Blackballing Buckler, Joshua Mardell
Blackballing Buckler. Joshua Mardell.
This article centres on a strange object: the Georgian blackball ballot machine once used by the Society of Antiquaries of London, the era's leading club for those interested in Britain's material past. To vote on whether to admit a new member, Fellows dropped a small cork ball into a wooden funnel: white for yes, black for no. Enough black balls, anonymously cast, could sink a candidate outright, hence "blackballing". The Society's own machine survives: a rather beautiful, almost laboratory-like piece of apparatus, with drawers underneath marked YEA and NO.
The article uses that machine as a way into the story of John Buckler (1770–1851), an accomplished topographical artist and architect, celebrated in his own lifetime for his drawings and engravings of England's cathedrals and medieval buildings. Buckler was blackballed by the Society not once but twice, in 1808 and 1809, before finally being elected in 1810. The article reconstructs this episode through a previously unexamined cache of his letters held at the Bodleian Library, in which friends, patrons and fellow antiquaries wrote to commiserate, strategise, and canvass support on his behalf.
The reasons for Buckler's blackballing were multiple. His correspondents offer several explanations. One is factionalism, and here Buckler's case echoes an earlier, more notorious scandal at the Society: the architect James Wyatt, Surveyor of the King's Works, had himself been blackballed in 1797 after a series of controversial "restorations" at English cathedrals that involved sweeping away large amounts of genuine medieval fabric, work destructive enough to earn him the nickname "the Destroyer." Buckler was closely associated with the circle that had opposed Wyatt. Another strand is religious: the anti-Wyatt faction had been mockingly nicknamed the "Gothic party" or even the "Catholic party," since their attachment to medieval, pre-Reformation buildings drew sneering accusations of "popery" from other Fellows. And running through all of this is a more general snobbery among Fellows towards professional, working artists, as against the gentleman-amateurs who otherwise dominated the club.
Buckler's network of supporters can be seen as an early clan of building preservationists: figures who valued old fabric for its own sake, resisted "improvement" for improvement's sake, and treated accurate recording as a form of protection in itself. His admission didn't just end his personal ordeal, but it gave the preservationist cause he'd championed a much-needed formal legitimacy.
This seemingly arcane controversy historicises how institutions can exclude people not through open argument but through quiet procedure and how "merit" alone has rarely been enough to guarantee anyone a seat at the table.
