Stonemason and sculptor born in Cawthorne, South Yorkshire, into a family of stone masons. An early work, submitted by Swift to the 1865 Wakefield Industrial and Fine Arts Exhibition where it was awarded a medal, is his limestone statue, Hebe (now Cawthorne Victoria Jubilee Museum). While serving his apprenticeship in the family business, his skills were recognised by the painter John Roddam Spencer Stanhope (1829–1908), whose family owned the local country house, Cannon Hall. Stanhope provided Swift with letters of introduction to Farmer & Brindley, the Lambeth-based architectural sculptors. By c.1870, Swift was working for the firm and also training at a local art school, almost certainly the South London Technical School of Art, with which Farmer & Brindley enjoyed a close working relationship. In 1874, Swift married Margaret Heckle. Although the couple were to have no children of their own, they adopted one of the sons of Swift’s younger brother Benjamin, John (known as Jack) Swift, who would himself become a stonemason. While Swift was at Farmer and Brindley’s, the Stanhope family commissioned the architect G.F. Bodley to refurbish Cawthorne’s parish church, All Saints; Farmer and Brindley carried out the work, with Swift supervising the workshop and carving a figure of St Paulinus above the north porch and, inside, a new reredos (1875–80). Also while at Farmer and Brindley, Swift carved the reredos designed by Thomas Garner for St Paul’s Cathedral (1886–88; damaged by bombing in the Second World War and removed in 1958). In 1896, Swift donated a Portland stone figure of John Wesley to Cawthorne Methodist Church to stand in a niche above the main entrance. At an unknown date between 1911 and 1916, he left Farmer and Brindley, and he and his wife (the couple by now having adopted another of Benjamin’s sons following the death in quick succession of both Benjamin and his wife) moved to Kenilworth in Warwickshire, where he continued to work as a sculptor. He died in Kenilworth, and both he and his wife are buried there.
Bibliography: Barnsley Art on Your Doorstep: Samuel Swift M. Wilkinson, ‘Samuel Swift (1846–1929) – A Life Set in Stone’, 2014 (PDF); D. White and E. Norman, Public Sculpture of Sheffield and South Yorkshire, Liverpool, 2015, pp. xiii, 27–28, 29–31, 299.
Terry Cavanagh, August 2024