Australia has lost one of its most extraordinary and most artistic craftsmen. Jim Frecklington, royal coachmaker, horseman, artist, and patriot, has passed away at the age of 76.
There can have been few Australians of modern times who created objects of such beauty and historical worth which have every prospect of still being admired and used centuries from now.
Frecklington was a rarity in an age of mass production: a master craftsman in the ancient sense of the term. He did not merely manufacture carriages. He conceived great works of art, assembled craftsmen capable of executing them and produced objects combining engineering, history, symbolism, and astonishing beauty.
His story was itself remarkable. Born in country New South Wales in 1949 and raised near Peak Hill, he developed an early love of horses and horse-drawn vehicles. As a young man he went to Britain, where he worked first with the Duke of Edinburgh’s horses at Windsor Castle and subsequently at the Royal Mews at Buckingham Palace. There he cared for ceremonial horses, drove carriages, and acquired an intimate knowledge of the great coaches of the monarchy.
He also discovered that the ancient craft of building them was disappearing.
Frecklington decided to revive it – in distant Australia.
His first great achievement was the Australian State Coach, presented to Queen Elizabeth II in Canberra in 1988 as Australia’s official Bicentennial gift. Built principally from Australian materials, it was not merely ornamental. Frecklington combined traditional craftsmanship with modern engineering, including heating, electric windows, and hydraulic stabilisation.
It became a working royal carriage and remains in the Royal Mews. It has carried members of the Royal Family on some of the great ceremonial occasions of the decades.
That achievement alone would have secured Frecklington an honoured place in Australian craftsmanship and the arts.
But he did it again.
His Diamond Jubilee State Coach was an even more extraordinary undertaking – part carriage, part work of art and part travelling museum. Into it were incorporated fragments and materials associated with some of the great places, ships and events of British and Commonwealth history, including Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London, Canterbury Cathedral, HMS Victory, the Mary Rose, and the Royal Yacht Britannia.
The result was magnificent.
Queen Elizabeth II first used it for the State Opening of Parliament in 2014. In 2023 the world saw Frecklington’s Australian-built masterpiece when it carried King Charles III and Queen Camilla from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey for their Coronation.
The Queen leaves Buckingham Palace in the Diamond Jubilee State Coach with the Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall, to attend the State Opening of Parliament
Live updates:https://t.co/KlXjL6ssbz pic.twitter.com/VaTMzrs5zU
— BBC Politics (@BBCPolitics) October 14, 2019
The King and The Queen will travel to Westminster Abbey in the Diamond Jubilee State Coach. This is the newest coach at the #RoyalMews and was first used in 2014. The coach is over 5m long, weighs over 3 tonnes & is drawn by six Windsor Greys. https://t.co/qX75zVB5gA #Coronation pic.twitter.com/thhTq8PPZw
— Royal Collection Trust (@RCT) May 6, 2023
Millions watching one of the greatest ceremonies of the British monarchy were therefore looking at something conceived and created by an Australian craftsman in a workshop at North Head in Sydney.
Frecklington meanwhile embarked upon what he intended to be his greatest work: the Commonwealth Royal Coach for King Charles III.
Again, it was to be much more than a vehicle. He conceived it as a moving representation of the Crown, the Commonwealth, and a thousand years of history. Its crown incorporates ancient timber from Westminster Abbey; bronze flowers represent the national flowers of the 56 Commonwealth countries; its construction incorporates steel from the Sydney Harbour Bridge, fittings associated with the Sydney Opera House, and even bearings connected with Australia’s celebrated 3801 steam locomotive.
It is difficult to imagine a more characteristically Frecklington idea: ancient Westminster Abbey and the Sydney Harbour Bridge brought together in one magnificent ceremonial object.
What makes his final years particularly moving is that he continued this immense undertaking while suffering from cancer and undergoing chemotherapy. He knew that time was against him. Yet he continued working.
He had mortgaged his own home to finance his projects. This was no wealthy dilettante commissioning others to realise a passing fancy. Frecklington was consumed by the conviction that some things were worth making properly, however difficult, however expensive, and however long they took.
He once explained his philosophy in words which now constitute an appropriate epitaph: ‘You may as well do something with your life that’s going to last.’
He did.
There was something profoundly Australian about Jim Frecklington. A country boy from central-western New South Wales went to Buckingham Palace, mastered an almost extinct European craft, returned home and demonstrated that an Australian could not merely reproduce the finest traditions of royal coachbuilding but advance them.
He combined the confidence of the Australian bushman with the standards of the old-world master craftsman.
Nor was he merely looking backwards. His coaches outwardly belong to the great tradition of royal ceremonial vehicles, but underneath the gold leaf and carved timber are sophisticated modern suspension, heating, electric windows and contemporary engineering. He understood that tradition survives not by being frozen in time but by combining inheritance with invention.
Queen Elizabeth II appointed him a Member of the Royal Victorian Order in 2014, a distinction in the personal gift of the Sovereign, recognising his service and craftsmanship. No doubt it would have been a knighthood in her gift but for the Canberra tantrum thrown on one previous occasion. Australia had earlier awarded him the Medal of the Order of Australia for his contribution to carriage building and the preservation of traditional craftsmanship.
Both honours were richly deserved.
But his greatest memorials require no inscription.
They stand in the Royal Mews.
Long after almost everything manufactured in our time has been discarded, replaced or forgotten, Jim Frecklington’s coaches will emerge on great state occasions, drawn by magnificent horses through the streets of London.
Future generations will see kings and queens ride in them. They will watch coronations in which his craftsmanship forms part of ceremonies centuries older than Australia itself.
And somewhere on those coaches will remain the work of the Australian from Peak Hill who decided that the lost art of the royal coachmaker should not be allowed to die.
Jim Frecklington did something very few of us can hope to do.
He made things of beauty intended to last and which will last for centuries.
And when it is explained that these glorious artefacts were designed and built in faraway Australia, foreign princes, ambassadors, kings, emperors, presidents, popes and people everywhere will pause and be impressed both for Jim Frecklington and the faraway land in which he was born and where he conceived such objects of honour and beauty.
The post Vale Jim Frecklington – an Australian craftsman for the ages appeared first on The Spectator Australia.