Art metal work company established by John Starkie Gardner (1845–1930). Gardner was born in Bayswater, London, the son of a manufacturer of chandeliers and lamps, John Edmund Gardner, FSA, and his wife, Cicely, the daughter of James Starkie. In addition to forging a reputation as a leading designer and maker of decorative metalwork, Gardner also came to be regarded within his lifetime as the country’s foremost authority on its history. At the time of the 1871 census, he was 25 and living with his parents in a house with four servants in St John’s Wood Park. In these years, according to Walter Sparrow, Gardner occupied his time studying botany and geology (he was a Fellow of the Geological Society of London) and enthusiastically collecting fossil plants and shells, an interest which filled ‘his mind with a valuable stock of natural forms, replete with decorative suggestiveness’. When, in c.1882, he decided to become an art metal worker, he part-funded his factory at 29 Albert Embankment, Lambeth, by selling his collection of fossils to the British Museum (Natural History) for £1,600. In 1884, Gardner married Caroline Cubitt, a 33-year-old widow, and the daughter of an architect, Edwin Ward (deceased). The couple jointly ran the company – Starkie Gardner and Co – but dissolved their partnership in 1895 when Caroline found that her husband had been paying out large sums from the business to a woman by the name of Alice Dring. (The couple divorced in 1900.) Gardner immediately went into partnership with Lewis Boswell Inman Hamilton, and in the early years of the twentieth century the firm held a royal warrant, with Gardner being allowed to style himself ‘Metalworker to King Edward VII’. And yet despite official recognition, in 1909 that partnership too was dissolved, with the firm in financial difficulties and Gardner borrowing from a money lender. By 1911, Gardner was living in the apartment – 27 Queens Mansions, Victoria Street – of one Alys Bateman. According to Bateman’s declaration in that year’s census, Gardner (his profession now ‘author’), was a ‘widower’ and a ‘relative’ of hers. Bateman, a 35-year-old concert vocalist, was here using her stage name; her real name was Alice Dring. Although she here declared herself as ‘single’, she was a widow, Bateman being her maiden name. Gardner and Dring married in 1914. Although Gardner had declared himself bankrupt in 1912, he continued as an art metal worker but with his second wife now running the firm from 1A Tradescant Street, Lambeth, in partnership with Oswald Hasting Jaques. At some date before 1921, Gardner retired and in 1922 the J. Starkie Gardner and Jaques partnership seems to have been dissolved, as the firm, trading henceforth as a limited company, reverted to J. Starkie Gardner. Although the firm was still in business after the Second World War, its main field of operations was by then engineering.
Starkie Gardner’s most important commission was the casting of the wrought iron gates and screens for George Washington Browne’s Scottish National Memorial to King Edward VII, Palace of Holyroodhouse, Edinburgh (1920). The firm’s other commissions include wrought iron gates (1885–86) for the Exhibition Road entrance to the South Kensington Museum (now Victoria and Albert Museum) and a replica of the Eleanor Grille in Westminster Abbey (c.1888) for its collection; bronze doors (designed by W.D. Caroë, modelled by Thomas Stirling Lee) for the Adelphi Bank, Liverpool (1893); wrought iron railings and gates, and the ‘Santa Maria’ weathervane for J.L. Pearson’s Two Temple Place, Westminster (1893–95); the Boer War Memorial to the York and Lancaster Regiment (designed by J.D. Webster & Son), Weston Park, Sheffield (1905); and three bronze doors (designed and modelled by James Woodford) for City Hall, Norwich (1938).
Ancestry website: (i) Westminster … Church of England Births and Baptisms … for John Starkie Gardner. St Martin-in-the-Fields 1837–1847; (ii) 1871 England Census for John Starkie Gardner. London. Hampstead St John. ALL. 19; (iii) 1901 England Census … London. St Margaret. ALL. District 23; (iv) 1911 England Census … London. St Margaret and St John. 22; (v) 1921 England Census … London. Paddington. 03. 01.
Bibliography: B. Bryant, Two Temple Place, London, 2013, pp. 33–34, 41, 86, 89 (and figs. 97, 98, 99). T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Liverpool, Liverpool, 1997, pp. 15–16; R. Cocke, Public Sculpture of Norfolk and Suffolk, Liverpool, 2013, p. 21; Greater London Industrial Archaeology Society: Notes and News, August 2004 – ‘The Art Metal Work Company of J. Starkie Gardner’; R. McKenzie, Public Sculpture of Edinburgh (2 vols), Liverpool, 2018, vol. 1, pp. 6, 12 (illus. pp. 9, 11); Mapping Sculpture; J. Physick, The Victoria and Albert Museum. The History of its Building, London, 1982, pp. 155–56; W.S. Sparrow, ‘Mr. Starkie Gardner and his work’, Magazine of Art, January 1897, pp. 129–34; The Times: (i) 7 August 1895, p. 9 (‘Partnerships Dissolved’); (ii) 8 November 1900, p. 10c (‘Gardner v. Gardner’); (iii) 15 February 1909, p. 4a (‘King’s Bench Division’); (iv) 6 March 1912, p. 22 (‘The Bankruptcy Acts … Receiving Orders’); (v) 11 May 1920, p. 18b (‘King Edward Memorial at Holyrood’); D. White and E. Norman, Public Sculpture of Sheffield and South Yorkshire, Liverpool, 2015, pp. 225–27; Who Was Who (online edn), 2007.
Terry Cavanagh, May 2025
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