He was able to expel the Kanakas and close the door to Asiatics, but he could effect nothing for British immigration into the Commonwealth. He failed to promote imperial unity, and his defence schemes were matured by others. But his genius for compromise served the federal cause in the inception of the Commonwealth, and no Australian of his time surpassed him in personal integrity and devotion to what he deemed duty. His oratorical power was undoubted, though the wealth of his ideas and the rapidity of his delivery often confused his hearers. His interest in literature, religion, spiritualism, philosophy, and art was insatiable, but among his copious writings on these and political topics he left nothing ripe for publication. A devoted husband and father, a charming friend, and a brilliant conversationalist, he yet felt himself, as his private papers show, in a sense isolated in life, a fact which doubtless explains in some measure his comparative failure in politics.
[Walter Murdoch, Alfred Deakin, 1923; Victorian and Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates; John Quick and R. R. Garran, Annotated Constitution of the Australian Commonwealth, 1901; B. R. Wise, Making of the Australian Commonwealth, 1913; H. G. Turner, History of the Colony of Victoria, 1904, and First Decade of the Australian Commonwealth, 1911; Sir G. H. Reid, My Reminiscences, 1917; personal knowledge.]
DE BURGH CANNING, HUBERT GEORGE second Marquess and fifteenth Earl of Clanricade (1832—1916). [See Burgh Canning.]
DE MORGAN, WILLIAM FREND (1839-1917), artist, inventor, and author, was born in London at 69 Gower Street 16 November 1839, the eldest son in a family of seven children. His father was the well-known mathematician, Augustus De Morgan [q.v.]; he was named after his maternal grandfather, William Frend [q.v.]. Both his father and mother were remarkable personalities, at once brilliant and unworldly, and the boy grew up in a home circle full of happy and varied interests, though soon shadowed by untimely deaths. William was educated at University College School and at the College itself; when he entered the College he also began studying art at the school of Francis Stephen Cary [q.v.]. He remained at University College until nineteen, when he was admitted to the Academy schools (1859). Early in the ’sixties he made the acquaintance of Burne-Jones, Rossetti, William Morris, and their friends, and amid this group of artists experimenting and finding new modes of expression, De Morgan, instinctively a discoverer, found himself drifting away from the routine work of the art schools. He began tentatively by designing for stained glass and tiles, but soon felt the necessity of carrying out experiments in their manufacture. Many years later he wrote of these days: ‘I certainly was a feeble and discursive dabbler in picture-making. I transferred myself to stained glass window-making and dabbled in that too till 1872.’ The early experiments in stained glass and tiles were pursued at 40 Fitzroy Square for a year or two, and of this period he writes: ‘The attempt to fire kilns connected with an ordinary house-chimney led to the roof being burnt off.’
After his father’s death in 1871, the sadly diminished family came to live at 30 Cheyne Row; and here a kiln was built in the back garden and a pottery industry definitely established. All the work was removed before long to Orange House in the same row. It was in this Chelsea period that De Morgan rediscovered the process of making various coloured lustres, and developed the magnificent thickly-glazed blues and greens, that helped to make his pottery famous. Here, too, he and Morris made some experiments in mosaics, crowded out, however, by other interests and not pursued. When the business outgrew the Cheyne Row premises, he thought of joining with Morris to take a factory at Blockley, Worcestershire; this being found impracticable, De Morgan followed his friend to Merton Abbey, near Wimbledon (1882), erecting buildings and kilns there and, to quote his own words, ‘retaining the show-room in the Chelsea house until ’86, when the shop in Great Marlborough Street was taken’. He remained at Merton Abbey until 1888, but was then obliged through delicate health to bring the factory nearer his home. A partnership was entered into with Halsey Ralph Ricardo, the architect, and a new factory was built at Sands End, Fulham, the show-room in Great Marlborough Street being retained. This arrangement lasted until 1898; but, in spite of the magnificent work produced, the fortunes of the industry were now waning; and after a partnership with Frank Iles, his kiln-firer, and with Charles and Fred Passenger, painters, De Morgan retired from practical work about 1905, the firm of De Morgan, Iles, and Passenger breaking up in 1907. His late partners continued to decorate dishes and vases for
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