John Douglas was the architect for the chancel, the eastern end of All Saints', built between 1905 and 1907. He himself was born in 1829 at Sandiway in Cheshire, where his father was lord of the manor, and where he himself later became lord of the manor. Pevsner, the author of the series Buildings of England, described his father as a "local builder", but that was wide of the mark. He called his son "Sholto" and the Sholto Douglas family was related to half the Scottish nobility. The Marquess of Queensberry who set the rules for boxing was a Sholto Douglas, there were Sholto Douglas baronets in Kincardineshire, there is a Sholto Douglas commemorated on the wall of the Cathedral ruins in St Andrews, and Air Marshal Sir Sholto Douglas was a notable figure in the Second World War.
John Douglas studied architecture under Sharpe and Paley in Lancaster, much influenced by Paley's later partner, Austin. Originally he worked in the Gothic style, but later developed his own. "Gifted with the artistic temperament, modest, and retiring to a degree", he lived and worked in Chester for 56 years, where he was the most outstanding man of his profession. He designed churches and schools, houses, and other buildings throughout Cheshire and North Wales. He was particularly employed by the Duke of Westminster for farmhouses on the Grosvenor Estate, though the Duke's palatial Eaton Hall was designed by Alfred Waterhouse, father of Paul Waterhouse who designed most of All Saints', with Douglas being left to do the lesser buildings. The Duke was an enthusiast for "noggin" or black and white designs; what are now called half-timbered or Tudor with black woodwork and white plaster, and Douglas did many of his buildings in this style. St Deiniol's Library Hawarden the memorial to Gladstone, was also his work.
Pevsner credits Douglas with a "growing refinement and feeling for location", while saying that his best work was "the stretch of St Wedburgh Street close to the Cathedral", which he bought and built as a speculation. Visitors to Chester cannot help seeing this - the half-timbered Tudor fronts are usually considered ancient, though in fact they are "sham", "nailled on boards", and Pevsner is right when he says, "one may well find their work hard to take", "it jingles away too insistently", and, "How much more convincing Douglas is where the temptation to fussiness inherent in the magpie technique is avoided." But of some Douglas works Pevsner is approving, though of one church he writes, "Very ugly, and not, it seems, in a deliberately challenging way." Would he have liked it better if Douglas had meant it to be ugly?
John Douglas died in 1911 but his designs for All Saints' must still have been on hand when the church was completed in the 1920s; nobody commissions an architect to design half a church. So why were they not used? Obviously Paul Waterhouse was selected because he had designed changes to Mount Melville for the Younger family, and had designed the Younger Hall, and one of his children was married to one of the Youngers, but why was a new architect wanted at all? Probably Mrs Younger concluded that Waterhouse would do a better job, and if she thought this, she was right. The chancel as we have it would look broad and squat if it were not for Nathaniel Hitch's vertical line between the east windows, in the wooden steeple which we take for granted, and for his hanging cross over the chancel steps, and both these were done when Waterhouse was in charge. Furthermore, John Douglas shared the Duke of Westminster's mania for Tudor half-timbering, which caused St Wedbergh Street in Chester to overwhelm the viewer with its garish contrasts. And John Douglas must have intended the same thing, though with Gothic woodwork for All Saints' interior - if we look at the wall above the bishop's chair we can see a patch of white plaster divided in three by wooden beams, and he cannot have put that there unless it was intended to run right along the interior walls. It would have been acceptable - but only just. And it would have been dull at the very least, and probably distracting and, in Pevsner's words, jingling too insistently.
In writing of Paul Waterhouse I quoted the three adjectives which applied to his speeches, witty, elegant, and unexpected, and said they could also be applied to his buildings. John Douglas was none of these things. Waterhouse may have thrown in pillars just for the fun of it, and the chapel at All Saints' may be too obviously a banking hall with an altar at the end of it, but the result has more than a hint of mystery - it is ironic that John Douglas who was known as a designer of churches normally produced buildings without any hint of the spiritual, while Waterhouse the designer of banks and insurance offices managed to suggest that there is more to life than meets the eye.
Article by: Gavin White