PERCE MURGATROYD, MASTER BRICKLAYER.
By One who knew Him.
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.
Gwendoline. "'E ain't agoin' to get up for no bun. 'E'd 'ave such an orful lot of up to get."