11 minute read
Beyond the Blueprint: Uncovering the stories of the Shrine's architects
BY DR KATTI WILLIAMS
Dr Katti Williams reflects on meeting the descendants of the Shrine’s architects, Philip Hudson and James Wardrop, and discovering the family treasures that are featured in Designing Remembrance: Alternate visions for Victoria’s war memorial.
It’s definitely a memorable way to spend Anzac Day. I’m kneeling on the carpet, next to Cathy. Our grandfathers were both young signallers who served in the cloying, nightmarish mud of France and Flanders in the latter half of the First World War. But while mine was a bank clerk, hers was an architect. An architect named James Wardrop.
Carefully placed on the floor in front of us is an original competition drawing of the Shrine, lovingly and carefully framed. In the corner of the work is a post-dated attribution: ‘Philip B. Hudson, 1923’.
Gazing at its rich sepia toning, exquisite detailing and evocative perspective, I’m momentarily lost for words. The original competition drawings, meticulously prepared by the Shrine’s architects Philip Burgoyne Hudson and James Hastie Wardrop, haven’t properly seen the light of day outside of Cathy’s family for decades, possibly nearly a century. Kneeling in front of this object—an architectural holy grail of sorts—seems peculiarly appropriate.
For the past year, Shrine curator Neil Sharkey, with assistance from the Shrine’s Education and Volunteer Manager Dr Laura Carroll and myself have been working on an exhibition that delves into the forgotten designs for Victoria’s War Memorial. We share a love for the architecture of the Shrine and a passion for deep and sustained historical research. It has been an ever-broadening and at times frustrating hunt for documentation and objects through which to tell the story. As the months tick by, we’ve raided what feels like half the archival repositories on the eastern seaboard. We’ve painstakingly chased down tangents and often drawn blanks; other times, we’ve uncovered previously unseen material: a letter here, a report there. We start to weave these challengingly varied strands of knowledge and evidence into a cohesive and interesting visual narrative. But we’ve done this without original competition drawings for any of the six placed entries—a situation we became resigned to.
Until first one email, then a second, arrives from the United Kingdom, via a genealogy website. The kindness of strangers (who are, admittedly, fellow history obsessives, sharing family trees online) yields names and contact details. Thankfully, family members of both Hudson and Wardrop are happy to speak to us, aware of the great significance of their grandfathers’ achievements and rightly proud of their legacy. Family lore tells of both architects and, later, teams of draughtsmen (they were mostly men in those days), tirelessly preparing the drawings before and during construction.
Thus, I find myself in Cathy’s living room, frantically texting Laura and Neil, who respond with excitement. Cathy gets her brother Nick (who is based on the other side of the country) on speakerphone. We talk eagerly, seated in Cathy’s studio, opposite Wardrop’s own plan drawer, with his drawing board and T-squares still sitting on top.
As Wardrop died in 1975, both Cathy and Nick have strong memories of him: a man with an exceptional eye and an enquiring mind, honed through pre-war travel and study in America and England and a long career in his home town of Melbourne. While he was nicknamed ‘The Duke’ for his height and somewhat imperious manner, he also had a wonderful and wicked sense of humour.
This is clearly expressed in one of the items Cathy shares: a sketchbook Wardrop carried throughout his time on the Western Front. Beautifully preserved, this rare treasure is one of the most evocative objects ‘on display’ - the exhibition is now open, featuring sharply satirical cartoons alongside sketches of everyday life in the trenches amid war-shattered surroundings. As a signaller, Wardrop was thrown into the task of repairing communication lines under horrific conditions, witnessing the chaos and carnage of the battlefields first-hand. After one particularly arduous incident on 10 August 1918 at Harbonnières (for which he was awarded the Military Medal), he was hospitalised in England suffering ‘debility’ or ‘effort syndrome’. A photograph from this time shows Wardrop partaking of a meal in bed in a British military hospital. While visibly exhausted, he still has a characteristic twinkle in his eye. He returned home in early 1919 to his love and future wife Lucia Hankinson, as well as to his profession.
A few days later, I spend several hours with Philip Burgoyne Hudson’s grandson, Tim, and fly interstate to meet with Tim’s brother, Andrew. Hudson collapsed and died while playing his beloved golf in December 1951, so neither Andrew nor Tim have first-hand memories of him. Hudson was a member of the Australian Club, a personal friend of John Monash, and a fixture in the social and sporting pages. Photographs from the time show a stocky, determined figure standing with the much taller Wardrop next to the model of the Shrine of Remembrance, or walking around the site. A bronze bust by Shrine sculptor Paul Montford, meanwhile, depicts an intense gaze.
What Andrew and Tim—like Cathy and Nick—do remember are the stories of their grandfathers’ unceasing devotion to the project, from design to completion. ‘I spent 11 years on the Shrine; it was my whole life,’ Hudson stated in 1947.
For Hudson, the project was acutely personal. He had served in France, first as a driver with the supply column, then with the 4th Pioneer Battalion. In 1918, with his wife seriously unwell, Hudson was torn between his duty as an enlisted man and his duty to his family, making repeated requests to return home on compassionate grounds. Yet when these were finally granted, his ordeal continued. En route to Australia, he caught the Spanish flu and was hospitalised in South Africa, then further delayed by an epidemic embargo. Six months after he left England, he finally arrived home.
His sister Pamela and his wife’s sister Marjorie were army nurses in India and France. Most significantly, his two younger brothers both fought in France—and died.
John, a medical student serving with the Australian Field Ambulance, survived a serious wounding in the Dardanelles. After a lengthy recovery, he was granted a commission in the Yorkshire Regiment, only to die in action on the Somme on 25 October 1916. His body was never found. Two months later, Roy—a gunner with the AIF’s 2nd Field Artillery Brigade— was gravely wounded by a shell while walking along a duckboard near Delville Wood. He was taken to the 36th Casualty Clearing Station at Heilly but died the following day, and was hastily buried at an adjoining cemetery.
Laura, Neil and I have long discussed the probable effect of these deaths on Hudson, serving so close nearby, but Andrew is finally able to provide definitive answers. He places a folder containing some of Hudson’s own war letters on the dining room table. It includes a powerfully emotional missive to his wife Elsie (née Yuille), written in Hudson’s small, precise hand, in which he describes being informed of his brother Roy’s death.
It was heartrending to me as I think that I was not more than a mile off from where he was killed. I think it was at Flers for I know that he was in that district at the time … Roy was one of our most gallant heroes. – A true soldier & one of nature’s gentlemen. He hated the life – loathed it all, but I am proud to say always jealously guarded ‘Duty’ as his watchword. When we last met he was longing for our victory, which must & will come, and a happy & peaceful return to dear old Australia. However I know that in spite of all the hardships that he suffered that he was proud to have done his duty. His death has been a terrible blow to me (following so shortly after our dear old John’s death) but it had to be. We must face it all bravely. Better by far to do one’s duty than be a shirker. His lot was a hard one – a very hard one. But now his work is over & he is at rest. I thank God that he has done his duty. Dearest I know that you will tell the children some day what brave & gallant uncles that they once had. – Men who went out to fight for right & the freedom which is going to benefit humanity in the future.
Andrew and I pause and ponder these heartfelt words, in which grief is interwoven with a sense of duty. These are concepts which underpin the design of the Shrine: the expression of sacrifice alongside pride, and furthermore, the impulse to create a soulful, evocative physical structure in the absence of the bodies of the dead.
This absence—of John and of Roy, among the 19,000 Victorian First World War dead the Shrine commemorates—is alluded to in another family treasure, which Tim
brings along to our meeting. It’s an artist’s impression of the Shrine, etched by a young architect, Arthur Baldwinson, in 1929, when only the foundations and lower portions of the building had been constructed. The Shrine emerges from the shadows as if at dawn. In the foreground is a ghostly army, wearing tin helmets and carrying heavy packs and weapons.
Reflecting on the design process, Hudson famously wrote that he believed that the Shrine ‘must embody a soul, and this I realised could only be accomplished by designing a memorial with an interior (as well as an exterior) where an atmosphere of solemnity and reverence would be established’. His conception of an architectural ‘soul’ is a perceptive response to the nature of Australian grief, of which he had tragic first-hand knowledge. The Shrine, Baldwinson’s etching seems to state, carries the souls, the memories, of the dead with it. We don’t yet know whether Baldwinson’s etching was a commission, a gift, or a happy purchase, but Hudson clearly treasured it—as Tim does today.
The items of family history that Tim, Andrew, Cathy and Nick have carefully kept have tremendous personal meaning for their families—but they also have real historical importance for the Shrine of Remembrance. They provide wonderful insights into both Hudson and Wardrop and their profound experiences of the reality and tragedy of war, serving to illustrate the story of the competition in a more vivid manner than Laura, Neil and I had hoped was possible.
A week after meeting Cathy, rereading Wardrop’s service record, a date and place jumps off the page: Hitchin, March 1917. I go through my own grandfather’s records, then his war photographs, until I find it: a shot of the signallers taken just before leaving the signal training school for attachment to different units across the Western Front. Seated on the ground is my grandfather, the soles of his hobnailed boots pointing towards the camera. Standing just behind him is a tall, lanky figure with a distinctive face and stance—the ‘Duke’, James Wardrop.
I quickly text a snapshot to Cathy and Nick. This time, it’s their turn to be lost for words.
With great thanks to Cathy, Nick, Tim and Andrew for so generously sharing their family treasures, and for many hours of enjoyable and illuminating conversation.
Dr Katti Williams is a research fellow in Australian architectural history in the Australian Centre for Architectural History, Urban and Cultural Heritage in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at The University of Melbourne.
