Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 51.djvu/27

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Scott
19
Scott

Jersey a grant, dated 28 July 1685, of five hundred acres of land in the province. On 1 Aug. he embarked in the Henry and Francis with nearly two hundred persons, including his wife and family; but he and his wife died on the voyage. The wife is said to have been well connected. A son and a daughter survived. The latter, named Eupham or Euphemia, married in 1686, John Johnstone, an Edinburgh druggist, who had been one of her fellow-passengers on the disastrous voyage to New Jersey. To him the proprietors issued, on 13 Jan. 1686–7, a confirmation of the grant made to Scot, and their descendants occupied a good position in the colony. Most of their descendants left America as loyalists at the revolution, but some of them are still living in New Jersey.

[Anderson's Scottish Nation, iii. 413; Preface to Whitehead's reprint in Appendix, 2nd edit. 1875, founded on East Jersey records, and his Early History of Amboy; Allibone's Dict. Engl. Lit. ii. 1955; Catalogues of British Museum and Edinburgh Advocates' Library.]

SCOTT, Sir GEORGE GILBERT (1811–1878), architect, born in 1811 at Gawcott, Buckinghamshire, was the son of Thomas Scott, perpetual curate of that place, and grandson of Thomas Scott [q. v.] the commentator. Scott's mother was daughter of Dr. Lynch of Antigua, and was descended maternally from the Gilberts, a family of West Indian proprietors. The members of the large household at Gawcott parsonage, including Miss Gilbert (Scott's great-aunt), who had been kissed by John Wesley, were bound by many traditions to the evangelical party, and their pronounced religious opinions raised a social barrier between them and their neighbours. Scott was first educated at home, but his father, who was an amateur in building operations, soon recognised in his son's love of sketching churches a predilection for architecture. After spending a year (1826–7) in preparatory schooling with his uncle, the Rev. Samuel King, at Latimers, near Chesham, he was accordingly articled in 1827 to James Edmeston, who is said to have been ‘better known as a poet than an architect.’ His evangelical views doubtless recommended him to Scott's father.

At Edmeston's office Scott got little encouragement in the style which afterwards made him famous. His master, who had experimented with ‘Gothic’ in a chapel at Leytonstone, condemned it as expensive, and warned Scott's father that his pupil wasted his time in sketching mediæval buildings.

After the conclusion of his pupilage in 1831 Scott spent two months in sketching near Gawcott, and, returning to London, took lodgings with his brother John in Warwick Court, Holborn. In order to gain practical experience he attached himself for a time to the firm of Grissell & Peto [see Peto, Sir Samuel Morton], who appointed him superintendent of their works in progress at Hungerford Market.

In 1832 he began an engagement lasting two years in the office of Henry Roberts, trained under Sir Robert Smirke [q. v.], and assisted him in the working-drawings, execution, and ‘measuring up’ of the Fishmongers' Hall. Scott looked back to this as a barren period; he did little sketching; ‘Smirkism and practical work’ were, he considered, chilling his natural tastes, and even in his two opportunities of private design (a rectory for his father's new living at Wappenham, and a private house at Chesham) he was disheartened by a sense of deficient originality.

The death of his father in 1834 threw upon Scott the necessity of immediate bread-winning. He was engaged at the time in assisting Kempthorne (an architect with whom he occupied rooms in Carlton Chambers, Regent Street) in preparing model plans for the workhouses to be erected under the new poor law. Scott resolved to turn this special experience to account, and, besides issuing a printed appeal to his father's friends for general architectural patronage, went down to Wappenham and conducted a vigorous canvass among the guardians of the district. This aggressive action, though an infringement of more recent ideas of professional etiquette, produced immediate fruit. He became architect to four poor-law unions, and engaged as clerk of the works (subsequently as collaborator) W. B. Moffat, a builder's son, whose acquaintance he had made when both were pupils of Edmeston.

Their combined exertions (for Moffat surpassed Scott in the campaign of self-recommendation) produced a brisk and, at first, inartistic practice, which was supplemented by success in many competitions. Scott eventually took his companion into formal partnership, which terminated in 1845, after the erection of some fifty buildings of the workhouse class, the most successful of which were the union buildings at Dunmow, Belper, Windsor, Amersham, and Macclesfield, and the orphan asylum at Wanstead—all in quasi-Elizabethan style.

During his partnership with Moffat, Scott was not without ecclesiastical commissions. His first seven churches (at Birmingham, Lincoln, Shaftesbury, Hanwell, Turnham,