Something in the Dust

Towards the end of my first day at Weymouth College in Dorset, where I had been accepted on a stone-carving course, I wandered over to the library. Several hours in the workshop hadn’t eased my sense of discombobulation; neither had my tutor’s missing finger.

It was two years since I’d finished my PhD in medieval sculpture. Jobs, however, were scarce and money tight. Sure, I could tell you about the philosophy of the grotesque (short answer: it resists all philosophy) and what a hyphenated chevron was (a late Romanesque ornament) but could I keep body and soul together? So here I was, in my mid-thirties and starting again, learning a trade. Libraries, not workshops, were what I knew. As I browsed the architecture shelves looking for fixed points of familiarity where my past might agreeably build a path into the present, my eye was imme­diately drawn to the five copies of one book, all very well-read judging by their parlous condition. That book was by the Irish sculp­tor Seamus Murphy and it was called Stone Mad. I took a copy back to my rented room and part of me has lived within it ever since. At first, however, the book seemed impenetrable and perplexing, apparently offering nothing more than wild storytelling. Its presence in a practical college and indeed upon a shelf where I might also pick up Modern Practical Stonemasonry or Letters Slate Cut struck me as incongruous. Yet, clearly, we were encouraged to read it. But why? It was only as I grew as a stonemason, later finding employment at Exeter Cathedral, that answers to that question spilled from its pages. In Stone Mad, first published in 1949 and based around the seven years that Murphy was an apprentice stone carver from 1922 to 1930, the experience of work, working stone and above all the joy of devel­oping a craft were lit up by characterful prose that put the ‘stonies’ straight on to the page. This was the important stuff. And, as it turns out, some of that experience was translatable from 1920s Ireland to England in the 2010s. Seamus Murphy (1907–75) was one of Ireland’s most successful stone sculptors. Born in Mallow, County Cork, he became an appren­tice upon leaving school at John Aloysius O’Connor’s Art Marble Works in Cork. There was no tradition of stonemasonry in the family. As he notes in the opening chapter, his father ‘was an engine-driver and had no knowledge of or interest in stone-carving’. From such inauspicious beginnings, however, he quickly adapted to the life of the workshop, taking on various tasks expected of apprentices and learn­ing the ways of the craft as he did so. Carving directly from nature was one of them. Another was collecting the morning beer:

Some of the privileges established by the Guilds hold good to this day and one of them, that of the right to have a beer at 11 o’clock in the morning, though abolished owing to abuse in most trades now, is still held by the ‘Dust’ (as we call members of the stone craft), their case being that it is thirsty work.

Being ‘Number One beer-carrier’ was no straightforward task and immediately plunged the young Murphy into a complex world of relationships necessitating deception (avoiding the foreman), know-ledge (each man had a special hiding place for his gallon jug, which had to be regularly changed to avoid discovery), mental arithmetic (it was not uncommon for a mason to be ‘short’ in his payment) and physical fitness (some masons would only drink beer from particular pubs, sometimes at a distance, having been barred from others). It is this ducking and diving of daily life, the workshop folklore, that forms the backbone of the book. Characters quickly emerge. ‘The Gargoyle’ takes an interest in Murphy’s talents from the start, offering guidance laced with gentle humour. Danny Melt keeps the workshop clean, removing the broken stone and dust that build up around the bankers (work stations) with wit and wisdom. Blueskull, Danno, Black Jack, Facemould, Stun – the names run from the page like the stories, weaving a world of high times and poverty, hard work and pride. Through them, the history of Ireland’s architecture is told not by any traditional means but through the hands of those who carved the details, who worked the blocks of stone themselves. Skills were chewed over at dinner-hour with plenty of room for mythologizing. Nedgill talks about a man ‘by the name of O’Dowd’, the best that ‘this country ever produced’, who made ‘stone-cutting look simple and you would wonder why the blazes you had to serve seven years to it’. The narrative hums along on the discussion of craft, the whereabouts of quarries, the quality of their stones and how they cut, how long they might last, always who did what and whether it was any good. Establishing a name for your­self in this world was of paramount importance and reputations could be made on the strength of one job, one stone even. Having served his apprenticeship Murphy went on to have an extraordinarily high-achieving career. In 1931 he won the Gibson Bequest Scholarship and the following year left Ireland for Paris to study at the Académie Colarossi under the sculptors Andrew O’Connor and Marcel Gimond. Two years later he returned to Cork to set up his own studio where he worked mainly in limestone, pro­ducing ecclesiastical statues, portrait heads and memorials. Notable works include Saint Brigid and the Twelve Apostles in San Francisco and the United Nations Monument in Glasnevin, Dublin, as well as numerous busts of Irish public figures. His work was a bridge between the medieval traditions of Ireland and the modern, characterized by a stylized naturalism based upon technical skill but neither overly formal nor abstract. Stone Mad shows how Murphy’s development into an important figure in the history of twentieth-century Irish art, ultimately becom­ing Professor of Sculpture at the Royal Hibernian Academy, started in the intense, companionable environment of the workshop where the talk was as sharp as the arrises on the finished stones – where even in death the constant undercurrent of dry humour spared no one. ‘When a member of the craft died we lost half a day to go to the funeral. But if he died “convenient” (on a Friday, that is, with a Sunday funeral) everyone gave him credit for it, and the men from the other yards turned out as well.’ Reading between the lines and the jokes it is evident that – along with Fred Bower’s Rolling Stonemason, written in 1936 and describing a life of hardship and masonry set within a similar period – much of Stone Mad forms a poignant document of a trade in decline. The times were changing, with increased mechanization and differing tastes in architecture and materials leading to many stonemasons and carvers becoming ‘just a memory for another generation’. As Murphy writes:

I am always deeply moved when I meet some of the old men I have worked with, standing idle at street corners with their lumpy hands hanging awkwardly by their sides – always hoping things will improve. There is something about men with whom you have done many a hard day’s work that makes them very dear to you . . . one feels the bond is strong.

What once might have been counted on as a constant – the hand (and the humour) behind the chisel – turns out to be as uncertain as some of the more friable stones dismissed over lunch. The ‘Dust’, with their grandstanding and pride and knowledge of the best stones, ultimately start to blow away. Stone Mad is one of those books that, with its off-kilter narrative and chop-change chapters, still seems relevant. Really it is about stories and how stories are wrested from the air, the earth and, of course, from the stone, but sometimes out of nothing at all. In its pages I see masons and carvers with dust-lined faces and strong opinions, more than ready to tell a few tales over a pint or three, nodding at me across the decades.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 84 © Alex Woodcock 2024