This site celebrates the life and work of sculptor John
Cassidy (1860 - 1939).

The Jubilee fountain is under wraps during conservation work,
April 2009.

As well from its Cassidy connections, Albert Square has much to
interest anyone interested in archirecture and public art. It was
created in the 1860s, as part of the project to build a new town hall. John Parkinson-Bailey writes:
'This required the demolition of the Engraver's Arms public house, the
Manchester Coffee Roasting Works, a coal yard, a smithy, a number of
warehouses and workshops and a warren of back-to-back houses and
courts; on what is now the open space of Albert Square were crammed
about 100 buildings.'
Prince Albert, consort of Queen Victoria, died in 1861, and the
site of the square was chosen, and appropriately named, as the location
for the city's memorial to him, which forms its centrepiece. Designed
by architect
Thomas Worthington, with a figure of Albert by Matthew Noble is
mounted in a 'ciborium.'
The general appearance of the structure resembles the much larger and
more elaborate Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens, London,
designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott; Worthington's design had
been published in The Builder
magazine in 1862, some time before Scott's. In London, Albert is
seated, whereas in Manchester he has to stand. 100 years later, the
memorial was in poor condition, and there were suggestions that it
should be removed, but it was renovated in 1977 following a public
appeal.


The square, and the exteriors of the buildings around, are replete with
statues and other sculptures. We refer you to the works and sites
listed below for more detail, but here is a list of the main
portrait sculptures in the square, with links to the pages of the
National Recording Project:

Links and references
Manchester's Irish Story
Manchester
Town
Hall
and
Albert Square, by Bob
Speel.
Clare Hartwell, Manchester (Pevsner Architectural
Series.) Penguin Books, 2001.
Recommended as a pocket-sized guide to the area.
John J. Parkinson-Bailey, Manchester, an architectural history.
Published
by
Manchester
University Press, 2000.
Nicola C. Smith,
'Imitation and invention in two Albert Memorials.' The
Burlington Magazine, Vol. 123, No. 937 (Apr., 1981), pp. 232-237.
Clare Hartwell and Terry Wyke (Eds.) Making Manchester ... an
illustrated volume of essays on the history of architecture of
Manchester and the region, published in honour of John H. G. Archer on
his 80th birthday. Published by the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian
Society, 2007.
Derek Brumhead and Terry Wyke. A
walk round Manchester sculptures. Walkround Books, 1990.
Down
in Albert Square...
'Twas down in Albert Square
I never shall forget,
Her eyes they shone like diamonds
And the evening it was wet, wet, wet.
Her hair hung down in curls,
She was a charming rover,
And we rode all night,
Through the pale moonlight,
Way down to Pomona.
- Manchester music hall song, recorded by "The Two
Beggarmen" - sometimes claimed to be abouy Lamorna in Cornwall.
|
'Down in Albert Square' *
Cassidy in the heart of
Manchester

Nineteenth-Century Manchester was a proud city, wealthy from the income
of its textile and engineering industries and eager to express its
importance through architecture, and public sculpture had its part to
play in their vision. John Cassidy set up in business at the height of
this era, and although his public works in the city centre are somewhat
overshadowed by those other, nationally famous, sculptors, some
can be discovered by the curious. His major city centre work,
'Adrift', is sadly not on public display at the time of writing
(November
2008.)
Find your way to Albert Square, a large public space, now
thankfully largely traffic-free and face Alfred Waterhouse's
magnificent Town Hall, and the Albert Memorial. Walk to your left and
you
will see the 'Diamond Jubilee Fountain' - as seen in our picture above
- although it may well not actually be working.
The Jubilee referred to was 1897, the 60th anniversary of Queen
Victoria
ascending to the throne; there was also, at the time, celebration
of the completion the same year of the Aqueduct which brings water
almost 96 miles to Manchester from Thirlmere in the English Lake
District. There seems to have been an 'official opening' of the
aqueduct in three years earlier in 1894, for which a temporary fountain
was apparently set up.
The Public Monument and Sculpture Association's National Recording
Project relates:
The question of
erecting a permanent fountain in Albert Square took a
decisive turn when in the summer of 1896 the council were informed by
the Manchester architects, Thomas Worthington and Sons, that an
anonymous donor wished to present the city with a large ornamental
fountain to stand in the square. Worthingtons were responsible for the
design, a three-basin fountain in granite and sandstone. A bronze
dolphin, modelled by John Cassidy, decorated the top of the fountain.
Looking at it, the observer might be surprised at the description of
the creature as a 'dolphin' rather than some kind of mythical
sea-serpent; dolphins are mammals and do not, surely, have scaly skins.

The bronze dragon-like water spouts around the basin are probably also
by Cassidy, although we have no documentary evidence.

Apparently, the fountain, built in sandstone (the upper bowl is red
granite) by J & H Patterson, was not always popular with the
public, especially on windy days, and in 1920s it was removed to Heaton
Park in north Manchester. A 1980s proposal to return into to the city
centre came to nothing, but by its centenary in 1997 its time had come:
Albert Square had been transformed from a large 'traffic island' to a
worthwhile pedestrian space, and funding was raised to re-erect the
fountain in its original location. In the words of the plaque set into
the ground by the fountain:
THE
QUEEN VICTORIA JUBILEE
FOUNTAIN
COMPLETED JULY 1997
FUNDED
BY
MANCHESTER CITY COUNCIL
NORTH WEST WATER
EUROPEAN REGIONAL
DEVELOPMENT FUND
THIS FOUNTAIN
WAS ORIGINALLY SITED
IN THIS LOCATION
TO
COMMEMORATE
THE SUPPLY OF WATER FROM
THE THIRLMERE RESERVOIR
The cost of the
re-instatement was reported as £250,000, and it was unveiled on
22 July 1997.

The fountain in action, April 2009.

Albert Square, circa 1905.

Albert Square in the 1950s: cars everywhere, and no fountain. The area
to the right, in front of the town hall, is now a pedestrian space. The
Albert Memorial dominates the scene: at this time it was slowly falling
into dereliction, but was extensively restore in in 1978. In the
foreground, the 1894 marble sculpture of Manchester worthy Oliver
Heywood (1825-1892) by London-based Albert Bruce-Joy, who was one of
Cassidy's chief competitors for this kind of work.

The square in 2008. In the foreground, the 1891 statue by Bruce-Joy of
Manchester MP and reformer John Bright. Behind the fountain stands
James Fraser, Bishop of Manchester from 1870 to 1885, sculpted by
Thomas Woolner, standing with his back to the other statues in the
square.
Inside the Town Hall
Note: the Town Hall closed in 2018 for a six-year refurbishment programme.
Some of the works are now on display elswhere, but not, as far as we know,
the Cassidy works from the Sculpture Hall.
To find more Cassidy works (and much else), if you are there during
normal office hours, take a look inside the Town Hall. Enter through
the main door under the tower, and climb the entrance staircase,
flanked
by statues of two Manchester's great scientists, John Dalton (left, by
Sir Francis Chantrey, 1891) and James Joule (by Alfred Gilbert, 1893),
the two considered by Brumhead and Wyke in A Walk round Manchester Statues to
be 'among the most important works of art on display in Manchester.

Turn right at the top of the steps and you will find the 'sculpture
hall', a rather curious space which seems to have evolved from a room
intended as a waiting area. It contains a
collection of busts (see list on the left of this page) for which no
other place could be found, but on the
walls can be found two relief panels made by John Cassidy. The large
bronze portrait of Alderman Sir
Daniel McCabe (above) a member of
Manchester City Council from 1889 to 1919, serving as Lord
Mayor from 1913-15, was presented to the Corporation of Manchester by
Cassidy, for reasons that become clear on study of Sir Daniel's life
story.
Born in Manchester in 1852, the son of poor Irish immigrants, he rose
to was elected to the City Council in from 1889. He became Manchester's
first Roman Catholic Lord Mayor in November 1913, and was asked by the
Corporation in 1914 to serve a second year. His sister, Mrs O'Neill,
was Lady Mayoress, so we can suppose that, like Cassidy he was a
bachelor, and perhaps something of a hero to him and the Manchester
Irish community in general.
A Deputy Lieutenant for Lancashire from 1915, and Knighted by King
George V on 15 January 1916, he was a Director of the
Manchester Ship Canal. He died in London on 29 September 1919, is
buried in St Joseph's Cemetery, Moston where there is another casting
of the plaque.

The other Cassidy panel in the sculpture hall was made to commemorate
the historic first transatlantic flight, made by Manchester men Alcock
and
Brown. The tablet tells its own story in detail:
This tablet is erected by the
Corporation of Manchester to record the great achievement of two
Manchester men, Captain Sir John Alcock, K.B.E., D.S.C., and Lieutenant
Sit Arthur Whitten Brown, K.B.E. who on the fifteenth day of June,
1919, were the first to fly without a stop across the Atlantic
Ocean from America to the British Isles, the time taken in covering the
distance being 15 hours 57 minutes, the distance being 1,950 English
statute miles and the aeroplane used being entirely of British
manufacture.
(Other sources differ slightly from this inscription in both time and
distance.) Either side of the inscriptions are portraits of the two
aviators. The tablet was unveiled by the Lord Mayor on 2 November 1921,
and the next day The Times
reported:
The tablet
shows the figure of an American Indian mounted on horseback
gazing across the ocean at the disappearing aeroplane, towards which on
the other side a figure of Britannia stretches out a welcoming hand.
Two gold medals especially struck to Mr Cassidy's designs for the
Corporation were presented, one to the father of the late Sir John
Alcock, and the other to Sir A.W. Brown.
At least one other Alcock and Brown artifact by Cassidy is known to
exist: a round medallion - perhaps a design for the gold medals - in a
private collection in the USA.
The story of Alcock and Brown's famous flight in a Vickers Vimy
aircraft from Newfoundland to Ireland, wiling a £10,000 prize
offered by the Daily Mail has
been often told (Manchester
Guardian
report), and is commemorated in both Britain and
Ireland. Both were knighted by King George V soon after their
flight.
Brown, the navigator, lived on until 1948; born in Glasgow in 1886, he
was brought up in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Manchester and worked as an
engineer for the Westinghouse company. The house at 6 Oswald Road,
Chorlton-cum-Hardy is adorned with a 'blue plaque' in his memory
Alcock, the pilot, was born born in 1892 in Seymour Grove, Old
Trafford, and later lived at 6 Kingswood Road, Fallowfield where his
life is marked by a 'blue plaque.' According to Wikipedia he 'was
present at the Science Museum in London on 15 December 1919 when the
recovered Vimy was presented to the nation. Three days later he was
flying a new Vickers amphibious plane, the Type 54 Viking, to the first
postwar aeronautical exhibition in Paris when he crashed in fog at Cote
d'Everard, near Rouen, Normandy stalling such that a wing hit a tree.
He died before medical assistance arrived.' He is buried, like John
Cassidy, in Southern Cemetery, Manchester.
Tailplane: the Manchester Airport memorial

There is another Alcock and Brown memorial in Manchester, an aluminium
figure of a flying man, created by Eliazbeth Frink and installed in
1964 in the then-new Terminal at Manchester Airport. It has been
controversial ever since the commission was awarded to Frink: her model
of the planned work was described by Councillor Hopkins of the Airport
Committee as a 'bewitched, bothered and bewildered budgerigar.'
Eventually, after much dispute, it was completed and installed at a
cost of £3250. Members of Alcock's family were particularly
unimpressed.
The controversy was revived in 2008: According to an article in
Manchester Evening News of 9 September:
'The sculpture ... drew controversy when installed in the airport's
Terminal 1 in 1964, with one relative describing the winged figure as
"sordid, vulgar and obscene." The statue was later moved from the
terminal's arrivals hall [with the approval of the artist] to a garden
next to the airport police station, and then brought into a departure
lounge area. It was moved to its latest home in a connecting corridor
between Terminal 1 and the airport's train station five years ago.'
Neville Alcock, the pilot's nephew, is understandably unhappy about the
location. He told the reporter: 'I know we can't have these memorials
up forever but if they are going to be displayed they should be kept in
good condition. I went to Manchester Airport recently and managed to
locate the statue after some effort. It used to have pride of place in
the airport and now it is tucked away in a corner. No-one would spot it
unless they made a special effort. The stonework is really dirty and no
effort has been made to keep it looking clean.'
An Airport spokeswoman defended the location said it was regularly
spotted by those travelling from the train station to the terminal
buildings. She said: 'We consulted on where it should go and the
decision was to put it in the station building. Everyone who takes the
train to and from the airport can see it.'
(The Airport authorities have also removed from the terminal in 2008
the four Venetian
glass
chandeliers by Bruno Zaneti of Murano, which were to many
people of 'a certain age' were real memories of their first visit the
airport as a child.)
Mr Alcock also pointed out that exhibits at the Museum of Science and
Industry - including the stuffed remains of the flying duo's mascot cat
Jimmy - were no longer on display and that a memorial plaque in
Manchester Town Hall had been placed in a barely-visible corner. An
allegation that is hard to deny.
Written by Charlie
Hulme, November 2008. Updated January 2019.
|