William Kingsnorth

16/05/1850

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Working after hours without training or payment, the pious and civic-minded W.K. Mallyon planned and specified the construction of 26 or more Anglican churches between 1880 and 1912 while a bank manager in the Mid-North.

Soon after marrying Rebecca Britcher, née Jervis, in 1847, William Mallyon Snr – a grazier originally from Kent in England – brought cattle overland from Queensland to the North-West Bend of the Murray River in South Australia (Reg: 5.3.1904: 7). In mallee country identified with the aboriginal ‘kings’, Ramco and Cobdogla, supplanted by the likes of Philip Levi and the von Riebens, he and his brother-in-law ran the Thurk and Murpka stations (M: 13.5.1933, 4). A family of three sons and four daughters was brought up here and, after 1862, from the hotel at Weston’s Flat, near Morgan, formerly known as the ‘Rest and Be Thankful’ (Ruediger: 83; Indices: passim). The Mallyons also had a base near Gawler where the older children – the eldest, William Jnr, was by then 12 – first attended a primary school (Burgess: 540). It was rumoured that William Snr had drowned in a reach of the river named Mallyon’s Bend but he had in fact left the district in 1867 to be granted a licence of the Wheatsheaf Hotel, Virginia, closer to Gawler. From there, in 1870, he transferred to the East Torrens (Tower) Hotel, Magill, where he remained for 15 years (Hoad: passim).

At the young age of 20, William Jnr became a warden of St George’s, Magill: the beginning of a lifelong association with the Church of England (Fenton: 7). Four years later, William Jnr joined the National Bank and, despite his limited education, rapidly rose up the ranks. Within 18 months, having served clerkships at Nuriootpa, Clare and Jamestown, he was appointed branch manager at Caltowie. Harvest time found a lone banking official, working from a sweltering room 12 feet x 6 feet, driven to exhaustion but still equal to the exigencies of the primary producers for whom he showed a natural affinity (R: 20.5.1933, 3). Still only 27, Mallyon was then entrusted to launch a new National Bank agency at Quorn. Accomplishing this, he proceeded in mayoral fashion to aid the local settlers to bring essential government facilities to the nascent town (PPR: 12.1.1907, 2). Early in 1878, he married Susan Williams in Walkerville before moving to his next post at Redhill, south of Crystal Brook. Underextended there, Mallyon dedicated himself to the erection of St Andrew’s (1880-1), teaching himself the necessary architectural skills and leading the campaign to compile the required £500 – twice his initial estimate (AO: 30.4.1881, 26).

Rewarding his efficient accountancy, prudential investment advice and purposeful engagement of the community, the National Bank’s controllers put Mallyon in charge of their branch at Port Pirie. He, his wife and the first two of his subsequent nine children moved into the august, live-in Ellen Street premises in January 1882. Immediately ambitious on behalf of the town, he attached himself to St Paul’s Church and invigorated a drive to realise a proposed cultural institute. On committees and by conveying arguments in the press, he became prominent in a successful bid to persuade the state government (inclined to favour vested city interests) to divert the products of the fabulous newly-found Broken Hill mines in New South Wales to the Spencer Gulf port via a railway link through Peterborough rather than the longer route to Port Adelaide. Once the ‘Barrier [Range] trade’ was secured, smelters and refineries were logically established, timber and fuel depots were set up, merchant shipping and stevedoring businesses were expanded and service industries followed, the economic prosperity of the town – already a proven agricultural market – was assured. Mallyon later remarked ‘he had been priest, deacon and everything else before the place began to progress’. Indeed, he allegedly buried the dead ‘when no ordained priest was available’ (Robinson: 247).

Highly conscious of the value of an education and the ethic of self-help, Mallyon guided the formation of the Port Pirie Institute from an initial three rooms, partly funded by the resale of ships’ ballast, to a fine two-storeyed civic centrepiece master-planned – according to his own exacting specifications – by English & Soward towards the end of 1884 (SAR: 13.12.1884,6; 8.6.1896, 6). Although credit for this achievement was begrudged him and his Building Committee, Mallyon, now a procurator of secular as well as ecclesiastic buildings, turned his attention to raising churches ‘for people who had their hearts in their work’, starting with St Columba’s, Snowtown – entirely similar to the basic 30 feet x 20 feet St Andrew’s. Beside those directly involved, virtually no one realised that the banker made these gifts – he never charged – in his own time, so commonly was he to be seen involved in almost every other aspect of the commercial, cultural and social life of Port Pirie. In quick succession, he accepted offices in the Church of England Vestry, the Y.M.C.A., the Freemasons, the Bible, Horticultural & Floricultural and Literary Societies, plus many more.

Elected a synodsman to represent St Paul’s, Port Pirie, Mallyon gained a direct line to the newly-appointed Dr Kennion, a bishop who actively encouraged the foundation of ‘English’ churches across the state. Parish building committees applied to the Adelaide head office for permission to build and for loans up to £200 from the Bishop’s Home Mission Society. Mallyon was referred to applicants, helping them selectively to build modest, extendable places of worship on the tightest of budgets (Fenton: passim). Although his masonry churches will have been built according to a standard specification, a range of designs with or without sanctuaries, with or without porches and vestries, with towers or without, was evinced. It would be unfair to say that the smaller churches possess a naïve charm and the bigger ones a pretentious grandeur; they result innocently from the sacrifice of struggling congregations, challenging circumstances and limited building expertise. An amateur by his own admission, Mallyon made up for unstudied design and rudimentary drawing (SRG 94/A98/5) with punctilious administration, mostly conducted by handwritten letter (Fenton, Scrapbook No. 1). He emerged an architect recognised to be a zealous project-manager who carried out contracts to the letter, seeking full value for every penny expended.

In 1884-6, Mallyon oversaw the building of six churches between Wilmington and Minlaton. For Christ Church, Wilmington, he intervened to displace a more ordinary and more costly design, personally canvassing far and wide to obtain the kero-burning ‘chandeliers’ he had specified (SAR: 27.4.1885, 1). In the same way he was known to drive 40 miles just to read at Matins, ‘nothing was too much trouble provided that the parson and the committee were enthusiastic’ (Fenton: passim). A dozen more buildings followed over the course of the next ten years. These were mostly close to home, but included the tiny Lipson church near Tumby Bay (smaller still than St George’s, Georgetown), St Stephen’s, Uraidla, and a sizeable Sunday Schoolroom at St Matthew’s, Kensington, where the contract was handled by the architect Edward Davies (AO: 21.3.1891, 7). The supportive regime (1883-95) of Dr Kennion ended for both the bishop and Mallyon on the high point of St Aidan’s, Saddleworth, even if churches, such as those at Koolunga and Yacka, executed in the lead-up, compared poorly. St Aidan’s sported orthodox transepts and an assertive tower as well as stained glass supplied by E.F. Troy – not the make-do Irish coloured transfers seen at St Peter’s, Peterborough, and elsewhere (A: 24.8.1894, 6; PT: 25.1.1889, 4).

Apart from earnestly abetting the completion of Stage Two of the Port Pirie Institute, architectural work was set aside for a period (1895-) after the death, in her infancy, of Madeleine, the Mallyons’ seventh daughter when the eldest, Ethel, turned 16. Investment in property and personal mortgage-lending on a surprising scale (LTO: 1885-1920) may have occupied banking hours but on weekends the manager showed a continuing interest in horticulture. Regularly found judging and exhibiting cut flowers at regional spring and autumn shows, Mallyon also ploughed his own experimental farmland, for example, a seven-acre field of lucerne, until recurrent attacks of gout forced him to deputise (QM 30.8.1901, 1). He reformed the Port Pirie Agricultural Society, broadening its ambit to embrace Industries and the Arts (PPR 25.6.1904, 2). And, not to neglect a promise made to the new Bishop Harmer, he resumed his charitable church-building programme, turning firstly to Quorn in 1897. Smerdon & Co., the pre-eminent contractors of the North, built the nave of St Matthew’s, anticipating the addition of a chancel four years later (QM: 5.12.1905, 3). Still lacking a vestry and porches, St Matthew’s appeals by virtue of a raw, rocky interior within a well-proportioned, formally-dressed shell. In the interim, Mallyon went further to conceive the buttressed ashlar exterior of St Paul’s, Port Pirie – another larger church to be left unfinished despite the best of plans.

Remembered for this creditable design, if no other, Mallyon in fact received assistance to prepare it from English & Soward, architects, in the person of 24 year-old Firmin Jenkins (QM: 2.3.1900, 4). The paths of these two would cross again in due course. At the close of the nineteenth century, a further two churches dedicated to St Mary were built in his typical ‘Colonial Gothic’ style, one at Goyder, near Balaklava, and one at Edithburgh, to join the Quorn and Port Pirie examples. A lull then ensued before a further seven could be opened during the eight years, 1905-12, at the start of the reign of Bishop Thomas. Yorke Peninsula was once more visited (Winulta, near Maitland) and Eyre Peninsula twice more (Tumby Bay and Streaky Bay). Word had spread by this time that the honest banker gave free architectural advice. A building committee representing St John’s, Auburn, and a hotelier seeking an expert opinion about her proposed new Flinders Rest, Warnertown (designed by Jenkins), took advantage of that service (A: 23.7.1907, 9; PPR: 26.10.1915, 3). Predictably, Mallyon himself speculated not only on paper but in bricks and mortar, erecting in Alexander Street, Port Pirie, two residential shops and a studio-gallery (1908) for his son, Collison, a mechanic and professional photographer (R: 19.11.1908, 8). Once the unheard-of sum of £2500 had been spent on St Augustine’s, Streaky Bay, Mallyon called a halt to church-building; he had reached the age of 62 (C: 22.6.1912, 13). M.E. Fenton, Mallyon’s champion who brought his work to public notice, illustrates how the evolution of his structures culminates in the complex hammer-beamed and scissor-trussed roof of St Augustine’s. A fine cruciform church – equal in size to St Paul’s, with a tower added – it is said to be his masterpiece.

With one eye on retirement and another on the cost of his daughters’ weddings, Mallyon multiplied both his speculation in real estate, for example, creating the subdivision of Ericville, next to Solomontown, and the number of his signatures on mortgages (PPR: 30.9.1908, 3). Having assumed part ownership in 1903 of Prest’s Ltd, the ‘Universal Providers’ at Port Pirie and four other Mid-North towns (O: 17.6.1916, 32), Mallyon could pass up a share in the 70-horsepower dockside carrying business which his brother, Alfred, took over from Daniel Kennelly three years later (Burgess: 539, 540). Building work and horticulture occupied him less. To encourage his wife and daughters in their choices to become nurses, kindergarteners and Sunday Schoolteachers, he performed committee work for the hospital, the district nursing service and the Young Men’s Association (R: 28.7.1908, 3). But he could not abandon the drawing board. Plans of a new gymnasium for the Y.M.A. which he presented just before leaving Port Pirie in 1916 were, in effect, a parting gift to the town (PPR: 28.11.1914, 6). Sometimes thought to be sanctimonious and meddlesome, ‘our respected townsman, Mr Mallyon’ was nevertheless acknowledged to be that rare creature, a ‘popular’ bank manager. A partiality necessarily shown to his private customers prevented him from seeking any local government position during his 34 years in charge at Ellen Street (R: 20.5.1933, 3).

Retirement in Adelaide at College Park was spoiled in May 1918 by the death on the Western Front of the Mallyons’ younger son, Alfred. Within days of the announcement, Mrs Mallyon literally died of grief. But, 17 months later, Mr Mallyon remarried a Port Pirie resident 30 years his junior, Sarah Kimbley, and by 1921 they had produced his eighth daughter, Rebecca. The newly-weds restarted family life at seaside Brighton where a gentleman’s bungalow fancifully incorporating a steeple, Markaranka, (named after a Nor’ West Bend station) was co-designed by Philip Claridge. A qualified Justice of the Peace, Mallyon sat on benches in magistrates’ courts and, still unable to withdraw from civic affairs, served Brighton’s South Ward in 1925 and 1926. A pet project four years in the making during the Depression was Grundy Hall, a Sunday School next to St Jude’s, Brighton – another collaboration with Philip Claridge (Andison: 31,32). A holiday spent revisiting his favourite New Zealand early in 1933 failed to revitalise a tired William Mallyon who died one day short of his 83rd birthday later that year.

Giles Walkley and Alison McDougall

Citation details
Walkley, Giles and McDougall, Alison, 'Mallyon, William Kingsnorth’, Architecture Museum, University of South Australia, 2014, Architects of South Australia: [http://www.architectsdatabase.unisa.edu.au/arch_full.asp?Arch_ID=135]