By the untimely death of the late Mr. Percival Murgatroyd we suffer
the irreplaceable loss of our youngest and perhaps most talented
master bricklayer. The story of his life is yet another example of
genius triumphing over adversity. Perce Murgatroyd was born in a
mean street. His father was a poor hardworking physician. Lacking the
influence necessary for the introduction of his boy to some lucrative
commercial calling he contrived at great self-sacrifice to educate him
for the Civil Service.
The long hours of grinding toil and the complete lack of sympathy at
home could not extinguish the divine fire of genius in the youthful
Murgatroyd. Exhausted and hungry as he often was at the end of the
day's work, he devoted his leisure to the study of bricks and mortar,
and out of his scanty pocket-money he bought for himself first a
trowel and later a plummet.
When I first made his acquaintance he was already, at the age of
twenty-five, assisting a bricklayer's helper, and was fairly launched
on a career of unbroken success which was to culminate in a master
bricklayership at the record age of thirty-eight.
Some of the finest things Murgatroyd did are to be found in and around
Tooting, a quarter which is becoming known as Murgatroyd's London; but
there is scarcely a district which does not cherish some gem from
his trowel. At Wanstead Flats, during some reparations to "Edelweiss
Cottage," there was discovered under the plaster a party-wall which
proved to be a genuine Murgatroyd. It is one of his early works,
executed with his studied reserve of power, and is marred only by
suggestions of the conventional haste of the early Georgian School,
from which Murgatroyd had not in those days completely broken away.
It is also worth while to make a pilgrimage to Walham Green, where all
that is best and most typical of the Master--that effect he obtained
of deliberate treatment of each individual brick--may be seen in a
perfect little poem--an outhouse (unfinished).
The fame of Perce Murgatroyd is founded on the quality rather than
the quantity of his output. To our eternal loss he suffered from a
temperament. He worked only by fits and starts. He never overcame a
superstition that "Monday was a bad day for good work." And he was too
conscientious an artist to attempt anything on days when the sky was
overcast and the light bad. Often too, when he had actually made a
start, he would stand, smoking furiously, in front of his work waiting
for an inspiration.
This habit of his was the primary cause of his premature end. Emerging
from some such fit of abstraction he became aware that it was
after twelve. Convivial spirit that he was, he hurried to join his
colleagues at their dinner, displaying remarkable agility as he
descended the scaffold. But the effort caused him to perspire, and he
took a chill, from which he never recovered.
The keynote of Murgatroyd's character was simplicity. Unaided he rose
to be pre-eminent as a bricklayer, but in private life he never became
accustomed to the exclusive society to which by his genius he had won
admittance. He never quite lost the mincing speech of the class from
which he sprang, nor could he acquire facility in the vigorous mode
of expression proper to his new and exalted station. "Not 'arf"
and "'Strewf" ever came haltingly to his tongue, and to the last he
struggled painfully with the double negative.
But the same indomitable courage which brought him to the top of his
profession eventually served him in his adopted social sphere, and in
the end he won through.
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[Illustration:
_Gwendoline._ "'E AIN'T AGOIN' TO GET UP FOR NO BUN. 'E'D 'AVE SUCH AN
ORFUL LOT OF UP TO GET."]
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