Nobody has written so well about architecture in Ireland as Maurice Craig. A scrupulous stylist, blessed with a connoisseur’s eye, he effectively invented the genre more than half a century ago when he published his seminal work, Dublin 1660-1860, in 1952. But he doesn’t write if he can help it. “It’s a painful business,” he says.
The camera, on the other hand, has never brought him pain, even if he is quick to admit that some of his photographs, currently on display in the Irish Architectural Archive (IAA) in Dublin, are not masterpieces. “They are my holiday snaps,” he says. “I had a habit of looking at buildings, both large and small, when others didn’t. In the 1940s and 1950s, I was almost the only person who took such photos.
“But you don’t realise at the time that a particular experience will mean something later. When I took those photos I seldom wondered what would become of them after I’m dead. Not to be too pompous about it, I never imagined that they would amount to public service of a kind.”
Craig’s modesty masks his peerless contribution not just to local architectural history but to Ireland’s broader cultural and social life. He was the ideal explorer to navigate and chart the hidden features of a forgotten Ireland. As good as he was in the archives — the true historian’s realm — he was brilliant in the field, gifted with the rare ability to see beyond the surface of buildings, to divine the character of the people and the times that gave them life.
Not merely erudite, his descriptive prose remains a joy to read, conveying a sense of pleasure that has opened the eyes of successive Irish generations to the built heritage of the island, both grand and humble. His books on Dublin, along with works such as The Architecture of Ireland from the Earliest Times to 1880, Classic Irish Houses of the Middle Size, and Ireland Observed (written with the Knight of Glin) all became bestsellers. In the process, he created a popular base out of which the heritage movement grew.
But Craig’s photos — there are thousands of them deposited in the IAA — don’t simply document an Ireland that has all but disappeared; they tell you a lot about the man as well. A view of the back of the Southwell Charity (built in 1733) in Downpatrick is hauntingly memorable as a portrait of his beloved old English sheepdog, Bimbi. His vintage touring car, a beautiful 1930 Delage with a 4-litre, straight-8 engine, appears in several pictures. One photograph in the exhibition means more to Craig than any other, however. Tellingly, it is not a picture of a building but of boats. Taken in the mid-1960s, it shows the Alliance & Dublin Consumers’ Gas Company’s fleet of four steamers.
“I happened to be driving over the bridge at Grand Canal basin and I saw all four of them at the company’s wharf,” he says. “They were for the breakers. It was the only time they were all together. The poor little things were under the sentence of death.”
Craig was born in Belfast in 1919, the son of an ophthalmic surgeon from Ballymoney who was in the habit of taking his sons to the shipyards on Sunday mornings. “Father was a frustrated shipbuilder who infected us with a love of ships,” he says. Craig’s earliest photos were of ships being launched: “What excitement to see these enormous things slipping slowly off the land into water.”
At school in Castle Park, Dalkey, in 1931, Craig carved and painted a set of wooden waterline models of famous ships of the time from photos and shipping literature. In 1953 he graduated to making steam-driven working models of ships, three of which are destined for the National Maritime Museum. “As a combination of work, which I enjoy, and aesthetics, and thinking, and the creation of something I can use and have a relationship with, modelling takes the biscuit. I feel ships and my own ship models have a particular personal relationship with me that buildings don’t.”
When in his teens, Craig had also thought he would be a composer of music; before that, a painter. His interest in architectural history grew out of model-making and drawing. He won a history scholarship to Magdalene College, Cambridge, but was soon told that they didn’t think he’d make a historian and would do better in English literature. He wrote his doctorate at Trinity College Dublin on Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864), a contemporary of Wordsworth and Coleridge. His enduring love of Landor — in 1998 he edited a selection of his poems — continues to shape his working methods.
“I spend a lot of time mooching about, putting on a record, looking at pictures. Hardly anything goes on paper until the last moment. My typescripts are never corrected. I write each sentence in my head, back to front, with different side thoughts — conditional clauses — until I’ve straightened it all out and it is melodious. The melody comes from Landor. That was always in front of me as a model.
“When I finished the Landor thesis, I learnt how not to write a book. In a thesis you must tell the examiners you have left no stone unturned. You must tell it all, but that’s the wrong way to write a book. A good book consists of leaving a lot of things out and concentrating on style. You try to avoid telling anything untrue and sending your reader to sleep. If you manage to do the two simultaneously then already you are doing quite nicely, thank you. Fine writing can be added on top in small, measured quantities.”
In 1951 Craig was appointed assistant inspector of ancient monuments in the Ministry of Works, London. He learnt a huge amount about building construction from seeing buildings in “a state of anatomical disruption, on the point of falling down”.
Three times he was asked, while in London, would he write a history of Irish architecture. He declined because he didn’t know enough about the whole subject. Indeed, not enough was known. The groundwork had not been done for a survey. But as soon as he could retire without forfeiting his pension, he did. “I was 50, still young enough to face the prospect of a big book,” he says. “After another few years, I wouldn’t have been able to do the fieldwork.”
Craig ranks as his single greatest achievement his rehabilitation of Edward Lovett Pearce (1699-1733), architect of the Irish Parliament House, in Dublin, but of his great Dublin book, he says, modestly: “There are other books on Dublin and mine will become more out of date as assumptions change. But I at least urged people to look at buildings.”
His own favourites in the capital are Pearce’s Parliament House, “with that unforgettable colonnade but without the later curved wings”; James Gandon’s The Four Courts, “full of faults but with that tremendous great, flat dome”; and the “serenity and overlapping symmetry of the Custom House, seen in three-quarter view when the roof disappears.”
And Ireland’s finest? “I swither between Cormac’s Chapel and the Casino at Marino,” he says. They’re small and perfect and, in the latter case, almost totally unaltered, which is important. It is a sublime example of what happens when an architect is allowed to do exactly as he likes and not serve an end. It is great fun, even if it is not much use.
“There are poems as perfect as the Casino,” he says, reciting and relishing once more the magic syllabic qualities of his favourite, Landor.
Maurice Craig: 50 Years of Photographing Architecture is on show at the Irish Architectural Archive, Merrion Square, Dublin, until September
