Born in Scotland in 1820, Charles Mitchell came to the industrial city of Newcastle at the age of 22. He brought ability and ambition, which he turned to the business of shipbuilding.
Mitchell’s shipyard, established in 1853, ushered out paddle steamers in favour of screw propulsion technology, turning out 16 new ships a year in the 1860s. Among other achievements, Mitchell’s ships helped open the Russian interior to ocean trade. For this, he received a call-up to Saint Petersburg to oversee shipyard renovations in 1862, less than a decade after Russia’s embarrassment by the Western powers in Crimea. Mitchell, who would wake at 4am to practise drawing, won gold at the 1872 Moscow exhibition for his model ships. In Russia, Mitchell came into contact with an important application of his craft: warships.
Two armourers, at that time, built guns big enough to deck out top-rated warships: Alfred Krupp in Essen, Germany, and Sir William Armstrong in Newcastle. When Armstrong sought a dedicated shipbuilder, Charles Mitchell was the obvious choice. Mitchell continued to deliver on contracts for commercial vessels, including the Trans-Siberian Railway ferry Baikal and the first transatlantic oil tanker, Glückauf, but he would be constantly employed in building weapons of war for the world’s governments for the rest of his days.
The Mitchells settled in a stately home which they filled with art and, in 1885, fitted with electric lighting by which to see it. Now, Mitchell decided to play the suburban squire, and in 1888 bestowed a church upon his growing manor.
The shipbuilder set about the upside-down business of church-building with aplomb, investing £30,000 (US$2.5m today). The result is an early mediaeval abbey that never was. Mitchell chose the best local sandstone, and elevated the building’s furniture on rouge jasper columns atop alabaster plinths. A stratigraphy of stone builds towards the east wall, crowned by an 8t altar of Anatolian marble, in the manner of a giant slab of gorgonzola. The decor drips 1880s psychedelia, the Arts and Crafts style stretched taut into symmetrical compositions of elongated palms and lilies, turning enormous knots in wood, stone, wrought metalwork, window and tile. Additional inspiration for Romanesque mosaics and the Venetian bell tower came from Mitchell’s earlier travels in Southern Europe. For his dedication, Mitchell chose St George, warrior patron saint of his adopted country, England, and of Russia, where he received a knighthood in 1868. Among the twisting foliage on the walls, the armoured divine is everywhere seen marshalling lance or sword against disturbed dragons.
Among Mitchell’s commissioned artists for St George’s was one Charles Mitchell the Younger, London-based Pre-Raphaelite and his only surviving child. Charles’ artistic set dreamt up fantastical worlds in the dying decades of Victoria’s reign. One may imagine the elder felt the Mitchell talents were better expended in the North. Yet Mitchell, patron of the arts, might have counted it a crowning glory to have enabled a living in them, impossible to him, for his son.
From the Scottish granite to the Northern English sandstone, Mitchell’s life spans most of the 19th century; his legacy, bound up in the defining developments of the century, is that of its ideal homo economicus, wreathed in his successes.
Mitchell’s memorial adorns the north wall of St George’s, and would appear grandiose in most other settings. Among billowing sails of copper, an Art Nouveau figurine bears a model of his church. Even St George appears serene, a seated benefactor alongside the figures of Art, Charity, Energy, Science and Truth, each one a Mitchell legacy.
A second memorial on the wall commemorates victims of the First World War, when the munitions of the Rhine and Tyne flowered on land and sea. Both Mitchells had died before its outbreak, but the conflagration carried the younger’s artistic set into oblivion, broken retirement or abstract expressionism. A naval arms race was a precipitator of world war: a worst-case – yet widely foretold – scenario, for which industry leaders like Mitchell share in the responsibility.
A polylinguist and perennial foreigner; a modernist whose tastes circled back to the classical; a profiteer of empire awash in the ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement. In evaluating the legacies of Charles Mitchell, can we discern an overarching ‘good?’ Were they, to contort him into the modern jargon, ‘sustainable?’
Any answer is a judgment of his times. Conditions on the Walker riverside in the 1850s had certainly contributed to the premature deaths of two of three Mitchell children. Mitchell saw his advancement in, and of, shipbuilding as the quiet improvement upon a desperate situation until it was less desperate, whereupon he created a space for art.
Policy may set a course for disaster – human, climatological or both. Through association, lobbying and staying informed, industry can continue to work towards building a better world. Sometimes, however, even great shipbuilders must wait for a better wind.
Further information: books.google.co.uk/books/about/Charles_Mitchell_1820_1895.html?id=224sAAAAYAAJ&redir_esc=y
