Real and fake

Unidentified painter after Mikhail M Adamovich (1884-1947) / M S Kuznetsov Partnership Factory, 'борьбд родинг героев РСФСР V 1918-1923
Heroes of the battle of the Motherland RSFSR V 1918-1923', porcelain and enamel painting [c 1910 - c. 1995?].
The design commemorates the fifth anniversary of the founding of the Red Army

Located on the outer fringes of the western civilisation it predominantly identifies with, New Zealand's non-indigenous material culture is characterised more by what is absent than what is present. This state of absence is one of the many tangible manifestations of colonial economies. While the colony supplies unprocessed material to the colonial power and acts as a market for manufactured commodities, it has few of the skills and resources necessary to undertake domestic conversion of the unprocessed produce.

When it comes to manufactured commodities such as ceramics, this skills deficit is accompanied by by the unavailability of what might be best described as the presence of comparative material. This deficiency ensures consumer choice is limited to what consumers are aware of, with the consequence being that market is defined not so much by competitive forces but rather by what manufacturers and their agents choose to supply. In New Zealand, for example, for much of the second half of the nineteenth century, this curtailed supply chain had little cultural significance as many European settlers brought not only their material culture with them to the colony but also memories of what they had seen in the metropolis; emporia of the mind.

But this situation changed dramatically as the population became more settled. By the early twentieth century, the ceramics market in New Zealand was dominated, exclusively, by English manufacturers. On the basis of information relayed to them by their New Zealand-based agents, the potteries of Stoke-on-Trent teamed up with import/export houses, based primarily in London, to determine what ceramics would be selected and distributed in New Zealand. It was a small, unsophisticated but lucrative market. The wares sent out were generally conservative in their design, repeating the shapes and patterns of familiar wares. When New Zealand manufacturers began producing tablewares during the import substitute phases that followed the institution of import licensing in 1938, they simply reproduced the familiar products of Stoke-on-Trent. External influences on the design of ceramics produced industrially in New Zealand were limited: the studio wares of the Anglo Japanese potting tradition (Temuka's stoneware lines); mid-20th century simple hand painted wares from the Netherlands, Sweden and Italy (Crown Lynn's brief foray into art ware in the mid 1950s); and American industrial ceramics (notably the rimless plates and the Dorothy Thorpe inspired wares produced at Crown Lynn). There was no reference to the larger European ceramic tradition or to those of Islam and China; to all intent and purpose they had no bearing on local practice.

Unidentified painter/Royal Saxon Porcelain Manufactory, Meissen, Tea bowl and saucer, porcelain, enamel painting and gilt, [c. 1730]. The extensive gilding and its baroque design suggests an early date of production.
Mackelvie Trust Board collection, Auckland Museum (1932.233)

These empirical limitations were recognised by some of the more pre-eminent early settlers including, in Auckland, George Grey and James Tannock Mackelvie. While Grey's primary focus as a collector of things was on books and manuscripts he also made significant acquisitions of Chinese decorative arts, apparently with the view of gifting them to a public institution. The non-resident Mackelvie – he lived in Auckland for only six years – acquired a significant collection of paintings but, as Mary Kisler observes, his 'real preference was for a range of decorative arts'<M Kisler, Angels & aristocrats: early European art in New Zealand public collections (Auckland: Godwit, 2010), p. 20>. A watercolour portrait of Mackelvie by George Halkett depicts him with a blue and white tin-glazed Delftware double gourd-shaped tin-glazed vase that is missing its lip. Unlike Grey, and no matter his proximity to the British Museum's extraordinary Augustus Wollaston Franks – they were neighbours in Victoria Street, Westminster – Mackelvie seems to have collected without the advice of experts; many of the pieces he acquired have been subsequently identified as being not what they were originally thought to be, a not uncommon problem in antipodean collections prior to the age of near instantaneous, high-quality visual digital communication.

Ceramics Study Gallery at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. This publicly accessible display storage gallery, which stretches for over half a kilometre, displays a representative portion of the museums collection of ceramics

While the collections of New Zealand museums are, compared to those of Europe, minuscule in size and restricted in scope, the situation is exacerbated by the reality that, even when correctly identified, most of the material forming those collections remains in storage, disregarded by its curators and inaccessible to the public. Museum managements have long advocated using digital resources to compensate for the absence of display space but such a solution has considerable limitations and is, ultimately, reliant on the quality and knowledge of the cataloguer.

Screenshot of the Auckland Museum's entry for a tea bowl and saucer in the Mackelvie Trust Board collection (September 2015)

The Auckland Museum's collection database is a case in point. Take the tea bowl and saucer from the Mackelvie collection, which is housed by the museum. The entry correctly identifies the form and the ceramic body and also suggests, without any supporting evidence, a date of manufacture within an imprecise twenty year span. However, the data is deficient in a number of respects. The organisation producing the piece is referred to as the Meissen porcelain factory, rather than, as Anglicised, the Royal Saxon Porcelain Manufactory, a title that not only provides a clue as to the country of origin, Saxony but also resonates with the autocratic nature of the factory's formation by Augustus II, the Saxon elector. Any connection to the Prussian monarch Frederick II is spurious. The entry does not indicate how the crossed swords mark is applied, it was painted; it states the gilded mark '35c' is a manufacturers (sic) mark although there is a possibility that the gilding may have been undertaken outside the factory. There is no description of the ground colour or the painted vignettes. No reference material is cited. The entry appears to comply with an internal museum cataloguing standard (record richness) of ⅔ yet it is evident that the object has been catalogued by a person both without any specific knowledge of the work of the manufactory and a minimal understanding of ceramics. There is no dialogue between the object and its cataloguer, leading to an absence of dialogue with the viewer of the entry.

Screenshot of a part of the British Museum's entry for a plate produced at the Imperial Porcelain Factory, Lomonosov, Russia (September 2015)

By way of contrast the British Museum's  on-line collection data-base provides information based on the expert assessment of curatorial staff. There are hiatuses in the information which appear to relate to the limitations of the software. For example, while the porcelain blank was produced at the factory when it was designated the Imperial Porcelain Factory, St Petersburg, by 1922, when the blank was decorated, it was the State Porcelain Factory, Petrograd, and by 1925 the Lomonosov Porcelain Factory, Leningrad.

Detail of the obverse of Unidentified painter after Mikhail M Adamovich/M S Kuznetsov Partnership Factory, 'борьбд родинг героев РСФСР V 1918-1923 Heroes of the battle of the Motherland RSFSR V 1918-1923', porcelain and enamel painting [c 1910 - c. 1995?]

The 'Heroes of the Battle for the Motherland' plate heading this post encapsulates some of the problems encountered in using digital technologies to verify an object's origins and dates. The plate's appearance and size suggests it is an example of the revolutionary porcelains decorated at the Lomonosov factory between 1917 and 1927. The painting is crisp and confident, albeit a little pallid and the gilding somewhat scant; the painted marks on the obverse of the plate are not too dissimilar to those found on the British Museum's examples. The lower inscription correctly attributes the design of the Red Army soldier to Mikhail Mikhailovich Adamovich (1884-1947) and the painter's 'АГц' cypher is similar to those on other examples, although, like many of them, it remains unidentified <N Lobanov-Rostovsky, Revolutionary ceramics: Soviet porcelain 1917-1927 (London: John Calman and King, 1990), pp. 154-155>. The design appears, rather more confidently executed, on a plate formerly in the Nicholas Lynn collection dated 1925, published in 1990 by Nina Lobanov-Rostovsky (Fig. 3).

Mikhail M Adamovich/Imperial Porcelain Factory. 'V РСФСР V 1918-1923/V RSFSR V 1918-1923', porcelain, enamel painted and gilded plate (1925).
N Lobanov-Rostovsky, Revolutionary ceramics: Soviet porcelain 1917-1927 (London: John Calman and King, 1990, fig. 3

There is an obvious problem though with 'Heroes of the Battle for the Motherland' plate. Rather than bearing the underglaze stamp of the Imperial Porcelain Factory at Lomonosov – an imperial cypher – it bears a blue transfer-printed underglaze factory mark with the post-1900 version of the M S Kuznetsov Partnership Factory – '[a double-headed imperial eagle] / т в2 / мс кузнецова / дф' – at Dulevo, outside Moscow. This might not be so much of a problematic given that it's known that Adamovich worked at the Dulevo factory between 1927 and 1933 and it is not without the realms of possibility he may have provided a painter at the Kuznetsov factory with the design; the painted date on the obverse might relate to the date of the original design, rather than the decoration of the blank.

Rudolf Vilde (1868-1941) / State Porcelain Factory, 'Sieg der Werktätigen 25 Oktober/Victory to the workers 25 October', enamelled porcelain plate (1921). The plate commemorates, in German, Labour Day celebrations
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (78.1288)

This is where digital information would leave a researcher; the information available suggests a possibility that the 'Heroes of the Battle for the Motherland' plate is what it claims to be. It's not. Examination reveals the decoration has been painted on a used, clear-glazed, plate which has been re-fired subsequently at a temperature somewhat lower than the original: abrasions consistent with quotidian use are visible under the painted decoration. While it may well have been decorated by a competent painter in Russia, possibly based on an unidentified prototype, it seems to have been produced within the last two decades of the twentieth century in order to satisfy a growing demand for Soviet revolutionary ceramics, which nowadays sell at auction for tens of thousands of pounds. Ironically, one of the first 'western' cultural institutions to acquire these graphic ceramics was an Antipodean museum, the Australian National Gallery in Canberra (now the National Gallery of Australia), which purchased a significant group of this material in 1978. The appearance of 'alien' ceramics in the gallery's collection represented a cultural shift from a provincial mindset to a sophisticated and knowledgeable one, comfortable with its place in the world.

Recognised for what it is rather than what it was intended to be seen as, the 'Heroes of the Battle for the Motherland' plate was acquired for a modest sum at Portobello Market in London in 1995.

Vogel furniture

William Henry Mudge (1831-1920), Kauri chest of drawers, 1891.

Even today, chests-of-drawers make regular appearances at Auckland auctions. Among the earliest pieces of furniture imported into New Zealand by Pākehā settlers, chests-of-drawers were also the earliest furniture types produced in the colony, after chairs and tables. A key feature of the domestic landscape, particularly in the bedroom, chests-of-drawers feature regularly in the auction columns of the local press in the first years of settlement. In January 1841, Frank Losack advertised in the New Zealand Gazette and Wellington Spectator the sale – from a tent – of a mahogany chest-of-drawers amongst a variety of other furnishings and impedimenta. Second-hand chests-of-drawers were a regular feature of the auction columns in the press well into the latter part of the century when expanded domestic production and the growing weight of fashionability displaced second hand furnishings, quite literally, to the back of the shop.

A recent auction in Auckland listed a plain Kauri chest-of-drawers of nineteenth century date. Unlike much of the furniture that turns up in auctions, this piece retained its original shellac finish. It was exceptionally well made and its design exhibited a sophisticated understanding of geometric proportion, from the square ratio of the whole to the reductive proportions of the five drawers. There were other subtle refinements, including the stepped vertical corners, the raised plinth and the cock-beading of the drawers. It was a handsome example of functional furniture and its timber and location attested a New Zealand origin.

Detail of inscription on the fielded dust slip of the upper left hand drawer. 

Dating such a piece seemed problematic. Its chaste lines, squared proportions, turned drawer pulls and an absence of ornament suggested both a maker with a provincial background and a date close to the middle of the century. Such speculation became moot when the drawers were removed from the chest revealing a pencilled inscription on the fielded dust slip of the upper left hand section. Written in an expansive long hand it read: 'Made at Christmas / 1891 W Mudge'. It's not common to find a signed and dated example of furniture from the nineteenth century anywhere, which suggests that this simple piece may have had a particular significance for its maker.

New Zealand electoral rolls for 1890 list three W Mudges in the country: one, a tailor, in Port Chalmers; another Otago resident, a carter, in Mount Ida; and the last and most likely identity, a carpenter residing at Marjoribanks Street, Wellington. William Mudge appears as a freeholder on the Wellington electoral rolls from 1878-79, initially at number 27, and remains on them until 1919, when he is still listed as a carpenter living at 41a Marjoribanks Street in Wellington East.

Excerpt from City of Wellington electoral roll 1890

William Mudge is not mentioned in New Zealand furniture histories; his identity as a carpenter, rather than a cabinetmaker or even a joiner would seem to suggest that he was more involved in the construction of buildings than the making of furniture. Newspaper reports provide a little more information as about his career and death, notably the fact that in 1890 he was president of the Wellington branch of the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners, constituted in 1860 which, as part of the Building Trades Union, is now the oldest surviving union in the country. In 1878 the Wellington branch of this British-based union is recorded as comprising 32 members. Bert Roth in his history of the trade union movement in New Zealand notes that 'the carpenters too were the first union to combine on a countrywide basis: a New Zealand Council of their union still subordinate to headquarters in Britain was formed in 1876.' <H Roth, Trade unions in New Zealand: past and present (Wellington: Reed, 1973), p. 5>. The Evening Post of 16 July 1890 reported a meeting chaired by Mudge – for which he received a vote of thanks – where members received a 'short but pithy' explanation of the benefits of unionism. An item from 20 August reported the union 'arranging matters relative to Demonstration Day', now known as Labour Day, suggesting that, notwithstanding his status as freeholder of the property in Marjoribanks Street, Mudge was a key player in the first celebrations – held on 28 October 1890 – of the eight-hour day, an achievement won in Wellington in 1840 by the carpenter Samuel Parnell.

[Unidentified photographer, The eight-hour day committee, Wellington, (1890), re-photographed by Winifred Gladys Rainbow (1890-1960). Samuel Parnell is seated in the centre of the front row. It is possible that William Mudge, as president of the Wellington branch of the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners was a member of the committee.
Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington (PAColl-2324)

Further information on Mudge's life is provided by a brief report noting the death of his wife, Sarah, published in the Evening Post in November 1919. It records that they arrived in New Zealand on the SS Avalanche in 1875 and, somewhat inaccurately, observes they 'had resided ever since at 41a Marjoribanks Street.' William Mudge died in September 1920 'at the residence of his daughter, Mrs Gilchrist, in Island Bay'. A brief obituary in the Dominion noted he was born in Devonshire in 1831 and, most significantly, 'was a very old member of the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners.'

The Mudge's move to New Zealand was made possible by the provisions of Julius Vogel's Immigration and Public Works Act, a piece of legislation designed not only the bolster settler presence in New Zealand but also to diversify its political economy. In reporting the arrival of the Avalanche in Wellington, the Evening Post noted that it carried 225 immigrants comprising 180 adults and 45 children. Beyond increasing settler numbers, Vogel's immigration programme sought to expand and diversify the colony's skills base. Mudge's skills as a carpenter and joiner were highly sought after by New Zealand immigration agents in Europe: migrants required housing and houses in New Zealand were, more often than not, constructed of timber.

Excerpt from the 1841 census return for the Borough of Devonport

William Henry Mudge was born in Christow, a small village in the western part of Devon, in 1831. By the time of the 1841 Census, the Mudge family was recorded as living at Newport Street, East Stonehouse, Plymouth, where William's father John was employed as a screw cutter, possibly in the Royal Navy's Devonport Dockyard which was massively expanded during the 1840s. By 1851 William had moved across the Tamar to Gunnislake in Cornwall, approximately 16 kilometres north of Plymouth, where he was apprenticed to a James Mudge, a carpenter employing five men. Like William, the 32 year old James Mudge had been born in Christow, so most likely was closely related.

Except for the 1851 census return for the village of Gunnislake

Between 1851 and 1856, when he married Sarah House Jackson (1830-1919), at St Mary's church, Bryanston Square in Marylebone, William Mudge, like many of his fellow countrymen, made his first significant migration from Cornwall to London. The 1861 census shows Mudge – now described as William H Mudge – listed as a joiner and, with his wife and three children, sharing a house on Southampton Street in Camden Town, an overcrowded London district best known for its sooty proximity to the mainline stations of Euston, St Pancras and King's Cross. By 1871 the Mudge family which now comprised six children had moved to 42 Mornington Crescent, still in Camden Town, which they shared with a lodger, another family and their lodger.

Excerpt of the 1871 census return for the Civil Parish of Pancras

42 Mornington Crescent, Camden Town, London in 2012.
Google Maps

It is difficult to discern from the scant official records what persuaded William Mudge to apply for assisted passage to New Zealand. While unemployment doubled in Britain between 1870 and 1880, a skilled and experienced manual worker such as Mudge should not have had difficulty finding employment, particularly in London. Skilled joiners were in constant demand as the city expanded at an unprecedented rate and Mudge's New Zealand chest-of-drawers attests to the quality of his work. It's possible that Mudge's activities as a unionist – and the Evening Post comment suggests that he was probably an active member prior to his removal to New Zealand – may have led him to believe that his life and that of his family would be better spent working in what James Belich describes as 'the progress industries' of  'Better Britain' than the smutty purlieus of the metropolis.

41a Marjoribanks Street, Wellington in 2015.
Google Maps

Official records don't indicate how or by whom William Mudge was employed from the time he arrived in Wellington up to the time he died, but, as an active unionist, it's unlikely that he was self-employed. Notwithstanding the admonition in his death notice that there be 'no mourning (by request)' his eldest daughter Priscilla inserted an in memoriam notice on the anniversary of his death. The Mudge name survives in Wellington in a small cul-de-sac, Mudges Terrace in Newtown, developed in the early 20th century by William's youngest son Alfred John (1869-1947), also a carpenter by trade.

William Mudge made his chest-of-drawers in his sixtieth year, at the end of what appears to have been a highly successful presidency of his union. While it's a design he could have made as an apprentice in Cornwall forty years earlier, its construction demonstrates that he was a craftsman of considerable talent and skill. But more than anything, the chest-of-drawers is a physical manifestation of Julius Vogel's attempts to bolster settler society by providing opportunities for 'decent working people' to enhance and improve their life in the Britain of the South.

George Grey's drawing room

Daniel Louis Mundy (1826-1881), [Sir George Grey and his niece and adopted daughter
Annie Matthews in the drawing room, Mansion House, Kawau Island, about 1871].
Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries (7-A3034)

Due to the long exposure time required to achieve a successful image, few photographs of inhabited nineteenth century New Zealand interiors survive. Probably the best-known is that taken by the Port Chalmers-based photographer Daniel Louis Mundy (1826-1881) depicting the erstwhile governor of New Zealand Sir George Grey (1812-1898) with his niece Annie Matthews (later Thorne George) in the drawing room of Mansion House, Kawau. The photograph is remarkable for a number of reasons not least for its documentation of some of the objects Grey collected for his temporary retreat from the disputatious world of colonial politics. It appears to be summer: the French doors are open onto the adjacent verandah; the timber-slatted Venetian blinds are drawn up; and the sun shines on the floor of this north facing room; the chairs are concealed by seasonal slip covers. With its stained and polished Kauri panelling and restrained decoration, it's a functional space, seemingly untroubled by the concerns of fashion but housing objects of a quality rarely seen in New Zealand.

The photograph depicts a small part of what was described by one visitor to Kawau as 'a peculiarly-shaped room, something like a carpenter's square, and the ceiling is supported by six pillars' <'The governor's tour', Supplement to the New Zealand Public Opinion (22 January 1881), p. 1, cited in D Kerr, Amassing treasures for all times: Sir George Grey, colonial bookman and collector (New Castle, Del; Dunedin: Oak Knoll; Otago University Press, 2006), p. 201>. Possibly for aesthetic reasons, Mundy has excised some details of the room, including its board and batten ceiling, but the configuration of the room seems uncontrived. Following Grey's departure, the house was materially altered to accommodate a range of functions – in its penultimate iteration the drawing room was converted into a bar – before it came under public control in 1977, when it was renovated in an attempt to reinstate its notional appearance under Grey's ownership. The room's current appearance, while superficially mimicking how it might have been seen by visitors during Grey's residence, intimates little of the significance of what it originally contained.

Grey's collections of books and manuscripts, notably those he gave to the South African Library in Capetown and the Auckland Free Public Library, have been exhaustively researched and documented and the paintings he collected and subsequently donated to what is now the Auckland Art Gallery/Toi o Tāmaki are well documented but very little attention has been paid to the other objects he surrounded himself with. His furniture, ceramics, carpets, clocks, silver and the like have been both dispersed and, if identified, poorly documented. Some of this material was given to the Auckland City Council and later transferred to the Auckland Institute and Museum (now the Auckland War Memorial Museum), much of the rest was inherited by his niece, part of which was subsequently either given or loaned to the Department of Conservation for display in the house following the 1977 renovation.

Daniel Louis Mundy (1826-1881), [Mansion House, Kawau Island, about 1871]. The drawing room
occupies the bow window-fronted ground floor of the rear wing of the building.
Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries (7-A3085)

Grey purchased the 2000 hectare Kawau island in 1862 and between 1865 and 1868 employed the architect Frederick Thatcher (1814-1890) to renovate and extend the original mine manager's two-storey brick house (1845) into what became Mansion House. Having been somewhat peremptorily removed from his vice-regal post by a Conservative administration, Grey returned to England in September 1868. He evidently intended being away for some time as he leased the newly extended house for five years, but he returned to Kawau in October 1870, broke the lease and lived there until 1885 when he moved with his niece and her husband to St Stephen's Avenue in Parnell. The books and the 53 paintings he gave to the Auckland Free Public Library were removed from the house from November 1886 and it was sold in 1888.

Mundy's conversation piece of the Mansion House drawing room offers a tantalising glimpse of Grey's taste soon after his return from England in October 1870. As Mundy was advertising an Auckland exhibition of his landscape photographs in the Southern Cross in February 1871, it is probable that he visited Kawau around the same time. While there appear to be no other images of Grey's drawing room it was described by many of his visitors, both personal and members of the public. The Auckland correspondent of the Otago Witness asserted in 1875 that Grey was 'in the habit of throwing open [...] his fine library and drawing room, and in fact the greater part of the entire house' to passing visitors, where there were 'choice books, and curiosities of all kind lying about, rare and valuable pictures by Sir Joshua Reynolds (sic) and other great painters, with many of less value, but still worth studying, adorn the walls.'

The British historian James Anthony Froude who visited Kawau for a week in 1884 described it as 'a spacious and fine drawing-room, panelled and vaulted with Kauri pine [...] Some good oil pictures hung on the walls, excellent old engravings, with Maori axes, Caffre shields and assegais, all prettily arranged.' After comparing its atmosphere to that of a reading room at the Athenaeum Club in London (Gray, like Froude, was a member), Froude further observes that 'The furniture was plain and solid, most of it home-made by Sir George's own workmen, Kauri pine chiefly providing the material.' <J Froude, Oceana: or England and her colonies (London: Longmans, Green, 1886), p. 264>. Other, less discerning, visitors were equally entranced, commenting that the rooms were 'large, lofty and cheerful, admirably furnished, and the walls hung with paintings of great antiquity.' <J Grey, His island home (Wellington: Lyon & Blair, 1879), p. 4.>. The observation that most of the furniture was mostly new reflected not only the peripatetic nature of Grey's career but also unfortunate incidents such as the disastrous fire at Government House in Auckland in 1848 which consumed his collections of specimens, manuscripts, wine, 'all [his] plate, linen, furniture of bedrooms, numerous books, [and] valuables of all kind.' <Grey to G Gairdner, 14 July 1848, cited in Kerr, Amassing treasures, pp. 61-62>.

The 'good oil pictures' shown in Mundy's photograph can be provisionally identified from those gifted to the Art Gallery. The oval painting on the left of the photograph is one of two Bacchanals by Jacopo Amigoni (1682-1752); the painting over the door is William Ewart's 1862 portrait of Hami Hone Ropiha (also known as John Hobbs), Grey's orderly during the Northern War of 1845-46. Over the fireplace is an Aelbert Cuyp (1620-1691) river scene with a ferry boat; hung next to the French door is one of the two paintings of saints, probably that of St Protase, from the altarpiece painted for the Congregation of St Ambrose in the church of St Francesco in Vercelli between 1527 and 1535, by Gerolamo Giovenone (c. 1490-1553), then attributed to Giorgiacomo Fara known as Macrino d'Alba and latter misattributed to Bernadino Lanino. Other than the portrait of Ropiha, these paintings were among those acquired by Grey in London at Christie's on 13 February 1869 where he purchased thirty-five paintings for a total sum of £259 19s – an income value of £226,500 or NZD526,100 in today's terms – including the Amigonis (lot 21), the Cuyp (lot 45) and the Giovenones (lot 36) <M Kisler, Angels & aristocrats: early European art in New Zealand public collections (Auckland: Godwit, 2010), p. 19f>.

Daniel Louis Mundy (1826-1881), [Māori artifacts (sic) in Grey's museum on Kawau, about 1871].
Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries (7-A14074)

Other than the two Korowai cloaks employed as seat covers, the Māori and African artefacts mentioned by Froude are excluded from Mundy's photograph although they do feature in another of Mundy's photographs of the interiors of Mansion House. Gray's most recent biographer, Donald Kerr, suggests that the greater part of Grey's collection of Māori artefacts was exhibited in the entrance hall and in his library <Kerr, Amassing treasures, p. 195>. Ethnographical displays were par for the course amongst more intellectual colonists during the nineteenth century: Anna Petersen reproduces an 1881 photograph of the Rev Dr John Kinder's study at St John's College in Auckland that shows a large collection of Melanesian artefacts mixed up with Indian brass work, stone adzes, specimen of coral and religious prints <A Petersen, New Zealanders at home: a cultural history of domestic interiors, 1814-1914 (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2001), pp. 78-79>. A posthumous photograph of the library of Donald McLean, chief land commissioner during the 1850s and 60s, depicts a similar, if less discriminating, assemblage of Māori artefacts. Petersen suggests that while this interest in indigenous arts represented an interest and involvement in the cultures of its makers it was also an assertion of economic and social power.

Unidentified photographer, [An interior photograph of the library at Sir Donald McLean's home on Napier Terrace, in Napier, Hawkes Bay, about 1890].
MTG Hawkes Bay (m2004/19, 7512 b, Album 39, 78722)

The furniture seen in Mundy's photograph of Grey's drawing room comprises a double half-height open bookcase, an upholstered footstool, two spoon-backed armchairs (covered by the Korowai cloaks), a pair of balloon-backed chairs that appear to be upholstered under the slip cover. Matthews and Grey appear to be seated on spoon-backed easy or parlour chairs that are also concealed by slip covers. A circular library table is covered with a bordered baize cloth and there are three occasional tables of different styles. In the bay window is a piece of furniture with what appears to be a carved gallery. This half-concealed object would appear to be a neo-jacobean davenport, which Froude observed 'had a large Bible on it, from which he read daily prayers to his household.' The davenport – a type of desk first made in the late 1810s – appears to have been fabricated from older components and is currently displayed in the renovated drawing room, presumably on loan from the descendants of Grey's niece. It is a rare example in New Zealand of furniture found in its original nineteenth century location.

It's difficult to accurately attribute a date or place of origin for furniture on the basis of a photograph but in the absence of the originals some tentative attributions may still be made in respect of the more visible pieces. The open bookcase, for example, appears to be of mahogany veneer and is unlikely to be of colonial manufacture. The same might be said for the occasional table positioned against the fireplace; its carved and turned tripod feet suggest a metropolitan, rather than provincial, origin. By contrast, the other two occasional tables and the upholstered footstool seem to fit with Froude's description of 'plain and solid' 'home-made' Kauri furniture: the vertical elements are turned and the supports sawn and chamfered. It seems likely that the furniture is a combination of pieces acquired by Grey subsequent to the incineration of his furniture in 1848 and utilitarian pieces either recently brought from England or made locally; there's little about it that suggests either Grey's gentry background or his former gubernatorial status.

There are four carpets visible in the photographs. Given Grey's social circumstances, they are, in all likelihood, Axminster or Brussels carpets – machine woven carpets from Kidderminster – rather than more exotic pieces. Seventy three Brussels carpets were listed as being installed at Government House in Auckland in an 1841 inventory of furnishings conducted by Felton Mathew. A notice for the sale of the recently assembled contents of the Coromandel gold prospector George Clarkson's Charleville House in Remuera in January 1871 lists eight Brussels carpets. At the time of Grey's return from England, new and carefully selected Brussels carpets were advertised for sale in Auckland by importers such as LD Nathan.

There are a significant number of ceramics adorning the room that include two porcelain garnitures de cheminée – on the bookcase and on the mantelpiece – that appear to be of Chinese manufacture. On the bookshelf the three quadriform inverted baluster-shaped vases are interspersed with what appear to be four brush pots, presumably also of Chinese origin. On the mantelpiece, the five vases are backed by two octagonal plates flanking two obscured objects that might be circular dishes; the mouths of the four flanking vases appear to be stopped by small bulbous bottles, presumably also of porcelain. Any decoration is indistinct. There are five more, large, vases, also apparently of Chinese origin scattered around the room on tables and brackets. Petersen quotes an 1881 visitor observing that all around the room 'was a sort of shelf or ledge, covered with curios of every description, peculiar chinaware, little deities of different metals, Maori curios, etc.' <Petersen, New Zealanders at home, p. 77>. Grey's drawing room was evidently a dynamic space, with pieces being added and, presumably, removed as his collection of things developed. What is evident is that the ceramics are not displayed primarily for the purpose of decoration. Like the paintings and the books, they're there to make a point: this is serious collecting.

Unidentified photographer, Captain [Roderick] Dew and the officers of HMS Encounter ([1862]).
Otto Herschan Getty

It's unclear what prompted Grey's interest in Chinese porcelain but Kerr records that 'while still in New Zealand [in 1865] Grey somehow learnt that a large Chinese enamel vase was being sold for £60 at a private sale organised by some navy agents in Westminster. Described as booty taken by a Captain Dew of the Royal Navy, 'it was a specimen of very curious art' that he was 'very anxious to get' because it would then be the only one in Australasia.'<Kerr, Amassing treasures, p.196>. That Grey was prepared to spend the equivalent income value today of £53,000 (NZD110,000) on an object he had not seen seems remarkable, but as with his books, collecting unseen was a condition of colonial life. In fact, Grey would have been well aware of Roderick Dew's actions as captain of HMS Encounter. Even though subject to criticism, Dew's actions at Ningbo during the millenarian Taiping rebellion against Qing rule in May 1862 were widely reported in the New Zealand press; it was an eerie foretaste of Grey's own position as commander in chief in and over the British colony of New Zealand during the settler-initiated land wars of 1863. From the brief description, it's possible that the vase positioned on the hearth of the unused fireplace may be that acquired from Dew's prize agent.

Detail of the vase located on the hearth in Daniel Louis Mundy (1826-1881), [Sir George Grey and his niece and adopted daughter
Annie Thorne George in the drawing room, Mansion House, Kawau Island, about 1871].
Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries (7-A3034)

Grey's collection of Chinese porcelain as depicted in Mundy's photograph seems to have been unique in the colony both for its origin as well as its size – at least twenty-three pieces are visible. While Chinese ceramics were imported privately into the colony, surviving records suggest such material was not abundant; Between 1865 and 1875 there are a mere four auctions listing Chinese vases in Auckland newspapers including the sale in September 1872 of the stock of Japanese and Chinese goods of Mrs Johnstone of Shortland Street. It's unlikely that any of the pieces would have sold for £60.The September 1858 auction of the household furniture and effects of Colonel Robert Wynyard of the 58th Regiment, acting governor after Grey's first term, lists an extensive range of useful and ornamental ceramics, all of which appear to have been of European origin. Moreover, commercial imports of non-British ceramics attracted punitive duties and tariffs which would have deterred all but the most determined – or privileged – collector.

Detail of the garniture de cheminée on the mantlepiece in Daniel Louis Mundy (1826-1881), [Sir George Grey and his niece and adopted daughter
Annie Thorne George in the drawing room, Mansion House, Kawau Island, about 1871].
Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries (7-A3034)

Grey's friendships in London encompassed notable collectors such as the art critic John Ruskin (1819-1900) and, more pertinently in respect of his ceramics, Augustus Wollaston Franks (1826-1897). Franks was keeper of British and medieval antiquities and ethnography at the British Museum and a voracious, knowledgeable and well-connected collector in his own right. He was also a fellow member of the Athenaeum club. Grey seems to have met up with Franks in November 1869 – he probably knew him from earlier visits to London – and during the remainder of his stay encountered him socially at regular intervals. Franks not only introduced Grey to other collectors but would have been well-positioned to advise him both on the paintings he acquired at Christie's and on the purchase of Chinese ceramics; he gave over three thousand examples of Chinese porcelain to the British Museum and his Catalogue of a collection of oriental porcelain and pottery, a documentation of his private collection that formed the basis of the gift (1876), is still highly regarded as an example of meticulous scholarship and exacting research.

Jessica Harrison-Hall opines the timing of Franks' interest in Chinese ceramics 'is significant and coincides with the commencement of long British involvement in East China during the Taiping Rebellion (1851-64) and the Second Opium War (1856-60)', and notes that these military actions 'brought a flood of high quality Ming (1348-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) ceramics onto the European art market.' <J Harrison-Hall, 'Oriental pottery and porcelain' in A W Franks: nineteenth century collecting and the British Museum, ed by M Caygill and J Cherry (London: British Museum Press, 1997), 220-229, p. 222>. Like Grey with his 'large vase', Franks is known to have acquired Chinese ceramics directly from military sources but, as Harrison-Hall observes, 'his main mode of collecting was very pedestrian. Literally. He walked along the Strand and shopped for most of his pieces at his London dealers'<Harrison-Hall, p. 225>, which may have been how Grey acquired many of his pieces.

As keeper of ethnography at the British Museum Franks was implicated in Grey's 1854 gift of over a hundred Māori objects and he evidently sought Grey's ethnographic advice during his time in London <D Starzecka, R Neich and M Prendegast, Taonga Māori in the British Museum (Wellington: Te Papa Press, 2010), p. 15>. In a note dated 17 May 1870 Franks informs Grey that he 'would be glad of an opportunity of looking at your pear-shaped implement from the Cape if not giving you too much trouble.'<A Franks to Grey, 17 May 1870, Auckland Libraries, GL F30.2>. Grey, in turn, was certainly not averse to taking expert advice and although the surviving correspondence between the two men in the Grey Collection at Auckland Libraries does not reveal if advice was sought from and given by Franks, it does encourage the possibility that it was.

As a collector, Grey's principal focus was on his books and manuscripts. His remarkable collection of paintings came, largely, from a single source. His carpets and furniture and other household goods seem to have been acquired by him primarily for functional purposes. His collection of Chinese ceramics, now dispersed and apparently unrecognised, has hitherto been ignored in assessments of Grey's connoisseurship. However it not only seems to have been acquired in the same pedagogical spirit as his paintings but also, like them, it's entirely possible that it was a collection of a particularly outstanding quality.

An overriding enthusiasm for good design in all things

VERTICAL LIVING: THE ARCHITECTURAL CENTRE AND THE REMAKING OF WELLINGTON

by Julia Gatley and Paul Walker

Auckland University Press, $60.00, July 2014, 9781869408152

The Architectural Centre Inc, a Wellington-based association organised in 1946 by a diverse group of individuals who believed 'in the transformative potential of modern architecture' is an exemplary instance of the collaborative way people around the world sought to understand the modern movement in architecture and design. As Julia Gatley and Paul Walker note in the introduction to their book, the Architectural Centre wasn't the only such body formed at that time in New Zealand but it is the only one to survive. However, while citing the contemporaneous formation of the Auckland-based Architectural Group (1946-1957), they ignore the Auckland-based Design Guild (1948), the Dunedin-based Visual Arts Association (1951-1968) and the Christchurch-based Design Association of New Zealand (1960-1966?), presumably on the basis that their foci were not solely architectural. It's an odd distinction to make particularly since the Architectural Centre was one of the principal proponents in New Zealand of not only architecture but also the many other fields of modern design. Unlike the other local design promotion organisations that emerged during the 1940s and 50s, the Architectural Centre proselytised its aims to the public through a journal, the New Zealand Design Review. Indeed the editorial of the first issue of the Design Review asserted that their members' 'greatest claim to affiliation was an overriding enthusiasm for good design in all things.' <New Zealand Design Review, 1:1 (April 1948), p. 1>. Despite being either ignored or dismissed as a student initiative in many of the standard New Zealand architectural histories, the Centre had a more significant role in activating modern design in New Zealand than its name might suggest.

Separately Gatley and Walker have produced earlier histories that have reshaped our understanding of twentieth century architecture and design in New Zealand. In Looking for the local: architecture and the New Zealand modern (2000), Walker, with Justine Clark, was responsible for the first substantial analysis of mid-twentieth century New Zealand architecture and design to be framed within an international context. Looking for the local explored one of the Architectural Centre's failed initiatives, a book on local architecture intended to make New Zealand architecture available to a local and international audience, along the lines of those produced by the American architect G E Kidder Smith in association with the Museum of Modern Art. Likewise, Gatley's Long live the modern: New Zealand's new architecture, 1904-1984 (2008) was equally internationalist in its perspective on how modernism was manifest in New Zealand. Vertical living, by contrast, with its focus on the architecture and planning of Wellington, is distinctly parochial in its coverage.

It's difficult to convey the cultural radicalism implied in the formation of the Centre and the other design promotion bodies and it's something that Gatley and Walker and their co-authors largely avoid addressing. New Zealand in 1946 was a deeply conventional, provincial society; consumer taste was, on the whole, conservative and mediated by British interests. The country's socially orthodox Labour administration's continued commitment to a command economy was not only increasingly resented by the electorate but also exploited by the opposition National party who claimed to represent a future untrammelled by the bogey of 'socialism' while espousing equally conservative social values. While it's a truism, the mantra 'rugby, racing and beer', leavened by a little Hollywood and a bit of bone china for the ladies,  perfectly exemplified the gendered anti-intellectualism of mainstream New Zealand culture of the post-war period. Organisations promoting modernism such as the Centre, tiny as they were, represented a challenge to the prevailing cultural hegemony.

What differentiated the Architectural Centre from the design promotion bodies that failed to survive? Gatley and Walker, comparing the Centre to the Architectural Group, suggest the answer lies in focus; that while the former was concerned with 'the bigger but vaguer issue of the urban realm', the latter 'focused on the design and construction of the small, refined, architecturally designed house, the holy grail of New Zealand architecture'. In drawing this delineation Gatley and Walker clearly articulate the tensions between metropolitan and provincial views of design and architecture and the Centre's long championing of urbanity in the face of suburban hegemony. This is too narrow a reading of the Centre's rationale and it underplays the sense of collaborative governance that allowed it to flourish, while the other bodies devoted to the promotion of modernism – organised along more conventional lines – withered. Another significant point of demarcation was the Centre's periodic championing of progressive political views – notwithstanding its 1958 president standing as a Ratepayers' and Citizens' Association candidate in the 1959 local body elections  –  and its embrace of theory, notably through its summer schools held between 1946 and 1953. By a bizarre quirk of local politics, modernism as manifest in New Zealand was often associated with a reactionary right and the other New Zealand design organisations actively rejected any theoretical debate, presumably on ideological grounds.

A 1916 Deutschen Werkbundes advertisement of its current publications. Even under wartime conditions, the range and scope of Werkbund publications were impressive. The advertisement appears on the back cover of Englands Kunstindutrie und der deutsche Werkbund (1916),
a translation of the founding documents of the British Design & Industries Association

One of the most significant associations established to promulgate modern design was the Deutscher Werkbund, 'an alliance of laymen, dilettantes, scholars of art, art critics, and a very particular kind of younger architect'<Quoted in F Schwartz, The Werkbund: design theory and mass culture before the First World War (New Haven/London: Yale, 1996), p. 13>. Established in 1907, the Werkbund looked to the bigger picture and saw architecture and design as a reified object as they sought, as Schwarz observes, 'to discover the way form acts in, and reacts to, a market economy; and to redeploy form under these conditions as a utopian force, as a carrier of Culture'<Schwarz, p 17>. Gatley and Walker claim the Centre's origin is located amongst the body of modernist architectural organisations such as CIAM (1928) and its British wing, the MARS group (1933) but this assertion ignores the fact that the Centre was not exclusively architectural in either its membership or activities and minimises the experience of a number of key figures involved in its establishment. While identifying a group of European refugees as a vector for the 'radical ideas' of the inter-war period, they fail to acknowledge that this 'educated and cultured' group, a number of whom – most notably Ernst Plischke – had been involved with the Werkbund and brought with them a sense of intellectual engagement that was entirely alien to provincial New Zealand. The experience of the Werkbund with its wide-ranging debates and its embrace of a disparate range of intellectual disciplines and social classes was not something New Zealanders were familiar with, notwithstanding their ostensible egalitarian aspirations.

Design and Industries Association original notification of interest form (1915). Like the Architectural Centre in 1946,
its establishment was driven by architects and its membership was equally diverse

A British attempt to replicate the Werkbund, the Design and Industries Association (DIA), effectively foundered soon after its establishment not only on its failure to comprehend the German organisation's horizontally-structured governance but also on its inability to effectively reconcile the mediaevalist romanticism of the still prominent arts and crafts movement with modern industry. Where the Werkbund's influence grew after the war, the DIA, established in 1915, divided into traditionalist and progressive strains, with the former tendency prevailing. Unlike many other British institutional initiatives of the period that were manifest locally – such as the Royal Overseas League (1910) or Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society (1887), which prompted a number of arts and crafts societies in Whanganui, Christchurch and Auckland between 1901 and 1912 – the DIA found no adherents in New Zealand. A search of DIA membership rolls fails to reveal any member with an overt connection to the dominion. In part this reflects the absence of any substantial manufacturing industry but it also reflects a gendered attitude to design prevalent in New Zealand during the first half of the twentieth century that posited design – although not architecture, which was perceived as 'mathematical' and hence suitably masculine – as a domestic and manual concern. The formation of the Architectural Centre would, in part, redress that imbalance; Gatley and Walker note the 'tardiness with which the New Zealand architectural profession has welcomed women to its ranks', while noting blandly that its early women members – only one of whom, Marilyn Hart, worked as an architect – 'had an important impact on the organisation's activities'.

Despite this architectural bias, the authors allow that the Centre had a wider stakeholding. Like the Werkbund, and unlike the other New Zealand design promotion bodies, publishing was at the core of the Centre's activities. A chapter by Walker and Justine Clark – his co-author on Looking for the local – critically assesses the Centre's publishing of the Design Review from 1948 until 1954 comparing its high design and production values – notably those produced under the aegis of the 'illustrator' Melvyn Taylor – to those prevailing in the country's 'professional' architectural journals of the time: the Journal of the NZIA and Home and Building (which had a formal connection to the NZIA). The question as to why the NZIA associated journals were so dire graphically when compared with the Design Review is not addressed. Damian Skinner contributes a chapter on the Architectural Centre Gallery, which operated in leased spaces between 1953 and 1968 and, in effect, carried on the work of the pioneering Helen Hitchings dealer gallery, which operated between 1949 and 1951 (currently the subject of a disappointing exhibition at Te Papa). Like the Centre itself, the volunteer gallery's programme was distinctive in its internationalism. Skinner opines that it was 'remarkable that it organised and displayed so many international exhibitions' but then diminishes the observation by suggesting this was because 'it was '"in effect a civic gallery", presenting modernism to the Wellington public', rather than a vibrant arm of international modernism.

In its essence Vertical living comprises a series of stand-alone essays anchored around the Centre and organised chronologically. Through this unchallenging structure a number of key themes emerge about the organisation, its members, its challenges and the changing institutional nature of Wellington. It's a very personal narrative that emerges: the activities of the newly established centre are documented by informal snapshots of parties and architectural students en charette, interspersed by more formal photographs delineating the morphing urban profile of the city. Later chapters are not so personal; it's almost as if as Wellington 'modernised', the Centre became less personal and its agenda more institutional. The tone of writing about the Centre seems to shift from a compelling account of its early days to a description of contemporary Wellington that seems to spring from a Positively Wellington Tourism press release: 'the coolest little capital in the world' sort of thing. Its a transformation that's similar to that which occurred in the city's architecture: from the austere beauty of Plischke's Kahn House in Ngaio (1941) to the sprawling, horizontal, vulgarities of Jasmax's Te Papa Tongarewa building 'circuited by a car race track' (1992).

Cover of W B Sutch, New Zealand planning (1965)

Indeed, facilities for cars were – and continue to be – the real catalysts of Wellington's redevelopment, impinging on all aspects of the Centre's activities, from town planning to heritage and environmental protection. Indeed the development of Wellington's motorway network was a threshold moment in the Centre's history and marked its transformation from an organisation devoted to the promotion of design into an activist lobby group. It's odd then that there is little mention of the activities of one of the more articulate protagonists of the Centre as a lobbyist organisation, W B (Bill) Sutch. Permanent secretary of the Department of Industries and Commerce from 1958 until his enforced retirement in 1964, Sutch was involved with the Centre from when he returned to Wellington in 1951. In his chapter on the Centre's gallery, which opened in 1954, Damian Skinner acknowledges Sutch – 'by all accounts a charismatic man' – as 'spearheading' the gallery committee, noting that he also 'would coordinate the exhibitions, assigning individuals the responsibility of undertaking the necessary research and organisation.'

Although unacknowledged by Gatley and Walker, as well as effectively controlling the gallery, Sutch was involved in all aspects of the Centre's activities. He and his wife, the lawyer Shirley Smith, commissioned Plischke to design their house in Brooklyn (1953-56) and he was notably interested in planning issues. In a speech delivered in April 1965 to the Wellington branch of the New Zealand Geographical Society, Sutch summarised succinctly and in some detail the state of planning internationally and in New Zealand, noting that 'the extent and complexity of planning undertaken in New Zealand are much greater than most people realise.' <W Sutch, New Zealand planning (Wellington: Victoria University of Wellington Geography Department, 1965), p. 47>. His assessment not only articulated the Centre's stance in respect of Wellington's urban planning but  also located it in a wider context: planning was not just about the making of urban space; it was also, fundamentally, about the economic life of a country. 

[Geoff Nees (1923-1999)?], cover of W B Sutch, Wellington: a sick city ([1965])

That same year, Sutch published Wellington: a sick city in which he savaged the National Roads Boards proposal – partially based on plans developed by the Californian engineering firm de Leuw Cather – to insert a motorway to the west of the Wellington CBD. This heartfelt philippic, inspired by a close reading of Jane Jacob's Death and life of great American cities (1961), again mirrored the equally passionate opposition of the Centre to the scheme. While the Centre did not campaign as a group against the Roads Board proposal, two of its senior members, the architects Al Gabites and James Beard submitted an alternative proposal that reduced the impact of the motorway on the fabric of the city by relocating it to the CBD periphery, pedestrianised large sections of the central city and inserted an extended underground railway along the length of a pedestrianised Lambton Quay. Sutch proposed something more radical: the motorway should be postponed indefinitely, at least until Wellington had a town plan (which it did not get until 1968) and a 'high-speed electric train (probably underground)' should be installed from the existing railway station, which 'should eliminate the peak hour traffic jams, reduce the need for all day parking buildings, save space from motorway swathes and eliminate the necessity for a motorway planned for heavy peak loading' <Sutch, Wellington, p. 23>. Dr Sutch's diagnosis of Wellington's ills and his prescription for their cure have an uncanny resonance with the Centre's current campaign to save the Basin Reserve from the depredations of the New Zealand Transport Agency, the institutional successor of the National Roads Board. Unfortunately for Wellington, the issues he raised and the solutions he proffered were and continue to be ignored by those charged with the development of New Zealand's transport infrastructure.

In terms of the Centre's original remit to promote 'good design in all things', its most impressive but generally disregarded non-architectural achievement came in 1966 when a conservative National party government introduced a Bill into Parliament establishing the New Zealand Industrial Design Council (NZIDC), a state-funded, independent agency charged with promoting 'the appreciation, development, improvement, and use of industrial design in New Zealand with the object of improving the quality, efficiency, packaging, presentation and appearance of goods produced in New Zealand'<Industrial Design Act, 1966>.  The Council was Sutch's invention and its first director, Geoffrey Nees, a student foundation member of the Centre, was recruited by Sutch in 1960 to fill the specially created position of Industrial Design Officer at the Department of Industries and Commerce. The Centre was pivotal to the creation of the NZIDC; not only had Sutch drawn inspiration from the Centres publications and debates but he also recruited its members to boost his arguments for its existence. Where other design-related organisations, notably the Design Institute of New Zealand and the New Zealand Society of Industrial Designers (established in 1960) fought against the formation of the NZIDC on the specious grounds of state interference in the private sector, the Centre worked to support the initiative. For the 1963 Export Development Conference, in part organised by Sutch to obtain institutional endorsement of his design initiative, two key background papers were submitted by members of the Centre: an official one; and one submitted by Allan Wild, a former president of the Centre (1956-58), under the false flag of the Public Relations Committee of the Wellington branch of the New Zealand Institute of Architects. It's Wild's 1968 project, Jellicoe Towers – illustrated on the book's dust jacket – that is one of the buildings giving the book its title.

By concentrating on the modernist remaking of the urban fabric of Wellington, Vertical living avoids dealing with what was probably the central problematic of modernism in New Zealand: the nature and function of the metropolitan phenomenon of modernist design as it was manifest in a provincial society. Equally, by asserting the Centre as a predominantly practitioner agency, Gatley and Walker in a way narrow the significance not only of the non-architects who were involved in its activities but also the importance of architecture as a signifier in the wider urban context. It's strange too that the political dimension of the Centre's activities, while hinted at, is largely ignored. The internal tension between the left and right, between those Centre members – such as Sutch – who espoused progressive views seem to have begun in the 1960s. The marginalisation of the left seems to have prompted an increasingly conventional, less diverse, membership. George Porter, the Centre president elected in 1959 to the Wellington City Council on a right-leaning ticket was noted in 1960 as becoming 'concerned that the Centre's activities were antagonising council and hindering progress. He encouraged restraint from members'. This reactionary stance, articulated by a key member of the Centre at the start of another decade of conservative hegemony, remains unexplored in the narrative. It may be the key to understanding why, despite its seven decades of advocacy and activism, the Centre has ultimately had a limited impact on the urban form of Wellington.