Sculptor and carver in wood and stone. He was born in Southport, Lancashire, and baptised on 16 November 1865, the son of Edward Phillips, a clerk, and his wife, Nancy. Nothing is known of his training. He contributed decorative carvings in wood, from addresses in Altrincham, Cheshire, to the exhibitions of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society in London between 1888 and 1903, some to his own designs and one, in 1899, a lychgate for the church at Brantham in Suffolk, to a design by the architect, E.S. Prior; in addition, the 1903 exhibition included a photograph of the rood screen at St Anselm’s at Hatch End in Pinner, which he had carved to a design by the architect Charles Spooner and his wife. By the 1890s he was teaching, and in 1896 his educational primer, Wood carving: being a carefully graduated educational course for schools and adult classes, was published by Chapman and Hall of London. In c.1903 he married, and in 1908 became father to a son. In 1910 he made his sole appearance at one of the annual Royal Academy exhibitions, with ‘Design for processional cross, in silver and oak-wood’, giving his address as 1–5 Back Canning Street, Liverpool. This location, half a mile from the Anglican Cathedral, in conjunction with the elevated status he reveals in the census of 1911 – that he was an ‘employer’ (previously a ‘worker’) and an ‘Artist. Sculptor’ (previously a carver) – makes the possibility mooted by Sharples in 2004, that Phillips directed the carving of the cathedral’s Lady Chapel and Choir, the construction of the former completed in 1910, the latter soon after, a strong probability. Phillips must also have developed a skill in figure modelling if he is the same Joseph Phillips who in 1916 completed a plaster model of a multi-figure group for the war memorial of the newsroom of Liverpool’s old Exchange building; the memorial, after some revision and many delays, was finally unveiled on 18 July 1924 (and, in 1953, following the demolition of the building, was re-erected on the north side of Exchange Flags). By the date of the 1921 census, Phillips was living in Oxford with his widowed mother, Nancy, but without his wife and son. He was now working for Messrs Mowbray & Co, of Pembroke Street, St Aldate’s, Oxford, as a sculptor in wood and stone. Nothing is known of his work for them. In the early 1930s, however, he was working again in Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral, having been commissioned to carve the Memorial to Bishop Chavasse (d. 1928) from a model by David Evans, on the back of the Bishop’s Throne. The fact that in 1933 Peter Induni was also given the job of carving the memorial could only mean that Phillips had failed to complete the work, making it almost certain that he was the 67-year-old Joseph Phillips whose death and subsequent burial in St Helen’s Churchyard, Benson, Oxfordshire, was recorded on 17 November of that year.
Ancestry website sources: Lancashire … Church of England Births and Baptisms … Parish Registers. Southport, St Paul (1865); England Censuses: 1891, 1901, 1911, 1921; Oxfordshire … Church of England Deaths and Burials … 1932–1964 (Parish of Benson).
Bibliography: Arts + Architecture Profiles, via Art UK; T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Liverpool, Liverpool, 1997, pp. 48–50; Mapping Sculpture: Joseph Phillips, Peter Induni; R. Pollard and N. Pevsner, Lancashire: Liverpool and the South-West (The Buildings of England), New Haven and London, (2006), 2022, pp. 323, 351, 353; J. Sharples, Liverpool (Pevsner Architectural Guides), New Haven and London, 2004, pp. 33, 80, 81, 151.
Terry Cavanagh, March 2026