolour of the grounds, completed around 1862; her husband, Rev. Charles Abraham, joined Selwyn s staff as a chaplain in Stretching over eight frames (Figures 7, 8, 9 and 10), this image provides a clear view of all of the buildings within the context of their landscape and is the only comprehensive image of the entire complex as it appeared in the middle of the nineteenth century, although there are discrepancies between some stylistic details in her image and in later photographs. Furthermore, all of the buildings are labelled which not only allows for discrepancies between Thatcher s plans and the finished products to be deduced, but also assists in the identification of later photographs, which often provide better details than this painting. Only the long classroom and dormitories which were moved to Kohimarama (Mission Bay) by the Bishop of Melanesia, John Coleridge Patteson in 1859 for use by the Melanesia mission are absent, but are clearly documented and photographed by James Richardson in 1866 (Figure 11). Abraham was well known as a didactic watercolourist, so any discrepancies are likely due to the

42 33 scale of the image; the fact that the buildings are labelled points to a documentary, not strictly artistic, intent which also suggests that accuracy was a concern. It is reasonable to assume that the Abraham watercolour is accurate, a necessary assumption if it is to be used to assess stylistic development. Construction of the College began in stone in early 1845 under British architect Sampson Kempthorne, a member of the CMS who had worked at Te Waimate after his emigration from England in He was initially employed by Selwyn to erect two churches in the Auckland area, even before the move of the College community. These two buildings, St. Stephen s, Judges Bay (Figure 12) and St. Thomas, Tamaki (Figure 13), were to meant serve the wider Auckland community, the former primarily for the natives. Constructed in an Early English style, both churches featured a heavy interpretation of Gothic features, incorporating lancet windows, steeply pitched roofs and buttresses; they represented the Gothic Revival in one of its most basic manifestations, not unrealistic for a newly settled town. 91 The latter was intended to serve as the chancel of a larger church as the population grew. 92 Construction began on these two buildings in 1844, with St. Stephen s consecrated on 1 December. At this time, Selwyn was most likely quite pleased with the rough interpretation of Gothic envisaged by Kempthorne and deemed it fit to continue their business relationship in the construction of the College; having sent down Pugin s texts for Kempthorne s benefit, Selwyn wanted construction to continue in this direction. 93 However, this relationship quickly crumbled as the construction of St. Stephen s, and later St. Thomas, failed spectacularly. Due to a combination of factors, including the use of sea sand for mortar, environmental factors and 90 Alington, An Excellent Recruit, Knight, Selwyn Churches of Auckland, Cotton Journal 8, Cotton Journal, 8, 4 Sept

43 34 possible technical mistakes, St. Stephen s began to disintegrate the day after its consecration and collapsed in 1847 after a storm. 94 St. Thomas was deemed unsafe in 1859 after over a decade of problems. The failure of St. Stephen s definitely contributed to Kempthorne s dismissal from the College, although the entirety of the circumstances is unclear. Kempthorne also appears to have been disliked by Cotton, who was, during many the Bishop s absences, in charge of the College and found him presumptuous in architectural matters. 95 He was replaced by Frederick Thatcher in May 1845, the architect who became one of Selwyn s closest associates. However, Kempthorne still contributed two buildings to the complex in his short time as presiding architect, the only structures erected in stone on the campus. The first building completed, in 1845, was the stone house, where the Bishop lived with his family. Initially, this building also housed students and classrooms at various times, but went the way of the Kempthorne churches in the early 1900s. 96 Constructed in scoria and employing thick walls and heavy lines, this two story building was unlike the elegant stone structures that Selwyn envisaged in his preliminary sketch. The house itself was not particularly distinctive stylistically, although the steeply pitched roof is a nod to the Gothic traditions, as were the pointed windows in the second story (Figure 14). The flat chimneys, however, recall Georgian design, making the building stylistically inconsistent. There is very little written about this building, suggesting that most members of the community found it uninteresting, but functional. The kitchen, completed in 1846, was built from local scoria laid in rubble courses (Figure 15). The stonework was not extensively dressed, lending the entire building a very rough aesthetic. Kempthorne maintained the proportions of the stone house and of the stylistic features including the square headed windows. Although of Kempthorne s design, it was most likely 94 Cotton Journal 8, 208; Knight, Selwyn Churches of Auckland, Cotton Journal 9, Davidson, Selwyn s Legacy, 53; Knight, Selwyn Churches of Auckland, 14.

44 35 completed by Thatcher; although the proportions and stone work are characteristic of Kempthorne, the open timber roof is reminiscent of Thatcher s style, suggesting that he modified this building to incorporate some of his own ideas (Figure 16). 97 Before the construction of the hall, it served as both kitchen and hall, with a partition for the high table. 98 While more primitive than Selwyn probably wanted, this buildings demonstrates the permanence in masonry construction that the Bishop had hoped for, as it is still standing today. The other building at the College constructed by Kempthorne was the barn, initially constructed at Purewa and later moved up the hill to the College. In his journal, William Bambridge, one of Selwyn s staff, mused on its resemblance to ecclesiastical structures and to English precedent: The supports for the roof are by arches which look like the roof of many of the English Churches, 99 no doubt with the characteristic open timber roof of many English country churches in mind. Open timber roofs had been lauded quite vigorously by both Pugin and the Ecclesiologists for several years as characteristically English and as an appropriate use for timber in church construction. 100 This structure was not ecclesiastical, of course, but, as part of a church-run complex, its design was influenced by the community for which it was constructed. It was, in fact, more architecturally sound than most of Kempthorne s other buildings constructed for Selwyn during the 1840s and lasted significantly longer. 101 Kempthorne s dismissal signalled two major changes in the construction of the complex: the introduction of a new architect and a change in medium. Thatcher, originally from Sussex, would prove significantly more successful, both architecturally and within the community, 97 Ian Lochhead, Research Report on Stone Kitchen and Dining Hall, St. John s College, Auckland, (unpublished report, 1976), SJC10/06/4, SJC. 98 Sarah Selwyn, Reminiscences, William Bambridge, Journal, 8 March 1845, MS 463 AML. 100 A.W.N. Pugin, True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture (London: J. Weale, 1841), 34-35; Philip Freeman, On Foliated Wooden Roofs, in Transactions of the Cambridge Camden Society, (Cambridge: John W. Parker, 1841), Alington, An Excellent Recruit, 109.

45 36 especially since he entered the college as a student in 1848 and was later ordained. 102 Thatcher was already familiar to Selwyn when he was appointed to the post through their correspondence regarding two churches constructed in the New Plymouth area, St. Mary s in New Plymouth itself and Holy Trinity in the smaller community of Te Henui. Although not formally associated with the CCS, Thatcher consistently adhered to their principles throughout his career proving himself incredibly adept at adapting the Gothic idiom to timber construction, something that Selwyn recognized. 103 Thatcher and Selwyn formed a close relationship that continued until Selwyn s death in 1878 and seem to have been on the same page stylistically and philosophically regarding the development of churches in architectural and spiritual form, although Sarah Selwyn admitted that they were much different men. 104 The change in medium was necessary for several reasons. The failure at St. Stephen s alerted Selwyn to the poor quality of local scoria. To compound the matter, the outbreak of war in the north and Auckland s expanding population made hiring masons prohibitively expensive. 105 Realistically, using timber was Selwyn s only alternative because it was inexpensive and the labour could be undertaken for the most part by the College community. However, throughout his episcopate, Selwyn constantly complained about timber construction because he saw it as a temporary medium. 106 The CCS specifically condemned it. 107 It is not clear if Thatcher also viewed the medium as temporary. There were two other problems with it as well: the lack of historical precedent within the Gothic framework that Selwyn wanted to pursue and the lack of defined theological symbolism. Stone construction had clear historical 102 Alington, An Excellent Recruit, See for example, his design for Old St. Paul s, Wellington, widely regarded as Thatcher s masterpiece. Margaret Alington, Frederick Thatcher and Old St. Paul s: An Ecclesiological Study (Wellington: R.E. Owen, 1965). 104 Sarah Selwyn, Reminiscences, Outhwaite to Coombe, n.d. [1845], Correspondence and Papers Buildings and Land, SJC001/1.00/11, SJC. 106 Selwyn to Coleridge, 26 July 1843, Selwyn Family Papers, MS-Papers /SEL 010/3.00/6, ATL. 107 Wooden Churches, The Ecclesiologist IV (1845): 49.

46 37 examples from the medieval period and a defined set of symbolic forms that timber simply did not. These two factors, precedent and symbolic value, were fundamentally important to the Gothic movement and its adherents. Nevertheless, Selwyn did not have a choice if the College was going to be constructed. It was with these issues in mind that Thatcher worked to resolve timber construction with a style more suited to stone. Two timber churches were designed by Thatcher just as this issue was coming to light and show how he approached the medium s inherent issues. Completed around the same time in the mid-1840s, the chapels at Te Henui and Maraetai work to resolve the timber issue by using forms found in historical English carpentry practice, a strategy that Thatcher later used at the College. The first, Holy Trinity, (Figure 17) where Thatcher was originally based, draws on the late Saxon church, St. Andrew s, Greensted-juxta-Ongar, in Essex, and the method of using upright logs to form walls (Figure 18). A deliberate connection between the construction methodologies of the two was recognized by Cotton in his journal. 108 Although it could never be confused with its late Saxon source, Holy Trinity used upright rimu logs with the exterior bark still attached to form the walls, consciously striving to maintain a vertical aesthetic. The addition of a porch and the steeply pitched roof further indicate that Thatcher had the Gothic movement on his mind during its construction as these were standard features that drew from medieval design and had been repeatedly emphasized as necessary to Gothic aesthetics by the CCS. The chapel built for the CMS station in Maraetai, at the Waikato Heads, is significantly more sophisticated than its counterpart across the island (Figure 19). Constructed between 1845 and 1846, this chapel foreshadows Thatcher s work at the College, using many of the same principles, specifically the heavy, decorative half-timbering most commonly identified with the College Chapel. Like at Te Henui, there is a historical source for this style: the half-timbered 108 Cotton Journal, 10, 3.

47 38 buildings of late medieval England which not only survived into the nineteenth century, but were extremely common. He also employed the same porch structure and bell-cote that he would later use for the College chapel. Robert Maunsell, the CMS missionary at Maraetai, was pleased with the building, remarking that this little Gothic Building will I hope serve as a neat model for a New Zealand church. 109 Cotton, who funded the building, suggested that it was going to be built a Facsimile of one of the Essex porches, 110 promoting the idea that elements of existing English medieval buildings could be used as inspiration for colonial chapels. It is not evident as to what porch Cotton identified as the origin, but Essex is not short of wooden porches it could be any one of a wide range. Most likely, Thatcher combined the general plan of an Essex porch and some of its decorative details with his existing knowledge of half-timbered construction in order to create something quite ecclesiological. The actual porch of the church follows the accepted model of framed up ends and horizontal division by a middle rail below a set of traceried openings. 111 Selwyn was also involved in the Maraetai project, although at a distance. He wrote to his brother in April 1845 that: a plan is now being drawn up by one of our own Architects [Thatcher] under my own direction for the church at Maraetai where the main timbers of the roof are to rest on ground and to be concealed in the walls of the porch and transept so that the side walls will have little or no weight to support 112 in order to counteract the high winds at Waikato Heads. The two surviving images of this building seem to suggest that this method was used, but without concealing the supports in the transepts because there were none. Both of these 109 Maunsell, 1845 Report to the CMS, quoted in Helen Garrett, Te Manihera: The Life and Times of the Pioneer Missionary Robert Maunsell (Auckland: Reed Books, 1991), Cotton Journal 9, Fred H. Crossley, Timber Building in England from Early Times to the Seventeenth Century (London: B.T. Batsford, 1951), Selwyn to W. Selwyn, 24 April 1845, Selwyn Papers, MS273, vol. 2, AML.

48 39 images show external buttressing, indicating that the technique was indeed used; it was later employed at the College chapel. Selwyn consistently took credit for this technique, writing about it even before his departure from England. 113 He had also sketched several unidentified, and never constructed, buildings that incorporated the technique, including one that Cotton added into his journal (Figure 20). The Bishop thus inserted his own architectural idea into the design, which no doubt pleased him, an idea that would be later adapted by architect Benjamin Mountfort who emigrated to Canterbury in Selwyn wrote as though he conceived of this method all on his own; however, it is essentially cruck construction, a popular and relatively straightforward method of construction from the English Middle Ages. The major benefit of the method is that the walls were required to support only their own weight as opposed to that of the entire structure which was held up by large triangular frames; this mode of construction is extremely stable in high winds. 115 At Maraetai, the cruck method was used in conjunction with post and beam framing in order to maintain a church-like silhouette, framing the gabled terminal ends outside the cruck structure and concealing two of the individual blades in the porch. The ecclesiastical equivalent to this practice is the flying buttress, although not exactly the same thing. In many respects, the chapel for Maunsell seems to have been a dry run for the College Chapel. It should be noted that Selwyn was significantly more flexible about building in wood for churches and chapel than he was with his College, and never appears to have had the same misgivings using timber for the Maraetai and Te Henui chapels, as he did for the College, despite 113 Selwyn discussed the technique at length in a letter to his brother in Selwyn to W. Selwyn, 24 April 1845, Selwyn Papers, MS273, vol. 2, AML. See also, Alington, An Excellent Recruit, 44; Mane-Wheoki, Selwyn Gothic, Mane-Wheoki, Selwyn the Ecclesiologist, ; Ian Lochhead, St. Batholomew s Church, Kaiapoi: A Mountfort-Selwyn Connection, Bulletin of New Zealand Art History 9 (1985): R.W. Brunskill, Timber Building in Britain (London: Victor Gollancz, 1985),

49 40 the fact that he did not like the medium. He reported to the SPG that he intended as soon as possible to build a wooden chapel; and to lay the foundation of a Church on a grand scale, 116 soon after his initial arrival in Auckland in The Bishop was actually sent a box containing Plans of Wooden Churches, Books & c. 117 in 1845 although who drew them or what they contained in unknown as they cannot be located. However, their arrival in Auckland demonstrates that using wood as a construction medium for churches was a reality that the Bishop and his associates recognized. Although it is unlikely that these plans radically changed his dislike of the medium, the receipt of a box of resources would have assisted in his erection of other churches in the North Island and provided reassurance that those in England were indeed on his side and understood, to some degree, the trials and tribulations of ecclesiology in the wilderness. With Thatcher s arrival, the construction of the College proceeded in timber. After the erection of the two stone buildings, one of the major priorities was the erection of housing for the boys, theological students and teachers. Three of the first buildings erected were what Selwyn and Cotton labelled the servants or workmen s houses; none of these buildings remain but are represented in both Abraham s watercolour and a copy of Thatcher s plans for one of them. Constructed in 1846, these three buildings were the first to use the curved timber bracing pioneered at Maraetai, in the style that Cotton called Tudor 118 before the two major buildings that made use of this feature, the hospital and chapel, as well as the dormitories and the partially constructed native school cluster, were constructed. 119 Unfortunately, the timber bracing is only demonstrated in the Abraham sketch; a photographic image that was taken of one of these 116 Selwyn to the SPG, 29 July 1842, New Zealand Box 2, C/NZ/2/NZ, , SPG Archives, quoted in Mane- Wheoki, Selwyn the Ecclesiologist, Selwyn to Coleridge, 20 October 1845, Selwyn Letters, MS-Papers ATL. 118 Cotton Journal 11, xvi. 119 Alington, An Excellent Recruit, 104.

50 41 buildings in 1919, preserved in the Sir George Grey Collection, shows a board and batten exterior instead (Figure 21). 120 In an undated memorandum to his carpenters, however, Thatcher noted that curved bracing would be supplied precut, indicating that it was indeed used, in at least two of the houses. 121 The building was probably redressed similarly to the hospital, due to the costs associated with the upkeep of exposed timber work. The three cottages are all unique, using the same stylistic features in similar arrangements to create a cohesive set. From the single perspective offered by the watercolour, these three houses combine half-timbered bracing, infilled using timber sheathing, with the steeply pitched roof characteristic of the Gothic Revival. Furthermore, porches and additions were employed by Thatcher to create an asymmetrical profile, a trend which was developing in England throughout the 1840s; both Thatcher and Selwyn would have been aware of this development through the journals and publications the Bishop received from England. 122 All three buildings use distinctly ecclesiological features to expand the buildings from the basic framed profile. The Paris cottage (Figure 22), most likely the surviving and redressed building in the Grey Collection photograph, employs a wing akin to a transept, whereas the Hunter (Figure 23) and Holland (Figure 24) cottages employ porch-like entrance ways, which correlate to the porches used on Thatcher s timber churches. Similarly, the additions on both the Holland and Paris houses use a broken roofline in order to provide visual separation between different areas of the building, a feature usually applied to church architecture to mark the distinction between nave, chancel and porch. The only surviving plans for these buildings are the four miscellaneous elevations of Workmen s Cottages preserved at the Kinder Library (Figure 25). The images present a small 120 Sir George Grey was the Governor of New Zealand in the middle of the nineteenth century. The Collection is named in his honour and contains a wide array of historical photographs from early New Zealand. 121 Thatcher to [carpenters,] n.d., Correspondence and Papers Buildings and Land, SJC 001/1.00/10, SJC. 122 C.M. Smart, Muscular Churches: Ecclesiastical Architecture of the High Victorian Period (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1989),

51 42 two-roomed cottage smaller than those preserved in the Abraham watercolour. The half timbering also appears less pronounced in the plans, suggesting that it was either accentuated by Abraham to make the units more cohesive or that the plans for the cottages were modified after the success of Maraetei. These also indicate an overhanging upper story (Figure 26), which may or may not have been included in at least one of the cottages; the Abraham watercolour gives no indication of this feature because of the scale. The boys dormitory was probably also in progress at this time. Sarah Selwyn s Reminiscences indicate that the construction of the employees homes and the student residence were concurrent; a sketch of the building included in the Cotton Journal, the only visual representation of the building s original form (Figure 27). 123 Like the cottages, the dormitory was built in a two-story half-timbered style, with vertical wooden sheathing, a steeply pitched roof and at least one side wing. Apart from its scale, demonstrated by the sketch, little else can be determined from this image. Extensive modifications occurred in the move to Kohimarama and it is actually not clear whether this is the same dormitory. The erection of the hospital followed soon after that of the cottages, breaking ground in June 1846 (Figure 28). Selwyn saw it as a priority because the hospital was not only important for his own community but also for Auckland at large where there was little access to medical facilities. He wanted to provide free medical services, in what he called the duty of spiritual hospitality, 124 as a monastic community would have done in medieval England. 125 He even set out rules for the governance and conduct of the facility which sound very much like those of a 123 Sarah Selwyn, Reminiscences, 30; Cotton Journal 9, Selwyn, Church in the Colonies, Davidson, Selwyn s Legacy, 63; Alington, An Excellent Recruit,

52 43 monastic hospital community. 126 It is also the best documented of the buildings that have not survived in the present College. Built of wood on a scoria foundation, 127 the hospital, like the domestic buildings, employed a half timbered structure with board and batten infill. As constructed, it featured three bays in an H-plan and an extension, which is designated in the Abraham watercolor as the surgery. As well as providing structural support, the H-plan layout also allowed for the hospital to be divided into rooms, which were used for a variety of purposes throughout the hospital s lifespan, especially in the College s earliest days where it housed classrooms for both academics and the domestic arts. 128 The images that survive of this building show a relatively direct translation between the proposed design and the actual execution in the construction process. The plan by Thatcher (Figure 29), preserved in the Kinder Library, displays the same three celled building present in the Abraham watercolour, with slight modifications. The two gabled end cells are joined by a central hall, divided into several rooms; the addition s shorter roof and offset location within the ground plan designates it as a separate space. The roofline also designated two verandahs, at the front and rear of the building, through a reduction in pitch. To add greater dimension to the space as a whole, the upper stories of the gabled cells are jettyed. The non-structural elements are also worth noting, as they lend continuity with other buildings in the complex. The squared headed windows are latticed on the lower story, which creates consistency with the other domestic and academic spaces including the two stone buildings, as well as the printing house and the hall, discussed below. The upper windows, including the dormer window in the central hall, appear in most of the images to be unlatticed, although this is difficult to confirm. 126 Selwyn, Rules for the Brethren and Sisters of the Hospital of St. John, reprinted in H.W. Tucker, Memoir of the Life and Episcopate of George Augustus Selwyn, D.D, vol. 1 (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1879), Cotton Journal 11, iii. 128 Cotton Journal 11, v.

53 44 The second surviving plan comes directly from Cotton journal, and varies slightly from that produced by Thatcher, and may be a second, final version (Figure 30). Besides modifications to the bracing, there are several other changes worth noting between Cotton and Thatcher s sketches. The rear verandah and the entrance stoop to the addition have been removed, probably due to cost, practicality and the awkward, sloping site on which the hospital was built. The chimney on the gable further to the right in Cotton s elevation has also been shifted to the centre of the ridgeline, which Cotton explains as due to a 2 foot extension of the centre cell. 129 The other change is the deletion of the dormer window. One of the most interesting features of the building, the jettyed upper story, appears to have been removed in the Cotton sketch, although it was clearly retained in construction. However, in the accompanying text to the several plans included in Cotton s journal, the chaplain states: The gables project out over the lower rooms, in the manner of a Swiss building This improvement in his Peculiar 130 style of building Mr. Thatcher gladly introduced at my suggestion, 131 on structural grounds. Evidently, there was some discussion between Thatcher and Cotton regarding the methodology to be employed in this building; given Cotton s involvement in the CCS, this does not seem odd. Thatcher had also consulted with Cotton in May 1846 on the plans for the hall, a project which did not commence until late The so-called Native School was also constructed in this period of half-timbering, although not to the extent originally planned. Detailed plans and the layout for the central building, the one that was actually erected, have been preserved at the College. The plan for this cluster of buildings was laid out in late 1846 to form a nucleus for Maori, and later Melanesian, 129 Cotton Journal 11, iv. 130 Here Cotton means distinctive, not odd. 131 Cotton Journal 11, 132 Alington, An Excellent Recruit, 115.

54 45 education within the campus (Figure 31). 133 Forming a semi-circular arc between the chapel and the farm buildings, it was to include a school for Maori boys and one for adults as well as a master s house in the centre, and outlying washing rooms (Figure 32). Detailed plans only survive for the master s house. It appears that a version of this building was erected and was used as the Maori boys school and as residence for some adult members of the College at least for part of its life. Like the other residential buildings in the complex, plans for the master s house employed the heavy exterior timber framing; Abraham confirms that the half-timbering was employed during the actual construction process, but suggests that it may have been less elaborate than initially intended. Built on a stunted cross plan, the front and rear elevations show the gabled ends consistent with the rest of the buildings constructed at this time; however, the side arms on the cross, designated in the ground plan at the study and store, are formed by polygonal apsidal ends, a feature derived directly from ecclesiastical design (Figure 33). The only other building that Thatcher designed with this feature is the college chapel. These apses, oddly, are also two stories, housing half-storied bedrooms on the second floor, lit by dormer windows present in both the front (south) and north elevations. Other elements are consistent with the other residences on the campus, such as the squared headed latticed windows, chimney and entrance verandah. Like the hospital, there is an overhanging upper story where the intended front bedroom extends significantly over the verandah (Figure 34). The back verandah has a separate lean-to roof at a gentler pitch that the main part of the structure. The Abraham watercolour gives no indication that the jettyed upper story was preserved, although the back verandah and the apsidal ends certainly were. That this feature was preserved in the hospital on structural ground suggests that it may also have been present in this house. This building appears 133 Alington, An Excellent Recruit, 108.

55 46 to actually have been built as planned, perhaps with some minor changes such as the minimization of some external bracing. There is little way of knowing what the two school buildings that Thatcher planned would have looked like, although likely they would have been stylistically cohesive with the master s house and the rest of the complex. The plans indicate that they would have been larger and on a cruciform plan. The building on its right in the Abraham watercolour is the parochial day school, and not designed, in all likelihood, by Thatcher. 134 The weatherboarding on the exterior and the indistinct stylistic details suggest that it was the work of someone else, although whom is not known. The College chapel was the last of the half-timbered buildings constructed on the campus. Although important for the overall function of the College and the development of a worship community, it was not a priority during the initial construction process because of the need to house the students and the convenience of St. Thomas. As such, it was not completed until late Until mid-1847, members of the College community worshipped in St. Thomas, where Cotton generally led the service, or with one of the Maori congregations at Orakei and Okahu, allowing for the construction of a chapel to be put off until housing was sorted out. 135 Consecrated on 23 November, it had been in use since an initial service by Cotton in early August. 136 There is significantly more literature on the chapel than the other buildings, partially owing to its uniqueness as well as to the fact that it is still standing. No plans survive, but a multitude of drawing and photographs inform the modern scholar on its original form, which was slightly different from its current condition. A new belfry was constructed in 1877 to house a 134 Selwyn, Church in the Colonies XX, 1; Alington, An Excellent Recruit, Davidson, Selwyn s Legacy, 56; Selwyn, The Church in the Colonies, Alington, An Excellent Recruit, 114.

56 47 larger bell and a bay added in 1959, although the modifications sought to retain the character of Thatcher s original design. 137 As such, while contemporary photographs demonstrate the basic shape and style of the church, its current form is larger and slightly different from how it appeared in the middle of the nineteenth century (Figures 35 and 36). The chapel is constructed on a unique plan, incorporating a cruciform shape with two semicircular apsidal ends. In her Reminiscences, Sarah Selwyn claimed that it was a plan much favoured by the Bishop, partially his own and partly gathered from drawings by Mr. Petit of Lichfield. 138 These drawings are from J.L. Petit s two volume Remarks on Church Architecture (1841), one of the works that Selwyn had brought with him to New Zealand and that formed a part of the College Library. 139 There is no single illustration from Petit s text which includes two apsidal ends in an ecclesiastical building; however, Thatcher and Selwyn probably derived the idea of using an apse from his text as there are many examples. These apsidal ends are very similar to those included in the master s house, and were used for the font and the altar respectively, a very uncommon arrangement. The chapel also employed the same method of construction inspired by cruck building combined with heavy, exterior half-bracing as its forerunner at Maraetai. The support system extended from the ridgeline of the roof through four blades on either side of the porch and vestry opposite each other and through both transepts to terminate at the foundation. The diagonal line of these supports is evident in the exterior bracing, particularly in the porch, but, unlike at Maraetai, is entirely absorbed into the structure of the building itself; there are no external buttresses, because of the inclusion of transepts. The structural strength the cruck method added was evident even to someone for whom architecture was not a primary concern, as Sarah Selwyn 137 Alington, An Excellent Recruit, Sarah Selwyn, Reminiscences, Lochhead, British Architectural Books, 33.

57 48 wrote that the chapel combined strength with its beauty, enabling it to withstand the fierce winds that laid low more than one chapel in the country, although this, on one side was exposed to gales from the sea. 140 At present, the exterior of the chapel is painted white, but it was originally stained in such a way that the braces were picked out in oil tinted with umber, in order to give the whole a more substantial look and also to recall the half-timbered buildings of England on which it drew. 141 The exterior also featured a gabled bell-cote similar to that at Maraetai, now removed for the larger belfry. The interior of the building was also very dark, due to the small windows and tint of the wood, allowing the church to take on the dimness of many early ecclesiastical structures in England; the limited lighting was seen to recall a medieval religiosity in worshippers who entered the structure (Figure 37 and 38). 142 Selwyn found this, of all things, the most ecclesiastical aspect of the College. 143 The chapel was also, historically, the only building that observers commented on, probably as it caught their attention due to its distinctive design and its centrality within the grounds. It was widely regarded as the most English of all the College s buildings, and, by some, the most English of the buildings in the Auckland region in the late 1840s. In an unidentified correspondence, a resident at the College admitted that there are settlers in our neighbourhood who say that they like to come to our chapel for it is more like England than anything in the country. 144 Realistically, the chapel looked very little like any church ever constructed in England, even its timber parallels from the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, it was consistently described by viewers as particularly in tune with historical ecclesiastical style. Upon his arrival 140 Sarah Selwyn, Reminiscences, T.B. Hutton to his father, 20 May 1847, Selwyn Papers, 5.26.a, SJC. 142 Bremner, Imperial Gothic, Selwyn, Church in the Colonies, Correspondence from an Unknown Clergyman, 11 August 1857, Selwyn Family Papers, MS-Papers-8427, ATL.

58 49 in Auckland in July 1855, Patteson described the College precincts, lavishing the most praise on the chapel: Last of all the little chapel of kauri wood, stained dark, like the inside of a really good ecclesiastical building in England Here my eye and my mind rest contentedly and peacefully. The little chapel, holding about seventy persons, is already dear to me. 145 Patteson certainly was not alone in his adulation. Even Selwyn, who was notoriously critical of the College s architecture, wrote in his correspondence with the SPG that when filled with out Collegiate body, [it] bears some faint resemblance to our College chapels in England 146 This amounted to lavish praise from the Bishop. But he consistently saw the chapel as temporary, and hoped to replace it someday with a more substantial stone structure. 147 After the construction of the chapel, the use of half-timbering as Thatcher s preferred method of construction ceased in favour of board and batten. Exposed half-timbering of the type required significant external dressing because of its revealed construction and, as such, added to the building s cost; furthermore, the exposed surfaces of the structural system were prone to rot in the damp Auckland climate, where humidity, warmth and significant amounts of rain contributed rapidly to decay. 148 This is also the reason that several of the half-timbered buildings were later redressed. Similarly, as Auckland grew and contractors were in demand, the price of labour grew, which forced the community to erect what Selwyn disparaged as merely temporary wooden sheds of the roughest kind, for such purposes as are absolutely necessary. 149 That this type of construction produced major financial and structural problems is demonstrated by the 145 C.M. Yonge, Life of John Coleridge Patteson: Missionary Bishop of the Melanesian Islands, vol. 1 (London: Macmillam and Co., 1888), Selwyn, Church in the Colonies, Selwyn to Coleridge, 6 October 1846, Selwyn Family Papers, MS-Papers , ATL. 148 Mane-Wheoki, Selwyn the Ecclesiologist, Selwyn, Church in the Colonies, 12.

59 50 change in methodology, which broke the consistency of the college complex, in the same way that the switch from stone had done. The major buildings completed in board and batten were the hall in 1849, the printing office, carpenter s shop and long classroom, all completed in the late 1840s. The hall (Figure 39) remains one of the few buildings where an interior view is available, despite the modifications that have been made to suit the needs of the modern College. A good perspective view has been preserved in a photograph included in the George Grey Special Collections (Figure 40). The hall marks Thatcher s shift to an interior bracing system, demonstrated in these images. Described as a handsome apartment in the Elizabethan style of architecture, 150 the hall finally allowed Selwyn to enact the community experience he envisaged at Te Waimate with a high table and communal tables for each of his classes, as had been his experience during his own educational experience; in order to create this feeling, Thatcher drew directly from the English College Hall tradition, through the use of an H-plan and elevated dais, lit by a western oriel window. 151 Henry Sewell commented that it was a very College like apartment with a high table, and transepts, an open roof and buttery. Everything looks like a College. 152 Despite the stylistic shift, Thatcher maintained the verticality and consistency of his previous buildings through the board and batten, the steeply pitched roof and the long, squared-headed lancet windows throughout the building. The long classroom, removed to Kohimarama by Patteson in 1859, is absent from the Abraham watercolour but photographic sources from its second home show its layout and stylistic features. It is not clear what this building originally looked like, but the Report on Schools in the District of Auckland for 1854 reported that it was a highly ornamental building, 150 Henry Sewell, Journal of Henry Sewell, ed. W.D. McIntyre, vol. 2 (Christchurch: Whitcoulls, 1980), Alington, An Excellent Recruit, Sewell, Journal, 55.

60 51 constructed in wood after the Old English style of architecture. 153 What that actually means is difficult to assess given the wealth of meanings for the term Old English in the colonial context; it may have originally been half-timbered. However, a drawing of this building by James Richardson in 1898 (Figure 41) shows a long nave like structure, with three transepts, using the same proportions found in all of the College buildings, the steep roof and the characteristic latticed windows. The northern window, in particular, is evocative of ecclesiastical design as it suggests a rose window. Neither the printing house (Figure 42) nor carpentry shop (Figure 43) was particularly distinctive stylistically, focussing on utility over aesthetics. However, they are cohesive with the rest of the College complex and maintain many of the principles present throughout all of Thatcher s work, including the ecclesiastical aesthetic he brought to many of his domestic buildings. The carpentry shop was evenly slightly reminiscent of his chapels with a similar porch structure combined with its proportions. 154 In these buildings, Thatcher appears to have striven not for originality and innovation but consistency and functionality. Evidently, the College buildings were not as originally planned, but through the innovation of the architects and the driving character of the College s founder, a temporary measure was erected, one which took into account stylistic coherence and a direct desire to transfer the Gothic aesthetic to an alternative medium and a difficult environment. T.B. Hutton wrote hopefully: We live in hopes that some nearer substitute [for scoria] may be found and meanwhile the aforesaid wooden edifices look well and not unecclesiastical. 155 For the purposes of an early colonial college, many found the buildings, Thatcher s in particular, quite pleasing and reminiscent of what a College should look like. 153 Report on Schools in the District of Auckland, 25 March 1854, Ia1/54/1001, Archives New Zealand. 154 Alington, An Excellent Recruit, Hutton to Gilbert, 20 May 1847, Correspondence and Papers, SJC 001/2.00/9, SJC.

61 3: Sourcing St. John s College: Symbolism, Inspiration and Implications Despite Kempthorne and Thatcher s best efforts, Selwyn, who was notoriously rigid, was never truly pleased with the College buildings, writing that I cannot, therefore, say much in praise either of the beauty or congruity of the College buildings. 156 That he called the native school handsome in his official discussion of the College in the SPG publication The Church and the Colonies in late 1848 was certainly an indication that he liked it, given his generally picky attitude. That the original Gothic designs were quickly scrapped due to material and financial constraints could suggest that the drive to use these buildings symbolically dried up when these plans were deemed unfeasible. The central purpose of the College s design scheme was to create a complex that reflected the symbolic forms of English architectural norms; adaptation to colonial conditions changed how those forms communicated. That being said, throughout the building scheme, the architects, primary Thatcher, used the material at hand to construct a complex that, while not ideal in Selwyn s estimation, could nevertheless fulfil a symbolic and ideological function. In order to achieve this purpose, Thatcher stepped back from the typical Gothic features and looked for alternative sources from the English countryside. In doing so, Thatcher, who was probably the better architect and definitely the one more suited to realizing Selwyn s vision, came up with something both wildly innovative and quintessentially English. Kempthorne s buildings are also very English, but, unlike Thatcher s contributions, Kempthorne s designs are neither innovative nor symbolically interesting. It should suffice to say that the stone buildings contributed little to the communicative value of the complex except for a general sense of Englishness through their heavy Norman-esque aesthetic. 156 Selwyn, Church in the Colonies,

62 53 As previously mentioned, the physical sources for the half-timbered buildings were the post and beam houses of southeastern England, Thatcher s birthplace. These buildings, most of which were domestic, employed a half-timbered support system where curved or straight braces were utilized within the post and beam meta-structure to increase stability within the wall and to simultaneously act as a decorative element. 157 These timbers were either in-filled with lath and plaster or with brick to complete the walls and provide an insulating layer; the use of weatherboard infill was uncommon but not entirely unheard of. 158 This practice was well established in Britain by the late Middle Ages and continued well into the Tudor period, which produced many of the most sophisticated and decorative examples of this style. 159 The three domestic buildings in the College complex, as well as the master s house, hospital and chapel, clearly draw on this tradition although they employ timber vertical board and batten infill to suggest vertical movement within the structure. A particular source that Thatcher employed is the Wealden hall house type, a medieval construction style that flourished between the 14 th and 16 th centuries, most commonly found in Kent and southeastern Sussex. 160 The hospital, in particular, was reminiscent of the Wealden hall house type because of its division in three major cells and the overhanging roof on the outer two bays, in contrast to the recessed central section, although Thatcher s building also included a protruding addition on the east end. 161 Similarly, the interior plans reveal that the three upper chambers were inaccessible from one another and could only be reached from the ground floor, a particular characteristic of the Wealden hall house type. The overhanging upper story, the feature 157 Brunskill, Timber Building in Britain, Brunskill, Timber Building in Britain, Anthony Quiney, The Traditional Buildings of England (London: Thames and Hudson, 1990), R.W. Brunskill, Houses and Cottages of Britain: Origins and Development of Traditional Buildings (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), Quiney, The Traditional Buildings of England, 67.

63 54 Cotton identified as Swiss and claimed as his own idea, is also characteristic of this architectural genre. Whether the source for this feature is Swiss chalet construction or English hall houses is not clear; Cotton had a particular interest in the former building style and wrote about it often. 162 The overhanging gables extended into Thatcher s work outside the College, suggesting that he was not entirely dependent on the chaplain for this idea; Thatcher s colonial hospital, the Gables, in New Plymouth completed between 1846 and 1848 also employed this feature, as well as the contrasting half-timbering of the College buildings and the rounded apselike feature typical of his work. 163 Cotton also demonstrated a considerable interest in half-timbered structures. The seat of his father s associate, Charles Turner, contained a number of small cottages which Cotton remembered fondly, and, after his arrival in New Zealand, deemed suitable for the colony. Long before the half-timbered buildings at the College commenced, he wrote to his sister Phoebe requesting some drawings of these buildings, described as a style which shows the timber, in all manner of odd shapes between the plaister panels. 164 He believed that it was likely these same sorts of buildings could be constructed in New Zealand, and they were, although the plaster was forgone in favour of a medium which better suited the locale. The cruck-frame method is another flashback to the English Middle Ages as it first began to appear in Wiltshire around the end of the twelfth century, and developed simultaneously with timber framing. 165 Whereas the half-timbering method was both common and easily envisaged by individuals without architectural training, using the cruck method would have required a certain level of architectural knowledge, although it was basically an A-frame. Selwyn s 162 W.C. Cotton, A Manual for New Zealand Beekeepers (Wellington: A. Stokes, 1848), John Stacpoole, Colonial Architecture in New Zealand (Wellington: A.H. & A.W. Reed), Cotton to Phoebe Cotton, [1843?], quoted in Stacpoole, Colonial Architecture in New Zealand, Quiney, The Traditional Buildings of England, 48.

64 55 familiarity with this method is entirely unknown beyond his discussion of the timbers of the roof resting on the ground to alleviate pressure on the walls in heavy winds. It is entirely unclear if Selwyn made this connection to early British buildings but he got the idea from somewhere; he may have seen some of these structures, which were very common, and figured out the structural implications. Thatcher, as an architect, would have been well aware of the method and its inherent stability. Many cruck-frame buildings were used in medieval monastic complexes, especially in tithe barns which often featured church-like features, such as timber arcading. 166 The chapel crucks are of note because the rafters are broken at the top plate; the interior segments forming the rafters and those that make up the exterior bracing are actually distinct, but jointed, pieces. 167 However, jointed crucks such as these were used with some regularity in medieval carpentry. 168 Thatcher s sources were certainly not the forms favoured by the CCS for ecclesiastical construction, nor were they those that the Bishop first looked to. However, Selwyn was not adverse to looking to lesser known sources for inspiration. After an early tour of the Northland, he wrote to an unknown correspondent: The next day we came to Hokianga where I hope soon to build a chapel on the plan of Boveny [sic] of old. 169 The chapel to which he alludes is St. Mary Magdalene, Boveney, a short walk from Eton. Constructed at some point before the middle of the thirteenth century, the relatively primitive church features a heavy Norman exterior constructed of rubble and mortar and a weatherboard timber tower, a common feature in southeastern and western medieval England. 170 This Norman construction, although somewhat 166 See for example, Walter Horn, F.W.B. Charles Born and Rainer Berger, The Cruck-Built Barn of Middle Littleton in Worchester, England, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 25 (1966): Alington, An Excellent Recruit, Brunskill, Timber Building in Britain, Selwyn to unknown, [1842?], Correspondence and Papers, SJC001/2.00/2, SJC. 170 Crossley, Timber Building in England, 38.

65 56 eclectic, was similar to what The Ecclesiologist had initially suggested for New Zealand to reflect its primitiveness, but it was definitely much heavier and more simplistic for Selwyn s original conception of his College. It is somewhat similar to Kempthorne s stone churches and the two initial stone buildings at the College. Evidently, Thatcher had a good grasp of English architectural traditions as well as an excellent ability to adapt these forms to a new environment. However, he had no access to actual examples after his arrival in New Plymouth in Several decades later, Mountfort disparaged that: It is a great drawback in our colonial life that the land in which we live has for us no history, no appeals from the past in names, customs, or monuments no venerable minsters or abbeys bring to our minds the ancient glories of the Church. 171 This problem was faced by Thatcher even more acutely as he had virtually no physical sources in an English style to draw upon. Nevertheless, the boom in architectural interest, especially in ecclesiastical construction, meant that Thatcher was not flying blind because of the print material in Selwyn s library, along with the regular correspondence between the Bishop and his English associates who often provided him with the most up-to-date architectural publications. 172 Throughout the British colonial world, one of the most valuable resources for clergy and architects involved in ecclesiastical construction was the architectural pattern book. 173 Including texts by Petit and Pugin, many of these pattern books provided very specific plans for a wide range of Gothic-inspired buildings that included picturesque images alongside elevations, measurements and material requirements; designs for ecclesiastical buildings formed a central component of many of these books. Most of these books were imported directly from Britain and 171 B.W. Mountfort, Other Times (Christchurch: Whitcombe and Tombs, 1885), Lochead, Architectural Books, For an assessment of their use with specific reference to the North American contexts, see Barry Magrill, A Commerce of Taste: Church Architecture in Canada, (Montreal: McGill-Queen s University Press, 2012),

66 57 reflected British aesthetic taste, allowing for people in the colonies to build in a style that directly correlated to that being used at home. 174 Some of the more detailed texts allowed for communities with little or no collective architectural knowledge to copy a perfectly acceptable Gothic church directly from the page. St. John s College, with access to an architect, was in no way obliged to resort to using exclusively pattern books for the complex. However, Thatcher had access to them and undoubtedly looked to a variety of sources, combining his own experience and imagination with ideas from printed resources; for an architect wishing to draw upon established tradition, the pattern book provided a wealth of inspiration that could be modified and used as needed. Thatcher probably had a collection of his own, but there is nothing that attests to its breadth or contents. Nevertheless, Selwyn s library presents several key examples that may have contributed to Thatcher s design choices for timber construction. One design which probably influenced Thatcher in the planning stages of the project was P.F. Robinson s Workhouse (Figure 44), published in Village Architecture (1830). This design was directly available as a copy of the 1837 edition was in the College Library. 175 Patterned after old buildings in Gloucester, 176 Robinson s workhouse features three stories and half-timbered construction reminiscent of Tudor-era townhouses, with long rows of rectangular windows and a protruding top story. The workhouse is very ornate, with the addition of gingerbread work and the ornamental corbels. This design was too fancy for a newly established colony, but provides impetus the adaptation of Tudor half-timbering for contemporary construction. Two of the 174 Lochhead, Architectural Books, n. 46; Douglas Richardson, Hyperborean Gothic, Or, Wilderness Ecclesiology and the Wood Churches of Edward Medley, Architectura 2 (1972): Mane-Wheoki, Selwyn Gothic, P.F. Robinson, Village Architecture, Being a Series of Picturesque Designs, 4 th ed. (London: Henry G. Bonn, 1837), 72.

67 58 features employed here are also found extensively at the College, suggesting it as a source: decorative exterior bracing and the offset upper story. Robinson s other text that may have influenced Thatcher was Designs for Ornamental Villas (1827), which was reprinted through several editions. One of the patterns included in this book that has been connected to Thatcher is that of the Swiss Chalet (Figure 45), because of Cotton s interest in that type of building. 177 The design for the Swiss Chalet had been introduced to British architectural circles at a time when the use of anything outside of northern Europe was deemed unfit for English use; in fact, the Swiss design was so popular that it was copied and modified by a significant number of British pattern book writers into the 1840s. 178 Cotton made no direct reference to Robinson, but the pattern from Ornamental Villas was very well known in architectural circles. Thatcher was undoubtedly aware of this design given its popularity in England but it is not clear if he consciously sourced from this material, Village Architecture, or Cotton alone, or if his use of overhanging gables derived at least in part from the Wealden hall house type. Thatcher knew Robinson; besides the presence of Village Architecture in the College library, Robinson had nominated Thatcher for his membership for the Institute of British Architects in the 1836 and may have been Thatcher s teacher during some or part of his architectural education. 179 There is consistency in both Robinson s work and Thatcher s through their historically based interest in vernacular timber construction. Although actual British construction probably formed the backbone of Thatcher s thought, he probably at least consulted the two texts of his sponsor, as he was in a country where access to actual English buildings was limited. The argument could 177 Mane-Wheoki, Selwyn Gothic, 79; Cotton Journal, 11, iv. 178 Helen Long, Victorian Houses and their Details: The Role of Publications in their Building and Decoration (Oxford: Architectural Press, 2002), Alington, An Excellent Recruit, 20.

68 59 be made that Thatcher s interest in the type of construction used at the College derived from his relationship with Robinson outside his texts, but there is not enough evidence to support this claim. Another significant design is George Truefitt s Designs for Country Churches (1850). Although this text was not published until after the College was constructed, Truefitt s Design No. 1 (Figure 46) demonstrates the growing interest in atypical construction methodologies during the late 1840s as well as a depth of source material available that illustrated half-timbered construction. The use of in-filled half-timbered construction in the prototype is significant and distinctive because of its direct application to church construction, where the Robinson designs and those of other British authors focussed primarily on applying this mode of construction to domestic space. This design inspired Mountfort in Christchurch for the ultimately unsuccessful church, Holy Trinity, Lyttelton ( ). 180 These texts were not the only ones available to Thatcher and Selwyn to assist in the building process as there were many more in the Bishop s library. The Bishop was well aware of how important these books could be, sending Pugin s texts down to Kempthorne so that the architects may get the details right. 181 This was perhaps presumptuous, but Selwyn certainly realized how important having illustrations of Gothic details were when no physical specimens were available. He does appear to have anticipated the need to build in wood as two fundamental English carpentry texts, Thomas Tregold s 1837 edition of The Elementary Principles of 180 Ian Lochhead, Canterbury s First Church: The Rise and Fall of Holy Trinity, Lyttelton, in Timber and Tin: The First ICOMOS Conference on the Conservation of Vernacular Structures, ed. David Reynolds (Auckland: ICOMOS New Zealand, 1992), Cotton Journal 8, 4 Sept 1844.

69 60 Carpentry and Peter Nicholson s The Carpenter and Joiner s Assistant (1797) were both included in his collection. 182 Clearly the shift from wood did not entirely disregard English precedent, although the later board and batten buildings such as the carpenter shop and the printing house are stylistically imprecise. Symbolically, however, the role of wood was not defined. Using stone in a clear ecclesiastical style had very specifically symbolic and communicative implication: not only did it recall an age of Christian piety and serve as a reminder of the importance of the church in everyday life, but it also demonstrated continuity within the English church from the medieval to the modern. 183 For Selwyn, a College built in stone represented a direct extension of the English educational system and of the monastic centres of learning. Stone also represented permanence, a quality that Selwyn wanted both for his buildings and, by extension, the church in New Zealand, although the Bishop would soon find out that stone was not as permanent in New Zealand as in England. In the early 1840s, wood did not possess these connotations. The university architectural societies were conscious of the problems of precedence and symbolism for timber construction by the mid-1840s and made a concerted effort to address them. The first serious attempt to address the issue was made by J.E. Millard in a paper read before the OSPSGA in early Recognizing that pure imitation of ancient English design was not always the best option for colonial churches, especially in North America, he advocated for the use of timber in the regions where it was the most practical medium available, pointing out that a wooden Church may be built by applying the same principles to a different material. 182 Mane-Wheoki, Selwyn the Ecclesiologist, Michael Hall, What Do Victorian Churches Mean? Symbolism and Sacramentalism in Anglican Church Architecture, , Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 59 (2000): 78; Bremner, Imperial Gothic, 168.

70 61 Indeed we have examples of wooden Churches in England. 184 Wooden churches were acceptable in some climates, provided that they conformed to ecclesiological principles; in fact, he noted that designs for wooden Churches in Newfoundland have been prepared. 185 Milliard s article demonstrated that these issues were being discussed in ecclesiological circles as early as 1845, but still he did not address symbolic or practical concerns. Nevertheless, the admission that wood could be used ecclesiologically was important. It is not clear if Selwyn or Thatcher read this paper, although Selwyn s brother did send a collection of OSPSGA publication to New Zealand in summer There is no archival evidence that this article was included in the package. That being said, Selwyn was still convinced that he could build in stone, suggesting he may not have paid much heed to an article primarily at a different, much less hospitable climate. The paper that finally addressed symbolism and gave concrete historical examples was On Wooden Churches by William Scott. A close friend of Edward Feild, the Bishop of Newfoundland, Scott s interest with the topic grew from the magnitude of this issue within ecclesiological circles as well as the struggles of his friend in Newfoundland who, like Selwyn, recognized the importance of ecclesiologically correct architecture. 187 Published in The Ecclesiologist in late 1848, Scott s paper actually came after the construction of most of the College buildings. Nevertheless, Scott s arguments may be used retrospectively to assess some of the symbolic connotations of the complex; based in theology, his discussion probably reflects the dialogue that was going on around timber construction at the time. His historical examples, too, are well known. Although his arguments did not provide the impetus for the construction of 184 J.E. Millard, On the Style of Architecture to be Adopted in Colonial Churches, Proceedings of the Oxford Society for Promoting the Study of Gothic Architecture (Easter and Acts Terms, 1845): Millard, Colonial Churches, Selwyn to W. Selwyn, 1 September 1846, Selwyn Family Papers, MS-Papers , 8. ATL. 187 Bremner, Imperial Gothic, 92.

71 62 the College complex or the strategies employed by Thatcher, they solidified the symbolic grounding for the medium, and probably assuaged Selwyn to some degree, reinforcing that timber was a legitimate medium that could speak as stone could. Scott posits three major arguments regarding timber construction: that it is fundamentally supported in Scripture and the Early Church; that it is the original construction medium of the expanding church; and that there are English examples that span the medieval period, a timeframe which he interprets very loosely. Through these arguments, he supports the construction of timber churches in an acceptable Gothic fashion, provided that they look to the English past and using medieval features in a way that is consistent with the medium and with the environment in which these buildings are constructed. The theological argument presented by Scott is entirely grounded in Scripture and the Early Church, creating a global scope that justifies timber construction outside of the English context and throughout the entire span of Christianity. He cites Noah s Ark as the first use of timber for Christian construction, arguing that the divinely ordered use of timber in the Ark, presented in Genesis 6:14 justifies, on its own, the worthiness of the medium for sacred spaces. 188 He extends what can be called the ship metaphor to the writing of the Patristic Fathers who equate the Church to a metaphorical vessel which conveys the faithful from the earthly to the heavenly. 189 Scott attests that: we shall at the same time find that a wooden church, with somewhat more vividness than even one of stone, suggests to us the great hold of Christian souls the ship of the Christian Church. 190 Connecting architecture in this way to the Ark and to the ship metaphor was not initially championed by Scott; these ideas had been most 188 William Scott, On Wooden Churches, The Ecclesiologist 7 (1848): Hippolytus Treatise On Christ and Antichrist, in Ante-Nicene Fathers Vol. 5 trans. J.H. MacMahon and ed. Alexander Roberts and James Domanldson (USA: Christian Literature Publishing Group 1886, Reprint Peabody MA: Hendrickson Publishing 1995), Scott, On Wooden Churches, 14.

72 63 clearly articulated several years before in a text by Rev. F. Close entitled Church Architecture Scripturally Considered (1844). Close stipulates that a church is said to imitate a ship alluding at once to the Ark of Noah and the tempest-tossed character of the people of God. 191 For practical application, this discussion is not overly helpful. However, symbolically, it positions timber construction in the same field as its stone counterpart and allows for the theological dimension of stone construction established by Pugin and the CCS to cross the boundary between construction materials. For proponents of the Gothic Revival who held stock in its symbolic value, including Selwyn, this positioning was very important because it rendered timber churches to be theologically valid and able to communicate specific, theological ideas through their forms. Scott also implies that timber was not only the original construction material for Christian churches which he says outright but also that timber construction was fundamentally linked to the expanding church in its earliest excursions into Britain. He states that the very first and primary elements of [ecclesiastical] construction will be found to be wooden, 192 even positing that stone construction in England grew out of a timber archetype. Although careful not to suggest that only timber churches were constructed, he focuses his argument on the growing British church during the Saxon period, pointing out that timber was the natural medium to use in early settlements; there were especially in poor places, deficient in materials, quarries and roads, wooden churches, just as they are required in Canadian forests, or at Newfoundland fishing-stations, 193 before being gradually replaced by stone structures as material wealth and security increased. As missions expanded in early Christian Britain, just as they were doing in 191 F. Close, Church Architecture Scripturally Considered from the Earliest Age to the Present Time (London: Hatchard and Son, 1844), Scott, On Wooden Churches, Scott, On Wooden Churches, 18.

73 64 the nineteenth-century Empire, church architecture developed from basic wooden models citing several examples from Bede s Historica Ecclesiastica (c. 731). 194 Consistently equating timber construction with missionary expansion, Scott suggests that timber churches were constantly being erected 195 throughout both the Early Church period and the Middle Ages, but few survived because of the perishable nature of the medium. He gives four surviving examples to which architects and clergy could look: the late Saxon church at Greensted, Essex (mid-11 th century); St. Oswald s (c. 1269), Nether (Lower) Peover in Cheshire, a half-timbered church; another church, unnamed, of timber and plaister construction most likely the Church of St. James and St. Paul, Marton (c. 1343) also in Cheshire; and a wooden church near Worchester, probably St. Peter s, Besford (late 14 th c.) which has a half-timbered nave. 196 He asserts that these churches were well known within ecclesiological circles. Cotton obviously knew about Greensted as he drew parallels between it and the Te Henui chapel; it was also discussed in The Ecclesiologist as early as An excellent perspective view of St. Oswald s appeared in the CCS s publication Illustrations of Monumental Brasses (1846), another well known and well circulated text (Figure 47) and may have informed Thatcher s decision to use this style for the chapel. These four churches gave real impetus to ecclesiastical construction in timber because they provided a direct link between timber church construction in the nineteenth century and the medieval period. 194 Scott, On Wooden Churches, 16-17; Bede, Historica Ecclesiastica: The Ecclesiastical History of the English Peoples, Oxford World Classics, trans. Bertram Colgrave and ed. Judith McClure and Robert Collins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 126; Scott, On Wooden Churches, Ian Lochhead hypothesizes that the Worchester church is St. Peter s, which seems to be the most likely candidate. See Ian Lochead A Dream of Spires: Benjamin Mountfort and the Gothic Revival in New Zealand (Christchurch: University of Canterbury Press), Wooden Church at Greensted, Essex, The Builder 7 (1849):115; Church Restoration, The Ecclesiologist 1 (1842): 143.

74 65 Along with these prominent examples, Scott also suggests, most helpfully, that translating stone construction methods into timber is not appropriate because it would disregard the ultimate condition of truth in Gothic architecture and, aesthetically, wood looks better when treated as an independent medium. As such, he provides examples of wooden elements found in many English churches that could be modified, adapted and developed to form a basic whole; he includes in this list of sources lychgates, porches, open timber roofs, belfries, rood screens and most interestingly, the interior construction of monastic tithe barns. 198 He only mentions a few concrete examples, but a visual survey of English construction throughout the Middle Ages yields such a vast array of source material that creating a list would have been unnecessary and superfluous; any British trained architect should have been able to identify elements that could have been combined to build an entirely acceptably church. 199 By combining these elements with ecclesiological principles, specifically verticality and upon good proportions, upon the bold lines and pitch of the roof, 200 Scott believed that an acceptably Gothic timber church could be constructed with ease in areas where building in stone was unfeasible. The major implication of Scott s article was not that it radically altered how timber construction was carried out, but that it solidified in theory some of the practices that were already taking place, and it grounded them in a comprehensive historical and theological framework, from which their symbolic value could be assessed. The idea that elements of churches could be modified and combined to form entire timber churches, and that there were indeed ancient timber sources, had already been discussed within the New Zealand mission and may have informed the way Thatcher approached his building scheme. These ideas were in 198 Scott, On Wooden Churches, An excellent modern survey that demonstrates the breadth of concrete, medieval sources available to British architects building in wood during the Victorian period is Crossley, Timber Building in England. 200 Scott, On Wooden Churches, 25.

75 66 circulation in the middle of the 1840s and their articulation by Scott in 1848 was probably not revelatory. However, Scott s article most clearly articulated this dialogue. By combining different English features in the colonial buildings, Thatcher was able to incorporate both ecclesiastical and domestic features into a timber construction scheme that reflected a precedent set by the old country. A good example of this amalgamation is actually the carpentry shop. In this building, there are some very distinctive ecclesiastical features taken from the world of medieval Britain: the overall silhouette of the building is defined by its steeply pitched roof and nave-like form, as well as the board and batten which lends a vertical aesthetic. The entrance porch is distinctly reminiscent of timber church porches. The lean-to addition on the west side correlated visually to aisled buildings, both monastic tithe barns and small churches. The chimneys, on the other hand, are drawn directly from domestic construction, as is the placement of windows. This building in no way could be mistaken for a church, nor does it look as if it had been transplanted directly from England. Rather, it combined familiar forms into a shape that directly associated it with a very specific architectural tradition. Through strategies such this, the buildings at the College functioned symbolically in three very distinct ways. The first was by direct use of symbolic forms, features and aesthetics. The second was through association. The third was by using wood as a legitimate medium in its own right and using it capabilities to full advantage to suggest ideas. By using direct symbolic references, Thatcher and Selwyn could directly link the buildings being constructed at St. John s College to accepted theological and architectural ideas within the larger Gothic Revival movement. Staying with the example of the carpentry shop, the steeply pitched roof was a standard Gothic form. Emphasized by Scott as one of the key aspects when building wooden churches, the importance of this feature actually comes from Pugin. In

76 , he declared in True Principles that it will be found, on examination, that the most beautiful pitch of a roof or gable end is an inclination formed by two sides on an equilateral triangle, 201 that is, 60º, or the same pitch used in every single one of the buildings at St. John s. The other key Gothic feature of this building is its verticality, established by the board and batten exterior finishing. This verticality, expounded by Pugin, Scott and virtually every other person involved with the Gothic Revival movement, immediately marked this building as Gothic because an upward motion was a central aspect of medieval design, specifically in cathedrals; although this feature appears at first glance to be a minor aesthetic choice, verticality was actually a centrally important feature in Gothic Revival churches. However, verticality also possessed a symbolic meaning established by Pugin in True Principles. He wrote: Vertical lines represent an emblem of the Resurrection. 202 The vertical lines in this building, despite its humble status as a workshop, have a direct symbolic meaning that relates directly to Christian theology, the mission of the Church in general and to purpose of the College as a centre for mission and evangelism. These types of symbolic forms functioned within the Gothic Revival system as general principles, were universal in their interpretation and their use was unhindered by colonial conditions. The second method of symbolic communication was through association. Because of the direct use of specific English construction methods, the viewer could associate the buildings at St. John s with buildings in England and draw conclusions about meaning based on the originals. The half-timbering that appears throughout the complex is the really obvious instance of associationism within the complex. Drawn directly from an easily identifiable geographic and chronological location, this feature directly related the Auckland campus to half-timbered houses 201 Pugin, True Principles, Pugin, True Principles, 9.

77 68 in England; because Thatcher was very precise with his reference material, the connection between these buildings evident. As such, the half-timbered buildings are embedded with a direct visual link to England. Symbolically, this aesthetic not only reminds the viewer of England, but also suggests certain cultural assumptions. Because the High Anglican concern for symbolism was not only related to expressing Christianity but also directly connected to expressions of national and institutional identity, the ability to identify an ecclesiastical building as English positioned it firmly within the ideological framework of Selwyn and his contemporaries because an English style building represented the English church, its origins and its mission. 203 The half-timbered buildings that Thatcher used as reference would not actually be identified as Gothic in contemporary architectural nomenclature; they are actually a domestic vernacular that was particularly prominent in medieval England. Nevertheless, the Anglocentrism of this movement allowed buildings that were not Gothic, but still English and medieval to function in exactly the same way as their counterparts that stylistically fall firmly under the Gothic classification because of the emphasis on home-grown architectural expression. 204 The construction of English-style buildings was consistently used as part of the larger desire to look back to the home country, as a physical and cultural location. This cultural location was Christian, English and civilized, and a vital element of its export around the globe was through the reconstruction of the old world, including its architecture. 205 Half-timbered buildings pointed towards this cultural background and specifically to the English church because it was medieval and there were several well known churches constructed using this method, alongside a wealth of buildings associated with the Church that were not actually churches including monastic 203 A Hint on Modern Church Architecture, The Ecclesiologist 1 (1842): Simon Bradley, The Englishness of Gothic: Theories and Interpretations from William Gilpin to J.H. Parker, Architectural History 45 (2002): Lochhead, Remembering the Middle Ages, 536; Le Couteur Anglican High Churchmen, 202; Bremner, Imperial Gothic, 205.

78 69 outbuildings and country vicarages. 206 By importing these buildings to New Zealand, Selwyn was effectively importing the culture that constructed the originals. The cruck method also falls into this category. Although significantly less obvious because it is primarily a concealed construction method, it extends the metaphor of Englishness through construction methodology. Within this category also fall a vast number of ornamental features employed throughout the entire College including latticed windows, open timber roofs and external entrances porches. None of these features has specific theological meanings, but rather they function as associative forms. The third symbolic methodology is the use of wood to show its materiality, what the CCS called truthfulness in construction. Truth was a major preoccupation of the ecclesiological movement because truth in construction implied truth in the ideology of the practices conducted within. 207 Scott particularly emphasized this issue in his insistence on using timber sources for timber construction; using timber as timber stretched back to Pugin s True Principles which consistently stressed this issue. 208 The styles employed by Thatcher speak directly to this preoccupation with propriety by openly using two quintessentially British timber construction methods, half-timbering and cruck framing; not only are they truthfully wooden, but they are also truthfully British. This honesty implied in the British mind that the organization occupying the buildings possessed the same disposition towards truth-telling, that is to say that the faith preached within was being promulgated by a fundamentally honest and true church, true to both Christ and its cultural origins. The truthfulness of Thatcher s methodology also allowed him to exploit the medium s inherent symbolism. Although this symbolism was articulated by Scott, it had been around much 206 Crossley, Timber Building in England, 2; Hall, What Do Victorian Churches Mean? 83; Bremner, Imperial Gothic, Pugin, True Principles, 35.

79 70 longer and was well established in architectural dialogue. 209 Primitivism and societal origins in particular were associated with timber construction. Scott extended this analogy to associate it with early missionary activity in Britain. The use of timber played into both the idea of New Zealand as Britain reborn and the expansion of the Church through evangelism. 210 Wooden construction pointed to successful evangelism in its early days. Selwyn even alluded to this in his discussion of the mission. 211 The major issue with timber as a medium had historically been its impermanence and perceived weakness when compared to stone. However, by using enduring English forms, Thatcher designed buildings that could project both strength and permanence. Visually, the heavy massing of braces, supports and larger, bold structural forms looked strong, giving the impression of stability. 212 The use of a durable methodology also assisted in giving these buildings an aura of longevity and permanence. This perceived strength, in turn, alluded to the strength of the institution of which these buildings were an outward representation. For Selwyn, strength was an important characteristic in both the Church and its buildings. Stone should have been able to express this characteristic, but the disasters at St. Stephen s and later St. Thomas demonstrated that the environmental factors made this virtually impossible; the use of timber in a way that appeared strong and durable demonstrated that even a young, seemingly primitive church could be a strong force in the immediate vicinity. Thatcher s buildings showed timber as a strong medium upon which a stable church could be built. Through these interpretive strategies, the individual College buildings readily projected these specific cultural associations; even the stone buildings, which were stylistically not very 209 Joseph Rykwert, On Adam s House in Paradise: The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural History (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1972), Fairburn, The Ideal Society, Selwyn, How Shall We Sing the Lord s Song? Bremner, Imperial Gothic,

80 71 interesting or innovative, alluded to the foundations of the English church through their heavy primitivistic forms. However, as a unit, there was the very obvious problem that not all of the buildings went together, making it very difficult for them to communicate together. The eclecticism of the College certainly did not contribute well to Selwyn s image of a comprehensive and cohesive symbolic system. The three distinctive styles the stone Kempthorne buildings, the early half-timbered buildings and the later switch to board and batten unfortunately could not communicate the same message as a set of buildings in a consistent style. While the stone buildings pointed to early, primitive Norman construction, the half timbered counterparts covered a wider chronological era for inspiration and a more definitively English architectural style. Board and batten, unfortunately, was a style that later became very much associated with the United States, not an ideal representation of the pious English Church. 213 The resulting eclecticism was entirely resource dependent, and in no way reflected an aesthetic desire to diversify. It also did not reflect Selwyn s initial vision for the College where a set of cohesive buildings brought together ideas of theological reflection, pious monasticism and the establishment of a familiar institutional structure. Despite the eclecticism, the complex still managed to evoke many of the ideas that Selwyn implanted in the original design. Certainly those within Selwyn s immediate circle were aware of the importance of architecture and the ideas surrounding the use of English features in an English theological college; Patteson s testimony in regards to the chapel confirms the desire of the mission s staff to draw these sorts of parallels. That being said, the associations between St. John s and the shadowy construction of England past were not limited to Selwyn and his immediate group. An unidentified British military officer readily associated the College with 213 Phoebe B. Stanton, The Gothic Revival and American Church Architecture: An Episode in Taste (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1968),

81 72 ancient sources in an 1847 letter to the Colonial Church Chronicle, while the complex was still being constructed: St. John s, in fact, is designed to combine the advantages of a modern College, and of a primitive monastic institution in the best days of such establishments when they laid the seeds of civilisation in Europe by the cultivation of the soil, and encouragement of useful arts, together with the habit of devotion and religious studies. 214 The College, described by another early visitor as medieval and abbylike, with a flavour of monastic repose, 215 was consistently associated with medieval monasticism, as well as with contemporary educational institutions, most of which had their roots in the medieval period anyway. Civilization and religion went hand in hand, as they supposedly did in the initial evangelism of Britain. These associations directly reflected Selwyn s philosophy for the institution. It appears that despite the loose collection of mismatched buildings, that could never have been mistaken for an English university or monastery, outside viewers were also making these connections. Each element of the complex had an English or Christian analogy, however basic that may have been. Evidently, for some of the buildings, like the carpentry shop, the symbolism was very loose; for others, it was highly specific. Together, they projected an overall appearance of something English and Christian that resonated with many viewers. A response of this kind was typical in settlers when viewing Gothic-style architecture; buildings that evoked an English flavour were immediate associated with the home country, its past and the young church, however primitive these buildings were. 216 The primitivism, in fact, often contributed to the idea 214 Letter from a British Officer Colonial Church Chronicle 1 (1847): Unidentified visitor, quoted in J.K. Davis, A History of St. John s College, Tamaki Auckland (Auckland: Abel Dykes, 1911), Ian Lochhead, Remembering the Middle Ages: Responses to the Gothic Revival in Colonial New Zealand, in Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration and Convergence: The Proceedings of the 32 nd International Congress of the History of Art, ed. Jaynie Anderson (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2009), 537.

82 73 that New Zealand was developing in much the same way that Britain had hundreds of years before, where an energetic mission church would raise up an untamed land to the standard of civilisation and piety of medieval England. Through its architecture, St. John s College could be a beacon of the church and of civilization, of monastic repose and diligent study within the local church. In this reading of the complex, the problem arises that many of the people who attended and visited St. John s were not English and did not have the background to make these symbolic and associative connections. Because of their background, the Maori and Melanesian students and visitors were not well versed in Gothic theory, nor would they have been able to specifically identify specific English medieval features and make the leap to their meaning; many of those who were simply visitors to the complex also probably had no interest in decoding the layers of culturally specific symbolism. The buildings would have had a very different symbolic value for these students and visitors. However, the Gothic style was probably readily associated with Christianity and the English Church because, in these students experience, that was context in which it was primarily used. Comparing the College architecture to that in the surrounding Auckland community further emphasizes this point because the limited number of buildings in mid-1840s Auckland were divided along stylistic lines. 217 There were few public buildings: churches, which were Gothic, courthouses, which were generally Classical or Georgian, and barracks, which were generally non-descript and utilitarian. There was a very specific correlation between the style and function of buildings in the early settlements; Gothic was used for Christian spaces. These buildings were also complimented by the most common building type in Auckland: settler housing. There was certainly a very obvious comparison that could be drawn between settler 217 Stacpoole, Colonial Architecture in New Zealand,

83 74 houses and the architecture at the College and it was dichotomous. In the eye of many in Selwyn s party, the homes being erected by the new immigrants were quite horrible because they were stylistically utilitarian and did not reflect the same ideological approach to style as the domestic buildings in the College complex. Cotton critically described many of the colonist s homes as sightless square weatherboard boxes; 218 Selwyn was similarly unimpressed with the perishable wooden Buildings in which the colonists usually live. 219 Given the circumstances, settler housing was understandable basic. Although they often attempted to make use of familiar English domestic building traditions, the lack of materials, the need to construct immediate shelter and the fact that even rough wooden huts were a major improvement on tents made early settler housing very rudimentary and stylistically varied. 220 What it did provide was an excellent context in which to view the College; next to many homes in the area, the school was very grand and beautifully reminiscent of England and reinforced the connection between medieval style and Christianity. As remarked above, the chapel was consistently seen as the most English looking building in the entire area. Within the local church, the college buildings fulfilled a very specific function. Not only providing the most utilitarian role of shelter and lodging, they functioned within a culturally specific symbolic system that allowed them to speak to both students at the school and the wider community. Communicating values of the ideal Christian past and the mission of the English church, the architecture used specialized historical forms to communicate the ideology of Selwyn s College. Clearly, the final product was far from how the Bishop had envisaged it, but through the adaptation of English forms to the colonial setting, the buildings no matter how 218 Cotton, New Zealand Beekeepers, Selwyn to [Coleridge], 22 July 1843, Selwyn Papers, MS273, box 4, vol. 1, AML. 220 Lynne Hancock, Settler Housing in New Zealand, The Journal of Architecture 1 (1996):

84 75 mismatched and temporary stepped into the communicative role that Selwyn had imagined for his original complex.

85 4: The College Outside of Bishop s Auckland: The Key and Pivot of Pacific Christianity St. John s College did not, however, operate in an insular environment, nor did Selwyn want it to. The architecture, too, was not meant to communicate only to the insular community that used it on an everyday basis. In his earliest sermons as Bishop, Selwyn emphasized the need to extend his mission beyond the immediate area of the College, across New Zealand and into the Pacific Islands. He wrote to his mother in 1842 that it was my wish to form a Polynesian College for the different branches of the Maori family scattered over the Pacific. 221 The College was meant to serve, and influence, not only the Maori and settler churches in New Zealand, but also the yet-unevangelised Melanesian territory. The multitude of isles to which he referred when he spoke to the Windsor and Eton Church Union in late 1841 were just these isles. However, before Selwyn could move on the surrounding islands, he had to minister to his flock in New Zealand proper, one which was rapidly growing as settlement increased. As such, the architectural scheme of the College also did not end at the construction of the campus proper. Through the useful industry in the curriculum, the school served as an architectural centre for the Auckland region as well, extending Selwyn s idealistic vision through building projects. One of the skills that Selwyn accentuated as important within the industrial system was carpentry and construction. This not only allowed for the construction of the campus itself, but also trained those students unsuited for the ministry to do a job that Selwyn deemed imperative building churches. Instruction in this subject allowed the College itself to provide architectural services to the surrounding community as it had both an architect and ready labour on hand. Selwyn also saw the erection of churches in surrounding hamlets as an extension of the duty of spiritual 221 Selwyn to Mrs. W. Selwyn, [1842?], quoted in Tucker, Selwyn,

86 77 hospitality that included the free medical care provided at the College hospital. 222 As such, the carpentry shop turned out eight prefabricated churches for the Auckland region between 1847 and These buildings, all of which conformed to the Gothic style, were prefabricated at the College in pieces, transported to their allotted sites and erected. None of these churches was as elaborate as the College chapel, but all were based roughly on its design and formed a cohesive set throughout the Auckland region. Thatcher probably designed most of them, although some may have come from the hand of his assistant, Reader Wood, who was also a trained architect. At least three are definitively attributed to Thatcher himself: St. Mark s, Remuera; All Saints, Howick; and St. Barnabas, Parnell. 224 Only one, All Saints, survives in the original form and location. The closest design to that of the College chapel was that of St. Barnabas, Parnell (Figure 48). Removed in 1877 to Mount Eden, it now forms part of a larger brick church, although the character of the original timber portion has been maintained. It was originally erected in 1848 at Mechanic s Bay to serve a Maori congregation. 225 Through the use of extensive half-timbering in the same manner as the College chapel, this building essentially expanded the chapel design into a larger church. 226 It incorporated a porch and transepts constructed in the same manner as its predecessor, but discarded the apsidal chancel in favour of a squared end. The positioning of the exterior bracing remains the same, as does the placement of the windows. From surviving images, and the current, although heavily modified, structure, the designs were almost exactly the same. The cruck methodology was clearly used as diagonal braces are evident in the porch and transepts. The porch was enlarged, the bell-cote exchanged for a belfry and the apses 222 Selwyn, Church in the Colonies, Alington, An Excellent Recruit, Alington, An Excellent Recruit, Mane-Wheoki, Selwyn Gothic, 79-80; Stacpoole, Colonial Architecture in New Zealand, Alington, An Excellent Recruit, 132.

87 78 removed. Nevertheless, there is a clear correlation between the two which would have been evident in late 1840s Auckland. Constructed in 1847 and demolished in 1859, St. Mark s, Remuera, is also closely correlated to the College Chapel. Unfortunately, there appears to be only one surviving image of it: a watercolour by John Kinder, dated between 1856 and 1858 (Figure 49). The watercolour shows that this church was clearly based on the College model; the incorporation of the halftimbered bracing, as well as the apsidal termination on at least one end of the building makes a direct visual correlation between the two structures. The projecting transepts and porch and the steep gabled ends further support this correlation. The bracing does not appear to be as complex as in the chapel, but forms a similar pattern; the lack of other images makes it difficult to accurately assess what the bracing actually looked like. Margaret Alington and C.R. Knight have both suggested that this building was a relatively direct copy of the College chapel although slightly larger; there seems to be no reason to dispute this claim. 227 The other church definitely designed by Thatcher is All Saints, Howick, which fortunately still stands on its original location with very few modifications (Figure 50); there appear to be no images of the original. Manufactured at St. John s in 1847, it was transported to Howick in two ships then carried by cart to the prepared site and reassembled. 228 It is of particular interest because it marks the move away from half-timbered bracing that occurred at the College around this time. There is exterior bracing, but it is modest and decorative, and does not appear to serve in the same structural capacity as the other buildings. It appears to be an early experiment as how to incorporate ecclesiological principles without the use of a distinctively 227 Alington, An Excellent Recruit, 127; Knight, Selwyn Churches of Auckland, Knight, Selwyn Churches of Auckland, 25; Selwyn, Church in the Colonies, 12.

88 79 English construction methodology. 229 This building is significantly larger than the College chapel, due in part to the addition of a central tower at the transepts. Like All Saints, the five other prefabricated churches discarded heavy bracing in favour of board and batten. That these churches were constructed later on in this scheme and many had to travel further in the Auckland region, making weight a factor, probably contributed to the stylistic shift. Nevertheless, they all take on the basic form of the College chapel and make use of the same timber Gothic aesthetic pioneered by Thatcher, with some variations. Their usual designation as the Selwyn churches speaks to their cohesiveness as a set of stylistically related buildings in the primitive Gothic aesthetic that defined the College complex. 230 The dissemination of these churches in the community served several purposes. The first and most practical was to provide houses of worship for Auckland and its outlying villages; all of these churches have since been incorporated into the city of Auckland proper, but, at the time, many were in outlying communities. Beyond the basic duty of supplying spiritual direction and ministry for these areas, assisting the growing settler population erect churches was another service Selwyn could, and felt he must, provide. Their second purpose was to provide a tangible and visual link to the College, the Church and Selwyn s mission. By using the same visual forms and construction methods employed at the College, these buildings served to connect College and community through material forms; obviously, the clergy coming from the institution also served as a link between College and community, but the presence of these churches emphasized the connections between the education provided by Selwyn s training scheme and its relationship to the growing New Zealand community. Because of the importance of architecture in Victorian theological and 229 Mane-Wheoki, Selwyn Gothic, Knight, Selwyn Churches of Auckland,

89 80 ecclesiological communication, churches in the community would have represented for Selwyn the presence of his ideal church outside the cloistered walls of the school, and the extension of the church into the real world. When he said in An Idea of a Colonial College that the College must neither be separated from the world nor confounded by it, 231 he undoubtedly included this particular task in his scheme for integration. His massive involvement in church building throughout his diocese suggests that he felt the dissemination of Christian architecture was a central aspect of his role as Bishop; the use of a cohesive style linked all of these churches together in order to project a unified message through their common forms. The geographic range of the prefabrication process was limited by resources; its time frame was limited by the life of the industrial program in the college curriculum. 232 No doubt Selwyn would have liked to expand this project, but he wrote nothing about it. That Selwyn saw the prefabrication of churches as part of the ideological dissemination of his value system is confirmed by the fact that it was not his idea. Prefabrication as a solution for colonial construction problems was discussed throughout the 1830s, 1840s and 1850s. These discussions primarily focussed on housing, a major issue in the wake of the immigration boom in the middle of the century. As early as 1830, building housing in pieces in England and exporting them to the colonies was being discussed; J.C. Loudon s 1833 publication, An Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm and Villa Architecture and Furniture, suggested that prefabricated buildings could supply emigrants with comfortable secure lodging immediately on their arrival at a foreign settlement. 233 It was also implied that these buildings would have a more English and substantial look, than, for example, a raupo hut. These houses were indeed exported quite 231 Selwyn, The Idea of a Colonial College, Knight, Selwyn Churches of Auckland, J.C. Loudon, An Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm and Villa Architecture and Furniture (London: Longman, Rees Orme, Brown, Green and Longman, 1833), 251.

90 81 frequently during the 1840s and 1850s to New Zealand, although they were often not as satisfactory as the settlers may have wanted. 234 This principle was also applied to churches. Significantly fewer churches were prefabricated in England and exported to the colonies but it was done. At least two stone churches were constructed in England, packed up and sent to the colonies, complete with all the necessary pieces and mouldings. One, sent as a gift to the Newfoundland settlement at Hermitage, was constructed of brick and stone in the Early English style to correspond directly to the stylistic trends in England and sent in pieces to Newfoundland along with masons to erect it. 235 The usual material for prefabrication was corrugated iron; several Gothic style churches of this sort were sent throughout the globe, including to Australia. 236 For remote areas with few material resources, these churches were important because they provided an acceptable Gothic design that was continuous with contemporary ecclesiastical fashion and symbolism. They were unifying factors in areas where architectural knowledge was limited and related the church in the colonies back to the church at home. New Zealand never received a prefabricated church from England but, in Selwyn s mind, the prefabricated churches coming out of the College would have functioned in the same way from both a symbolic and practical standpoint, as a reminder of the continuity of both culture and faith within the expanding English church and as a reasonable solution for areas that needed assistance erecting churches. Another facet of the carpentry program was to teach students at the College proper church building techniques so that they could go out and build Gothic churches elsewhere. The level of success achieved by this initiative is not clear; Gothic church construction increased 234 Hancock, Settler Housing in New Zealand, Bremner, Imperial Gothic, 402 n Bremner, Imperial Gothic,

91 82 rapidly throughout the 1850s and 1860s, but there were definitely a raft of factors unrelated to the College s building scheme that influenced this development. One arena where there may be a direct correlation is in the integration of Gothic forms into the church building practice of Maori converts. Throughout the 1840s, a number of large scale churches were erected by Christian Maori communities throughout the North Island that incorporated Gothic stylistic features with traditional construction methodologies. Called whare churches, these buildings directly referenced the Gothic idiom in their use of stylistic features and symbolic forms specifically associated with the medievalist movement. 237 A prominent example is Rangiatea ( ), the large mission church at Otaki, which was under the jurisdiction of the CMS missionary the Rev. Octavius Hadfield. Although there was missionary supervision and labour involved with the project, it primarily was Maori driven under the leadership of the local rangatira (chief) Te Rauparaha. 238 The framework of this building was primarily Gothic (Figure 51). Incorporating a long nave with steeply pitched roof and buttresses, it appeared, from the exterior, a distinctively Gothic church, despite the horizontal weatherboard that Selwyn no doubt hated. 239 This overall silhouette was distinctively European and a definite step away from the outline of Maori buildings at the time. The interior, however, reflected the whare construction method that revolved around a central ridge beam and row of columns (Figure 52). This feature was a huge divergence from the Gothic tradition, and was often criticized because it was liturgically 237 Richard Sundt, Whare Karakia: Maori Church Building, Decoration and Ritual in Aotearoa New Zealand (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2010), Sundt, Whare Karakia, Individuals heavily involved in the Gothic movement, like Selwyn, were notoriously critical of weatherboard because it lent a structure a horizontal, not vertical aesthetic; that being said, weatherboard was significantly easier and cheaper than either exterior framing or board and batten. See for example, Scott, On Wooden Churches,

92 83 problematic. 240 The building also incorporated a significant amount of Maori decorative arts, including kowhaiwhai (scroll paintings) in the rafters and tukutuku (lattice wall paneling), features that the CMS had historically been supportive of using, although Selwyn, no doubt, was not. 241 There are many sources for the use of the Gothic style in this and other churches like it; the practice of building this kind of church was relatively widespread amongst Maori Christians between 1840 and Of particular interest here is the involvement of Te Rauparaha s son, Tamihana, in the construction. 242 Tamihana had been a student at St. John s College during the late 1840s and would have been very familiar with the development of the building style in New Zealand. It is possible that his influence and, through him, the influence of the College, was partially responsible for the integration of the Gothic style because it was viewed as a particularly Christian form of architecture. Another former student of the College, Hirini Rawiri (Sydney David) Taiwhanga was responsible for the construction a large Gothic-style church at Kohanga under the jurisdiction of Maunsell in the mid-1850s; Taiwhanga had studied both woodworking and theology at the Auckland campus. 243 There is probably a correlation between the architectural style employed at the College and the proliferation of the Gothic style among Maori congregations in the late 1840s and 1850s. These architectural inroads among the Maori would have undoubtedly pleased Selwyn although he never made mention of it. That being said, the CMS had a firm hold on the evangelism of the Maori and continued to work almost exclusively among them, leaving very little room for Selwyn to maneuver as a missionary; New Zealand was certainly not the tabula 240 J.F. Lloyd, Letters and Journals from Missionaries: the Otaki and Wanganui Districts of New Zealand, Church Missionary Intelligencer 1 (1850): Deirdre Brown, The Maori Response to Gothic Architecture, Architectural History 43 (2000): Brown, The Maori Response to Gothic Architecture, Sundt, Whare Karakia, 157.

93 84 rasa he originally believed it to be. 244 Melanesia, on the other hand, had seen very little missionary activity and this was where Selwyn focussed his attention as an evangelist and this was where he focussed his efforts. The inclusion of Melanesia in Selwyn s diocese was actually a mistake; due to a clerical error, he was assigned a massive amount of territory that stretched well beyond the initial mandate that the CBF had originally imagined for the New Zealand mission. 245 These islands had been outside of Anglican missionization because they were not officially British territory. 246 Nevertheless, he saw his mission through the right of his letters patent as extending into this massive territory, with St. John s College at its heart, to educate, civilize and evangelize in the South Pacific region. Although Selwyn had expressed interest in evangelizing the South Pacific even before his departure from England, the actual mission did not begin until late Sarah Selwyn explained the delay: All these years the Bishop had never lost sight of the Melanesian Islands, as he called them, and the name was afterwards universally adopted, and of his burning desire and intention of carrying to them the knowledge and blessing of the Gospel. But he had also thought it right to wait till many things were established in New Zealand, and he should have his Diocese well in hand. 247 Selwyn saw it as part of his duties as a missionary bishop to extend the organization of the church and the evangelization of Melanesia was a central part of his mandate until the 244 W.P. Marell, The Anglican Church in New Zealand: A History (Dunedin: John McIndoe), Allan K. Davidson, Christianity in Aotearoa: A History of Church and Society in New Zealand (Wellington: New Zealand Education for Ministry, 1997), These islands were: Norfolk Island, Vanuatu, Fiji, New Caledonia, the New Hebrides and the Solomon Islands. Bremner, Imperial Gothic, Sarah Selwyn, Reminiscences, 32.

94 85 assignment of Patteson to the seat of Bishop of Melanesia in Selwyn was also influenced by Governor George Grey s vision of New Zealand as an economic and cultural centre for the South Pacific; the Bishop however, was focussed on the stewardship of the region through the introduction of religion and civilization. 249 He wrote to Coleridge: It has been the concurrent feeling of many wise and pious men, and even of Gibbon [Wakefield], that New Zealand would become the Britain of the Southern hemisphere. Setting aside all other points of similarity involved in the prediction, I fix my thoughts steadily upon one, and pray for God s grace to make my diocese the great missionary centre of the Southern Ocean. 250 The very centre of that scheme was, of course, the College. The major problem in evangelising Melanesia was the area was very large and the population spread out at quite a distance from Selwyn s seat in Auckland. Working within a large territory with limited resources, Selwyn focussed his attention on education and, as such, St. John s College became a central aspect in his scheme. He needed an institutional structure through which to disseminate his ideology. He outlined in An Idea of a Colonial College that St. John s was the most important institutional structure for the success of the mission. 251 Truly the key and pivot of his operation, the existence of the College was the hinge on which the entire evangelisation of the Melanesians was based. The scheme devised by Selwyn was essentially an educational system that used young people to evangelize their own communities. After a good relationship had been established with the islanders, young men were brought back to Auckland for the summer months where they learned the Gospel and basic Christian theology. They were then returned to their own 248 Allan K. Davidson, An Interesting Experiment : The Founding of the Melanesian Mission, in The Church of Melanesia : 1999 Selwyn Lectures Marking the 150 th Anniversary of the Founding of the Melanesian Mission, ed. Allan K. Davidson (Auckland: College of St. John the Evangelist, 2000), David Hilliard, Bishop G.A. Selwyn and the Melanesian Mission, The New Zealand Journal of History 4 (1970): Selwyn to Coleridge, 12 August 1849, reprinted in Tucker, Selwyn, vol Selwyn, Idea of a Colonial College, 15.

95 86 communities to spread the good news; promising scholars would be brought back to the College for further training. 252 The Melanesian students at the College were to be gradually made the instruments under God s providence of evangelising and civilizing the whole of these numerous islands. 253 Without a solid base of clergy to dispatch to these islands, Selwyn turned to what resources he had: the people themselves and the education system in which he was so heavily invested. He stated in a letter to Coleridge in August 1849 that the College is the very point and key of the whole system, the constant interchange of scholars between the college and their own homes. 254 Statistically, the Melanesian mission under Selwyn could never have been considered successful as the number on converts was relatively low. Similarly, the use of St. John s College as an educational centre for his young scholars proved less than ideal, as the New Zealand climate was too cold and too damp for most of the Melanesian boys who made the journey. 255 Its success primarily lay in its increase in Selwyn s own reputation in England and in the consolidation of what he perceived to be an important mission field in the expansion of the church abroad. For a relatively unsuccessful mission, the question must be asked as to what the architecture at the College did beyond its utilitarian capabilities. During the period of Selwyn s active involvement in Melanesia, no Gothic churches were constructed in the region; the major Gothic project, St. Barnabas Church (Patteson Memorial Chapel) on Norfolk Island, did not get underway until the 1870s, well after Selwyn s involvement ended. 256 Unlike the Maori students who took these forms and incorporated them into their own community worship, the use of the 252 SPG, Work in the Colonies, G.A. Selwyn, Lecture on Missions in the Pacific, Colonial Church Chronicle (1854): Selwyn to Coleridge, 12 August 1849, reprinted in Tucker, Selwyn, vol. 1, Davidson, The Founding of the Melanesian Mission, Bremner, Imperial Gothic,

96 87 Gothic style in Melanesia was limited, focussed well after the active period of St. John s and primarily driven by missionary endeavours. Yet the desire to bring Melanesians to Auckland played into Selwyn s object for the Melanesian mission: to take wild and naked savages from among every untamed and lawless people and to teach them to sit at the feet of Christ, clothed and in their right mind. 257 This civilizing aspect was later toned down by Patteson, but it reflected Selwyn s general attitude towards mission. 258 By having the boys in an English environment, this civilizing aspect could be introduced into their lives through material culture combined with Christianity. The correlation that sound Christian learning was directly related to their surroundings would allow Selwyn to introduce religion, civilization, and sound learning; all, in short, that is needful for a man. 259 He spoke in a later letter to Coleridge of amalgamating the two races, 260 that is English and Melanesian, amongst whom he counted the Maori, further indicating his desire for a homogeneous church body based on the values exuded by the College. For the Melanesians, as for the Maori, Selwyn believed in architecture as an agent of civilization, capable of communicating Christian, and by default, English values to the young scholars he brought to the College. 261 It would also, through their work in the carpentry shop, assist them in gaining the skills they needed to become useful members of a British-style society. Because architecture, through its symbolic forms, could speak, it was considered a primary tool for evangelism. In this case, the architecture of the College complex with its theological and cultural associations was to communicate to the Melanesian students in concert with the 257 Selwyn to Coleridge, 12 August 1849, reprinted in Tucker, Selwyn, vol. 1, Sara H. Sohmer, Christianity without Civilization: Anglican Sources for an Alternative Nineteenth Century Mission Methodology, The Journal of Religious History 18 (1994): Selwyn to Coleridge, 12 August 1849, reprinted in Tucker, Selwyn, vol. 1, Selwyn to Coleridge, 21 December 1849, reprinted in Tucker, Selwyn, vol. 1, Bremner, Imperial Gothic, 24.

97 88 curriculum. The import of Gothic forms into Maori Christianity shows that this scheme worked to some degree. Nevertheless, with a different perspective on the role of architecture in society as their English evangelists, no doubt the Melanesians were not as concerned with the architectural forms as Selwyn may have hoped. The limited success during this period of evangelism makes it much more difficult to assess. By the time Selwyn began to introduce Gothic forms to New Zealand, the CMS had been working among the Maori for about thirty years; to make a comparison based the reactions of the students to Gothic forms would be unfair given this vast difference in their conversion experience. The association between the mission and Gothic forms in the educational setting did remain a consistent thread in the Melanesian mission after the transfer of the region to into the hands of Patteson, as did the architectural influence of St. John s College. When the College transitioned to a wholly theological facility, the residential school for Melanesia boys was continued at Kohimarama and eventually relocated to Norfolk Island in The continuity between these institutions is not only evident in Patteson s approach to mission, but also in the architecture. As discussed above, two of the buildings at the Kohimarama campus were actually surplus buildings from the original College. The long classroom and the dormitories were moved down to the new site at some point before December Several more buildings were constructed by Thatcher s associate, the architect Reader Wood, who had also assisted at the College during the late 1840s. Wood s buildings basically followed the board and batten style pioneered by Thatcher at St. John s, except for the hall and kitchen, which were constructed of stone. One of the most interesting features of this complex, which demonstrates the incredible continuity within this 262 Sohmer, Christianity without Civilization, Bremner, Imperial Gothic, 284.

98 89 extension of Selwyn s initial mission, is the chapel, constructed within the wing of one of the new buildings that also held the school (Figure 53). 264 Designed in the same basic style as the St. John s buildings, with the squared headed windows that defined the domestic structures, the chapel featured the same exposed timberwork, collegiate seating arrangement and raised altar as in the main College chapel. The chapel demonstrated a marked continuity between the two institutions, especially when considered alongside the other buildings. Like Selwyn, Patteson wanted more, and believed that a better chapel could serve as a more successful tool for evangelism: Sometimes I have a vision but I must live twenty years to see more than a vision of a small but exceedingly beautiful Gothic chapel, rich inside with marbles and stained glass and carved stalls and encaustic tiles and brass screen work... A really noble church is a wonderful instrument of education, if we think only of the lower way of regarding it. 265 The timber chapel, like the one at St. John s, was useable for the present and demonstrated that the church in New Zealand and Melanesia was in its early days; that being said, as the church developed, so would its architecture, as it had in Britain, hundreds of years before. Patteson is very clear that architecture as a mode of communication, specifically as an educational tool, was an important aspect to this mission, an aspect that had been transferred from the parent College. Evidently, the architectural scheme of St. John s extended well beyond the original campus, into the Auckland community and the expanding mission in the South Pacific region. Its use as a communicative tool reinforced continuity, both within the mission and with the Church of England at large in the global arena. The Gothic style was used almost exclusively by High Anglican missions through the English-speaking world and it carried a very specific set of 264 Patteson to his sisters, 7 February 1863, in Yonge, Life of John Coleridge Patteson, vol. 2, Patteson to Frances Patteson, 25 October 1863, in Yonge, Life of John Coleridge Patteson, vol. 2, 79.

99 90 meanings that related to the history, theology and mission of the Church abroad. What Selwyn did in Auckland was extend the metaphor to cover not only worship but also education. Selwyn s ideas for his post and its central educational facility were an ambitious project for a young colony and that ambition may have been a contributing factor in the ultimate failure of the College to live up to the Bishop s expectations: he expected too much too quickly. 266 Because of its ambitious nature, it is easy to see St. John s as a very isolated example of the high minded desire of a single clergyman. This assessment is not accurate, however, as Selwyn was working within a larger set of global trends that stretched throughout the entire Empire. The impetus for theological colleges and Anglican institutions of higher learning rapidly gained momentum during the nineteenth century and Selwyn was in no way alone in his desire to furnish his diocese with clergy trained in house, nor, more importantly, was he the only colonial bishop so short staffed that he felt the need to take matters into his own hands. Twenty-two colleges were founded across the British Empire between 1789 and 1874 to educate and train immigrant and indigenous clergy for the mission field and for the settler churches. 267 Selwyn had communicated with William Broughton, the Bishop of Australia, about the issue in the early 1840s when both men realized that expanding their mission required an exponential expansion of staff. A lengthy excerpt of a letter from Broughton published by Coleridge in late 1842 articulated the rationale behind the educational expansion: There appears to be at this time considerable difficulty on their [the SPG] part in maintaining the requisite supply [of clergy]; and that difficulty, it is to be feared, is likely rather to increase; especially as... our establishment here is but a preliminary to a wide extension of the Church over the vast expanse of the Pacific. The conclusion at which we 266 Davidson, Useful Industry and Muscular Christianity, Davidson, Selwyn s Legacy, 14; Bullock, A History of Training for the Ministry of the Church of England in England and Wales from (St.-Leonard s-on-sea: Budd and Gillatt, 1955),

100 91 have arrived was in favour of erecting, under the immediate eye of each, a School of Divinity. 268 In Australia, several theological colleges were founded in the ensuing decades. However, none of these promoted the same sort of missionary training that St. John s did, focussing only on theological training for white students without the same emphasis on educating members of newly converted communities. 269 Nevertheless, Broughton s letter confirms that, across the Empire, there were not enough clergy to minister to increasingly large and wild dioceses and, as such, training the children of settlers and of new converts offered the most promising avenue for supplying missions with staff. As clergy and missionary education in the colonies increased, so did the need to construct campuses and buildings to house them. Like Thatcher and Selwyn, the architects and clergy in charge had to reflect on what style they wanted to use and how that style would communicate to the wider community. Unsurprisingly, the Gothic style consistently proved to be the preferred aesthetic. This trend was especially prevalent in the colonial context where the style could also be used as a visual connection to the higher education institutions of the old world where Collegiate Gothic had originated in the late Middle Ages; the desire to use the Collegiate Gothic tradition is evident in Selwyn s initial sketch for St. John s. 270 A significant number of these institutions were aimed primarily at students drawn from the settler populations, especially in areas where missionaries had made limited inroads or where there were major racial tensions. Another St. John s College, on the other side of the world, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, emerged with a similar vision, aimed at both the education of children in the Red River 268 Broughton to Coleridge, n.d. [1842], Selwyn Papers, M b SJC. 269 Meredith Lake, Provincialising God: Anglicanism, Place and the Colonisation of Australian Land, Journal of Religious History 35 (2011): Lewis, The Gothic Revival,

101 92 Settlement and the education and training of native teachers, 271 with a specific focus on the growth of a seminary at the tertiary level for the training and ordination of clergy. Although he admitted that the erection of a College on a larger scale, as in many Colonial Dioceses, has been found impractical, 272 Bishop David Anderson outlined his desire for a school that integrated ministerial training with a collegiate school and was intimately connected to his future cathedral in Winnipeg in an 1850 address to his clergy. He was also quick to point out that any development in the school, which had operated in various capacities since the early 1820s, would require more of an architectural plan 273 than the original college buildings which were basic, utilitarian and essentially Georgian (Figure 54). A committee resolution in 1850 established St. John s Collegiate Institute, as a multi-level cathedral sponsored educational facility specifically designed to prepare candidates for admission to the theological college and for colonial ministry. 274 Until the dissolution of the Collegiate School in 1859, Anderson s institution primarily focussed on pre-university education, with some focus on training for ministry. 275 Nevertheless, in an 1858 charge to his clergy, he clarified his vision: I would employ it [the term College] as embracing not the pupils and scholars alone, but the Bishop and clergy also, forming a missionary college in a dark land. I would regard each clergyman as a member of that college, and it thus becomes a centre uniting us all. 276 Anderson, like Selwyn, seems to have viewed the College as not just an educational institute but a key and pivot in the unity of the Northwest mission. Selwyn was probably unaware of these developments as he was labouring in Auckland, 271 David Anderson quoted in Jack M. Bumsted, St. John s College: Faith and Education in Western Canada (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2006), Anderson quoted in Bumsted, St. John s College, David Anderson, A Charge Delivered to the Clergy of the Diocese of Rupert s Land at his Primary Visitation (1850) (London: T. Hatchard, 1851), Bumsted, St. John s College, Bumsted, St. John s College, Anderson, quoted in Bumsted, St. John s College, 9.

102 93 but Anderson s institution shows a consistent undercurrent surrounding the centrality of educational institutions in the colonial context. Architecturally, St. John s, Winnipeg did not have the same immediate focus on the replication of English forms. Anderson did not display the same architectural fervour that Selwyn did, nor did he embark on so vigorous a building scheme, despite the desire to do so. However, the drawings proposed for the revitalized College in its later years are much closer to the idealistic ones proposed by Selwyn in the early 1840s and, like Selwyn s ideas, were quickly discarded in favour of something more realistic, constructed in 1886 after the College refocused its mandate towards training for ministry alone. 277 Anderson emphasized early on that building a proper campus was imperative to the school s mission; it simply took longer to do so than it did in Auckland. Another college emerged within the High Anglican tradition that was very similar to St. John s, Auckland in its theological framework, as well as its emphasis on useful industry and architectural training, not to mention the imposition of semi-monastic rigour into college life. In St. John s, Newfoundland, Bishop Edward Feild, a member of the OSPSGA, imposed a similar regime upon his candidates for ministry at Queen s College, the theological training facility established by his predecessor, Bishop Aubrey George Spencer in Promoting physical vigour and plain living, Feild implemented rigorous sessions of prayer, study and practical activities onto his students; interestingly, this included the study of architecture. 278 The principal of the school, William Grey, was also heavily involved in the Gothic Revival through the OSPSGA and CCS, and designed a significant number of the Gothic Revival churches 277 Bumsted, St. John s College, Bremner, Imperial Gothic, 42.

103 94 throughout Newfoundland in the mid-nineteenth century. 279 The emphasis on the importance of architecture in ministry was such that Grey gave lectures twice a week to students at the College on Gothic architecture and its role in the mandate of the church. 280 The College itself incorporated significant amount of Gothic design into its small campus, using whatever media, primarily timber, were on hand at the time. A major difference between Queen s College and St. John s, Auckland was that there was no indigenous presence in Newfoundland, focussing the former s mission on using architecture to communicate sound theology as opposed to educating relatively new Christians on the cultural tenets of the Church of England. The work that Selwyn undertook at St John s College, Auckland was well within acceptable Anglican practice during the middle of the nineteenth century, both theologically and architecturally, but he anticipated developments throughout the Empire and the global church by about ten years, placing him at the forefront of this field; in particular, the application of correct ecclesiological principles to timber construction was not common until the 1850s. 281 The use of the style in an educational institution was also an accepted practice; Gothic Revival campuses for institutes of higher learning became more and more widespread as the century wore on. As one of the earliest of these institutes, the architecture at the Auckland campus was undoubtedly more primitive than that of many of its close contemporaries, but, nevertheless, St. John s in no way made a trade off between its primitivism and its adherence to the symbolic forms of Anglican church architecture, instead interpreting them in new ways to suit the colonial conditions. 279 Shane O Dea and Peter Coffman, William Grey: Missionary Gothic in Newfoundland, Journal of the Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada 32 (2007): William Grey, The Ecclesiology of Newfoundland, The Ecclesiologist 11 (1853): See for example, Richardson, Hyperborean Gothic, 49.

104 95 By using the Gothic style at St. John s, Selwyn set it within a continuous architectural tradition that stretched throughout the entire globe. Obviously, there were regional differences but this continuity was very evident to anyone who was observant of architectural matters. In truth, many of the young men who went through the College knew little of global patterns beyond their own personal experience, which for some of the Maori and Melanesian students was limited to their contact with Selwyn and his party. However, there was a clear and direct correlation between the Gothic style and Christianity in early colonial Auckland, a connection that probably would have been evident to even those with the most limited architectural knowledge or interest. The expansion of the style beyond the walls of the College and its influence on the communities that passed through the institute allowed the Gothic Revival to lend a material unity to the larger mission that Selwyn undertook, from the Auckland region to the far-flung islands of the South Pacific. The territory in which Selwyn saw himself spreading the Gospel was huge, seemingly far too large for one man, but the tools at his disposal, first and foremost the material structure of a central missionary college, allowed for him to disseminate ideas about the Church to a mission field that was becoming increasingly more global.

105 Conclusion St. John s College closed its doors as a comprehensive educational institution in After years of problems, it was a homosexual scandal that finally gave a reason to shut the school down. 282 In actual fact, Selwyn was trying to do too much with too few resources and a limited infrastructure that simply could not support the kind of community he envisaged. The demise of the school was already in the cards by The idea of useful industry, while realistic in an established monastic compound several hundred years previously, could not support the community without massive amounts of labour on the part of both students and staff. As a result, the academic standards of the College were seen as sub-par by both the CMS, who encouraged their Maori students to leave, and by the settler community who felt that their sons should have a higher standard of education that did not include such a heavy technical aspect. 283 Another reason for the school s failure was undoubtedly racial as English parents were simply not happy about the imposition of manual labour on all children, settler and Maori alike. 284 In short, upper and middle-class families did not support the school, nor did the CMS, which withdrew funding; Selwyn s distinctly High Church agenda also made the evangelical organization rather uncomfortable. The school reopened in the late 1850s as a purely theological college with the sole purpose of training the future ministry. Very little of the original, holistic scheme that Selwyn envisaged remained. The exception was, of course, the architecture which survived and was transitioned to serve both the theological college and Patteson s school at Kohimarama. As this point, the Gothic Revival was in full swing and medieval style churches were popping up all over in the colony as well as across the English speaking world. Although St. John s may not 282 Davidson, Selwyn as Missionary and Colonial Bishop, Phillipson, The Thirteenth Apostle, Benfell, Bishop Selwyn and Mission Policy,

106 97 have been the key and pivot to the colonial church that Selwyn so desired, its architectural forms spread throughout the colony as architects and clergy moved to make churches that could serve not only as a roof over the heads of worshippers, but also as a sacred edifice that could speak the history and identity of the faith professed within. The effort at St. John s College was effectively intended to keep the past alive and hone identity through visual symbolism and the reproduction of things that Selwyn felt were compatible with sound doctrine, the Primitive Church and the contemporary Church of England. 285 In no aspect was this desire more evident than through the architectural scheme that was put in place between 1845 and The Kempthorne buildings are relatively unremarkable and their main communication method is through their generally European style; there is no specific style that they evoke although some elements are vaguely Gothic. The buildings that were produced as a collaboration between Selwyn and Thatcher not only incorporate the established symbolism of the Gothic style, but exploit the symbolic value of the medium in which they were forced to work, making innovative steps in the direction of looking to alternative sources in England s past for inspiration. One of Selwyn s great concerns throughout his mandate was unity in Christian mission, an idea that he articulated through his desire for a unified indigenous and settler church within the Church of England as a larger global body. In an article for Mission Life entitled Unity: the Strength of Missionary Action published in 1867, Selwyn wrote the need for a single comprehensive message to be sent to the far corners of the globe in order to accomplish the ultimate and more important task set before him: to spread the word of Christ. 286 This sentiment 285 Phillipson, The Thirteenth Apostle, G.A. Selwyn, Unity: The Strength of Missionary Action, Mission Life 6 (1867): 300.

107 98 was echoed from a sermon preached by E.B. Pusey in 1838 called The Church: The Convertor of the Heathen. Pusey wrote: The Apostles were fishers of men, in that they, and all the successors in their office, have this one commission to gather people into this one net. The Church is the one vineyard; the one marriage-feast, into which all are brought; the one candle giving light to all that enter it. 287 For Selwyn, this one church was what he aimed to spread throughout the Pacific and it was one church that was a direct inheritor of the English Church and its tradition. This one church was reflected in a single, mandatory style for architecture that communicated in ways beyond what could be accomplished by education alone. Serving as a reminder of home for settlers, a statement of the presence of Englishness for indigenous students and visitors and a theological statement about the unity of the global and local churches, the architectural forms of the College complex affirmed Selwyn s mission, or at least his perception of it, in the diocese with which the Church had entrusted him. For contemporary viewers, the College complex is an interesting set of architectural pieces that use elements from historical English design in an innovative way. Because architecture, specifically ecclesiastical architecture, does not operate in the same way in contemporary culture as it did in the mid-victorian period, the extrapolation of symbolic and theological statements from this set of architecture may seem farfetched. But, as Patteson wrote to his sister, for clergy during this time period, as well as society at large, a really noble church is a wonderful instrument of education, if we think only of the lower way of regarding it. Levels of understanding, implicitly acknowledged by Patteson, range from the use of stained glass to tell Bible stories not addressed in this study to the use of symbolic and historical forms to 287 E.B. Pusey, The Church the Convertor of the Heathen: Two Sermons Preached on Behalf of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel at St. Mary s Church, September 9, 1838 (Oxford: John Henry and James Parker, 1859), 24.

108 99 communicate ideas of identity and faith; architecture could show what the church believed in and the role of the church in the world. This idea, put into practice at St. John s College, was a consistent undercurrent throughout ecclesiastical architecture in the nineteenth century. Its use in Auckland was moulded, with certain reluctance, to the needs and conditions of that particular setting, while still taking into account the rich history of English ecclesiastical architecture and the broad symbolic features that were deemed necessary and were consistently used throughout the globe. The hyper-symbolic system that was the Gothic Revival did not work perfectly in all places. Using stone and replicating the building patterns of fourteenth-century England was not realistic in nineteenth-century Auckland. In order to express the message that he hoped to deliver through the College and its associated structures, the Bishop was forced to adapt to colonial conditions and re-examine alternative architectural methodologies. Aided by Thatcher, and to some degree by Kempthorne, the College complex as it was constructed reflects both the Church in New Zealand as Selwyn hoped it would be and the Church as it actually was. The vision espoused by Selwyn, and indeed by the entire Gothic Revival movement, of an ideal medievalstyle church, in all sense of the phrase, was certainly not realistic in the modern Victorian world. Social, economic and cultural factors all worked together to make that goal unattainable. Nevertheless, the Bishop made the best of the conditions with which he was faced and built an educational institution reflecting those fundamental values of religio, doctrina et diligentia that he so prized. St. John s College was a uniquely colonial construct, but also a uniquely British one, reflecting the hopes and desires of the Church of England in the ever-expanding global church.

109 100 Just prior to his departure from England, Selwyn preached a sermon at Exeter Cathedral centred around a question posed by Psalm 37: How shall we sing the Lord s song in a strange land? He concluded his sermon by saying: How shall we sing the Lord s song in a strange land? This is no longer a disheartening thought, but one full of comfort, and hope, and promise. For we have a sure foundation on which to build our Church on the simple faith of Christ s promise And though we have to leave these glorious temples of our native Church, to find in the wild woods our school of architecture, and to worship God under the open canopy of heaven, or under the shade of overarching trees or in the tabernacle which as of old must be the forerunner of the temple yet, looking to the noble work which God has done in old times by the hands of our forefathers; and remembering that, when those works had their beginning, no doubt the builders trembled for their insufficiency, both of spirit to plant the Gospel, and of means to build up the temple; and yet the Gospel was planted, so that now it has grown into a great tree; and the foundations of the house of God were laid, and it has risen to be the venerable pile which we see around us. Why, then, should our hearts faint within us, when we go forth to sow the seed, and to lay the corner stone of the Church of Christ in the most distant of the islands of the sea? 288 Selwyn had great plans for New Zealand which ultimately had to be scaled down to respond appropriately to colonial conditions. But through the development of the College and its building scheme, he never lost sight of the fact that he was laying the foundations of a new branch of the Church, both as an institution and as a set of edifices for worship and education. Building on a long standing tradition of English architecture and adapting it to a place that, when departing England, he really knew nothing about, Selwyn s College was indeed singing the Lord s song in a very strange land, but in a very familiar language. 288 Selwyn, How Shall We Sing the Lord s Song in a Strange Land? 16.

110 Figures Figure 1: Than Church, near Caen Normandy. From A.C. Pugin, Architectural Specimens of Normandy (1828). Figure 2: Caroline Abraham. Temporary Encampment at Purewa. Pencil sketch, n.d. The church tent, here at the College s temporary settlement in Purewa in the mid-1840s, is the large white building in the centre of the image. Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries, I-W

111 102 Figure 3: Te Waimate Mission House This house is Georgian in style and exemplifies a typical British style of house construction in both Australia and New Zealand during the middle of the nineteenth century. Photographed by the author Figure 4: Church of St. John the Baptist, Te Waimate. c From Illustrated London News, 6 January This church is constructed in the Georgian style and was replaced by the current, Gothic church in 1871.

112 103 Figure 5: G.A. Selwyn. Encampment at Purewa, [ca. 1845]. Watercolour. 148 x 222 mm. This image shows the temporary housing of the College at Purewa when the permanent campus was under construction. The large building in the bottom right hand corner eventually became the barn at the College s permanent site. Alexander Turnbull Library in the National Library of New Zealand, Wellington, New Zealand, A Figure 6: William Bambridge. St. John s College, c Pencil drawing after G.A. Selwyn. The buildings are, from left to right: English School (a), Lecture rooms and dorms (b), Kitchen (c), Stables (d), Hospital (e), Bishop s house and library (f), Chapel (g), Maori School (h) Cotton Journal, vol. 9. Alexander Turnbull Library in the National Library of New Zealand, Wellington, New Zealand. Facsimile of a copy held at the Dixson Library, New South Wales.

113 104 Figure 7: Caroline Abraham. Panorama of St. John s College Auckland, c Part 1: panels 1 and 2. Tinted lithograph of original watercolour. 170 x 493mm. Looking north towards Judges Bay, from left to right: Printing Office, Washhouse, Bishop s House, English School, Hall, Kitchen, Maori Adult School, Weaving Room, Surgery. Alexander Turnbull Library in the National Library of New Zealand, Wellington, New Zealand, A a-1. Figure 8: Caroline Abraham. Panorama of St. John s College Auckland, c Part 2: panels 3 and 4. Tinted lithograph of original watercolour. 170 x 493mm. Looking east towards Waitemata Harbour, from left to right: St. Thomas Church (far distance), College Chapel, Maori Boys School, Primary School. Alexander Turnbull Library in the National Library of New Zealand, Wellington, New Zealand, A a-2.

114 105 Figure 9: Caroline Abraham. Panorama of St. John s College Auckland, c Part 3: panels 5 and 6. Tinted lithograph of original watercolour. 170 x 493mm. Looking south towards Manukau Harbour, from left to right: Barn and Ricks, Mount Wellington, Stables, Holland House. Alexander Turnbull Library in the National Library of New Zealand, Wellington, New Zealand, A a-3. Figure 10: Caroline Abraham. Panorama of St. John s College Auckland, c Part 4: panels 7 and 8. Tinted lithograph of original watercolour. 170 x 493mm. Looking west, from left to right: Well, Paris House, Waiatarua Lake, Hunter House, One Tree Hill, Carpenter s Shop, Mount Eden. Alexander Turnbull Library in the National Library of New Zealand, Wellington, New Zealand, A a-4.

115 106 Figure 11: Long Classroom, Mission Bay/Kohimarama, Photograph. The long classroom is the middle building, with Patteson s house on the left and Reader Wood s stone building on the left. Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries, Figure 12: Sampson Kempthorne. St. Stephen s Church, Judges Bay, Drawing from Cotton Journal, vol. 8. State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, a

116 107 Figure 13: Sampson Kempthorne. St. Thomas Church, Tamaki, Drawing from Cotton Journal, vol. 8. State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, a Figure 14: Sampson Kempthorne. Bishop s House, Photograph by William Beattie, n.d. Auckland War Memorial Museum, DU S

117 108 Figure 15: Sampson Kempthorne. Kitchen, Photograph. c The kitchen is the wing on the right hand side. Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries, Figure 16: Sampson Kempthorne [and Frederick Thatcher]. Kitchen, interior, Photography by author.

118 109 Figure 17: Frederick Thatcher. Holy Trinity, Te Henui, c Photograph c.1860s. Collection of Puke Ariki, New Plymouth, New Zealand, A Figure 18: St. Andrew s Church, Greensted-juxta-Ongar, Essex, 11 th century. The Builder, VII, 1849.

119 110 Figure 19: Frederick Thatcher, CMS Chapel, Marataei/Waikato Heads, Sketch by Richard Taylor. The chapel is on the left. Alexander Turnbull Library in the National Library of New Zealand, Wellington, New Zealand, E-269-q Figure 20: G.A. Selwyn. Sketch of unidentified buildings [1843?]. The use of cruck-type construction is evident in the lower building, seen from the gable end. The crucks extend from the ridgeline to the ground and form a very obvious triangle. Cotton Journal, vol. 10. State Library of New South Wales, a

120 111 Figure 21: Caretaker s Cottage. Photograph c This is probably the Paris House after an external redressing. Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries, Figure 22: Frederick Thatcher. Paris House, Detail of Caroline Abraham Panorama, part 4.

121 112 Figure 23: Frederick Thatcher. Hunter House, Detail of Caroline Abraham Panorama, part 4. Figure 24: Frederick Thatcher. Holland House, Detail of Caroline Abraham Panorama, part 3.

122 113 Image removed due to copyright restrictions Figure 25: Frederick Thatcher. North Elevation for the Workmen s Cottage c Kinder Library, St. John s College, SJT1/19.2/3. Image removed due to copyright restrictions Figure 26: Frederick Thatcher. West Elevation for the Workmen s Cottage c Kinder Library, St. John s College, SJT1/19.2/3.

123 114 Figure 27: Frederick Thatcher, [Boys Dormitory, c. 1846?]. Cotton Journal, vol. 9. State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, a Figure 28: Frederick Thatcher.[ Hospital], Photograph, n.d. In this image, the hospital has been redressed in board and batten. Auckland War Memorial Museum, DU

124 115 Image removed due to copyright restrictions Figure 29: Frederick Thatcher. Hospital Elevations c Kinder Library, St. John s College, SJT1/19.2/1. Figure 30: William Cotton. Sketch of St. John s College Hospital Plans [1846?]. Cotton Journal, vol. 11. State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, a

125 116 Image removed due to copyright restrictions Figure 31: Frederick Thatcher. Native School Complex Block Plan, Kinder Library, St. John s College, St. John s College Plans I. Image removed due to copyright restrictions Figure 32: Frederick Thatcher. Master s House, Front and North Elevations, Kinder Library, St. John s College, St. John s College Plans IV.

126 117 Image removed due to copyright restrictions Figure 33: Frederick Thatcher. Master s House, East Elevation, This elevation shows the apsidal ends as well as the front and rear verandahs. Kinder Library, St. John s College, St. John s College Plans III.

127 118 Image removed due to copyright restrictions Figure 34: Frederick Thatcher. Master s House, Upper and Lower Story Ground Plans, The overhanging upper story, which projects over the front verandah, is evident n these ground plans. Kinder Library, St. John s College, St. John s College Plans, [no number].

128 119 Figure 35: Frederick Thatcher. College Chapel, Front. This is the College Chapel as it currently appears. Photographed by the author. Figure 36: John Kinder. St. John s College Chapel. Monochrome wash. 1870s. 255 x 360 mm. This watercolour by John Kinder shows the College in its original form. The image was completed at some point before 1877 when the new belfry was constructed. Alexander Turnbull Library in the National Library of New Zealand, Wellington, New Zealand, B

129 120 Figure 37: Frederick Thatcher. College Chapel, interior towards the altar, Photographed by William Beattie, n.d. Auckland War Memorial Museum, DU S Figure 38: Frederick Thatcher. College Chapel, interior towards the pulpit, The colour of the interior illustrated in this image is the original colour scheme of both the interior and exterior of the building with darker contrasting braces. Photographed by the author.

130 121 Figure 39: Frederick Thatcher. Hall, exterior, Photographed by author. Figure 40: Frederick Thatcher, Hall, interior, Photograph, c Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries,

131 122 Figure 41: Long Classroom, Kohimarama. Ink drawing, Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries, Figure 42: Frederick Thatcher. Printing Office, c Photograph c.1900 (?). Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries,

132 123 Figure 43: Frederick Thatcher. Carpentry Shop, c Photograph, n.d. Auckland War Memorial Museum Library, DU S Figure 44: P.F. Robinson. Design No. 7: The Workhouse. Village Architecture (1837).

133 124 Figure 45: P.F. Robinson. Design No. 1: The Swiss Chalet. Designs for Ornamental Villas (1827). Figure 46: George Truefitt. Design No. 1. Designs for Country Churches (1850).

134 125 Figure 47: Cambridge Camden Society. St. Oswald s, Lower Peover. Illustrations of Monumental Brasses (1846). Figure 48: Frederick Thatcher. St Barnabas Parnell, Drawing by James Richardson, c Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries,

135 126 Figure 49: Frederick Thatcher. St. Mark s Remuera, Watercolour by John Kinder c Alexander Turnbull Library in the National Library of New Zealand, Wellington, New Zealand, A Figure 50: Frederick Thatcher. All Saints Howick, Photographed by the author.

136 127 Image removed due to copyright restrictions Figure 51: Rangiatea Church, Otaki, exterior, Photograph c Alexander Turnbull Library in the National Library of New Zealand, Wellington, New Zealand, PAColl (New Zealand Free Lance: Photographic Prints and Negatives). Figure 52: Rangiatea Church, Otaki, interior Hand-coloured lithograph by R.K. Thomas, c.1852, after Charles Decimus. This image, which shows Rev. Octavius Hadfield preaching to the Maori congregation, is significant exaggerated from the actual proportions of the church. Alexander Turnbull Library in the National Library of New Zealand, Wellington, New Zealand, B

137 128 Figure 53: Interior of St. Andrew s College Chapel, Kohimarama. Mission Life, September Figure 54: St. John s Church, Winnipeg,Manitoba, Church Missionary Intelligencer, 1860.