73 Facts About Edmund Blacket

Edmund Thomas Blacket was an Australian architect, best known for his designs for the University of Sydney, St Andrew's Cathedral, Sydney and St Saviour's Cathedral, Goulburn.

Edmund Blacket was the most favoured architect of the Church of England in New South Wales for much of his career, and between late 1849 and 1854 was the official "Colonial Architect to New South Wales".

Edmund Blacket worked with a number of other architects of both Australian and international importance: James Barnet, William Wardell and John Horbury Hunt.

Edmund Blacket is regarded by descendants of the Blackett family as "a man of the strictest probity with a great love for his profession, who studied the classics, and was considered the leading authority on Classical Greek in Sydney, loved music, playing the organ at the temporary wooden pro-Cathedral, was a competent wood-carver and an amateur mechanical engineer".

Edmund Blacket was born on 25 August 1817 at 85 St Margaret's Hill Southwark, London, England, the seventh child of James Blacket and Margaret Harriot nee Ralph.

Edmund Blacket was educated at Mill Hill School, near Barnet, and although he showed an early interest in architecture, spending his holidays sketching and measuring old buildings, his father opposed him taking up the profession.

On leaving school, Edmund Blacket went to work in his father's office and three years later, at the age of 20, took a position in a linen mill in Stokesley, Yorkshire.

Edmund Blacket continued in Yorkshire until 1841, taking every possible opportunity to draw ancient buildings and their details, which included spending his 23rd birthday surveying Whitby Abbey.

Edmund Blacket's diaries indicate that he had become a member of the Church of England and had a great love for the Anglican Liturgy.

Edmund Blacket suffered from sea-sickness for the first month, although Sarah did not.

Edmund Blacket acquired a marmoset monkey which disturbed his sketching for the rest of the voyage.

Edmund Blacket spent the rest of the voyage carving a wooden crucifix.

The Eden sailed into Sydney Harbour on 4 November 1842 with Edmund Blacket, who kept a shipboard diary, writing that he had never seen such "an exquisite scene".

The first building that Edmund Blacket saw in Sydney Town was the simple copper-clad steeple of Francis Greenway's St James's Church.

Edmund Blacket went ashore and found lodgings opposite the little Methodist Chapel with its Doric portico in Princes Street.

Edmund Blacket soon found suitable employment and the Blackets relinquished their plans to travel on to New Zealand.

Edmund Blacket was an enthusiastic writer, leaving a shipboard journal in the form of an ordinary school exercise book and sending many letters to his family in England, and to his children, particularly his youngest daughter Hilda, to whom he once sent thirty stamps, as an encouragement to write back.

In 1849 Edmund Blacket assisted his cousin Thomas Edmund Blacket Stephens in his immigration to Sydney.

On his arrival in Sydney, Edmund Blacket possessed a small library of architectural books, and he kept abreast of the latest trends by subscribing to journals.

Since it was the wish of so many colonials, not the least of whom was the Bishop, to assuage their homesickness by at least attending a church that reminded them of one in Cornwall, Yorkshire or East Anglia, Edmund Blacket was to become a very popular man.

Edmund Blacket quickly adopted the colonial Georgian form of domestic architecture, to which he then applied a variety of details.

Edmund Blacket was introduced to the architectural trends in both North America and Scotland by John Horbury Hunt and James Barnet respectively.

The early 1840s were a time of economic depression in New South Wales brought on by a severe drought in 1839, so Edmund Blacket was very fortunate to immediately gain employment from Bishop Broughton as Inspector of the Schools in connection with the Church of England in the Colony.

Edmund Blacket began work on 1 January 1843, and on 18 January delivered to the Bishop the plans for the church of All Saint's, Patrick Plains.

From 1843, Edmund Blacket undertook the completion of the interior and then in the 1850s he built the tower and spire.

Later, Edmund Blacket was to be one of the architects to transform Greenway's St James in keeping with a High Church mode of worship.

Edmund Blacket had a private practice during this time, one of the most notable of his commercial commissions being the Kent Brewery for Henry Tooth.

In 1847 Edmund Blacket was officially appointed Diocesan Architect for the Church of England, while still continuing with his private practice.

For St Mark's, Darling Point, Edmund Blacket showed the committee a design based upon an engraving of the church at Horncastle, Lincolnshire.

At St Philip's, Church Hill, Edmund Blacket was to replace the church built by Governors Hunter and Bligh and justifiably known as "the ugliest church in Christendom".

Edmund Blacket was masterly at designing in the Perpendicular style and, as with other designs, he produced alternative versions which he slotted into place on the drawing or glued on as flaps, so that the Parish Council could choose.

In 1846 Edmund Blacket, who was seen by the committee to have a greater grasp of architectural principles and design than Hume, was appointed to replace him as architect of the cathedral.

The challenge to Edmund Blacket was to create a building which worked within the limitations of scale but still had the imposing quality of a cathedral.

Edmund Blacket initially designed towers that accommodated the wishes of both Bishops, but he wrote to a relative in Yorkshire asking them to send drawings of the facade of York Minster.

Edmund Blacket's design was acceptable to both, the Oxford Society in particular waxed lyrical, saying that his design "had realised the idea of a cathedral, as diverse from a parish church".

Edmund Blacket obliged by making such changes as he could, but the string course and the rebuilding of the paired windows in the existent transept were impractical.

On 1 December 1849, while the construction of St Andrew's Cathedral was proceeding, Edmund Blacket was appointed Colonial Architect for New South Wales, succeeding Mortimer Lewis.

Edmund Blacket occupied this position for nearly five years, but there are few buildings remaining in Sydney from this employment with the exception of the small Water Police Office in a robust Classical style.

Edmund Blacket's largest job was the Glebe Island Abattoirs and the Moreton Island Lighthouse was a significant undertaking.

Edmund Blacket spent much of his time in the country, supervising the building of wooden bridges, some of which have survived.

In 1853, the Edmund Blacket family moved to a rented house in Glebe.

Edmund Blacket was involved with the foundation of Sydney University from the outset, and played a role in selecting the site on the Parramatta Road at the top of a rise overlooking Grose Farm.

Edmund Blacket was appointed University Architect on 23 May 1854, several days before he resigned as Colonial Architect, and he continued to supervise building for the Government for some months.

Edmund Blacket asked his friend, the artist Conrad Martens, to create a watercolour drawing from his plans and elevations.

In 1857, Edmund Blacket designed and built a home for his family, "Bidura", on Glebe Point Road.

In 1859, Edmund Blacket received his last letter from his father, who died in November 1858.

At the University of Sydney, Edmund Blacket built the Anglican St Paul's College and supervised the building of the Catholic College of St John's after the resignation of its designer William Wardell.

In 1881, Edmund Blacket designed the Clarke Buildings of Trinity College, a residential college affiliated with the University of Melbourne.

Edmund Blacket later added a kitchen and staff accommodation block.

One of Edmund Blacket's best known commissions was the extension of Sydney Grammar School in 1855.

Edmund Blacket added a wing to either end of the building, respecting the proportion of the original, but with two floors where the earlier stage had one, and with the centre of Hallen's building having a Doric portico.

Edmund Blacket designed the Avoca Street front of the Prince of Wales Hospital at Randwick, Mudgee Hospital and the ornate Blind Asylum on the corner of William Street.

Edmund Blacket built several Anglican Church rectories, most of which are in a simple, asymmetrical, Gothic Revival style with gables and some Gothic detailing in the bargeboards and verandas, such as those at Berrima and Bega.

Many of his larger churches are among Edmund Blacket's best known buildings.

St Michael's Anglican Church, Surry Hills was first designed in 1854, but Edmund Blacket modified and reduced it, as required, to cut costs.

The church plan accepted in 1882 is rare among Edmund Blacket's designs in having simple Geometric Gothic tracery in its windows rather than the Flowing Decorated style of which he was a master.

Edmund Blacket's preferred style for a medium-to-large church was Flowing Decorated Gothic.

Edmund Blacket was to design four cathedrals for the Church of England, All Saints, Bathurst, 1845; St Andrew's, Sydney, ; St Saviour's, Goulburn, 1874; and St George's, Perth, 1878.

Edmund Blacket designed a single tower and spire, asymmetrically placed and of majestic proportions.

That in the North transept has a wheel based on the Visconti emblem of a window in Milan Cathedral, but by the judicious placement of two small tracery lights, Edmund Blacket has turned it into a sunflower, an emblem frequently used by one of the stained glass firms he employed, Lyon and Cottier.

The most visible signs of Edmund Blacket's career are the spires that he positioned on hilltops around Sydney and in several country towns.

In both examples Edmund Blacket makes it "difficult to determine where the tower ends and the spire begins".

Each of the tall windows on the four sides is set into a slightly projecting plane, with its own gable, very similar in form to that which Edmund Blacket often used around doors.

Behind the pinnacles, Edmund Blacket has placed an encircling battlement which appears to mark the point where the tower ceases to be tower and becomes spire, or vice versa.

On 15 September 1869, Sarah Edmund Blacket died, aged 51 years.

Edmund Blacket was to remain unmarried and in her father's household, caring for her four young siblings.

Edmund Blacket was to remain in Balmain until about 1880, despite the fact that it was a notorious place with its own force of six police necessary to keep order.

Edmund Blacket died suddenly from "apoplexy" on Friday 9 February 1883 aged 65 at his home "Roland Villa", Croydon Street, Petersham, Sydney.

Edmund Blacket was buried with his wife in Balmain Cemetery, and his name was added to the tombstone that he had designed for her, but at the closure of Balmain Cemetery in 1942, their ashes were removed to St Andrew's Cathedral, where an enamel hatchment and a small brass plaque mark the place of their interment.

Edmund Blacket's first articled pupil was William Kemp whose apprenticeship was interrupted when Blacket became Colonial Architect.

Edmund Blacket permitted his staff to enter competitions, and it was while at Edmund Blacket's office that Horbury Hunt won the commission for Newcastle Cathedral, to be executed in his preferred material of brick.

The brick church at Tumut, consecrated in 1873, is ascribed to Edmund Blacket, but appears to owe much to Hunt.

One of the innovations that he introduced to Australian architecture while working for Edmund Blacket was the saw-tooth roof for industrial building, which was employed at Mort's Woolstore.