Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Kemp, George Meikle
KEMP, GEORGE MEIKLE (1795–1844), architect, was born at Moorfoot, by Gladsmuir Loch, in Midlothian, 25 May 1795. A few hours afterwards the family removed to Newhall in the same county; and there, in the Pentlands, till the age of fourteen, Kemp assisted his father, who was a shepherd, amusing himself while at work with the construction of mill-wheels. From 1809 to 1813 he was apprenticed to a carpenter at Redscaurhead, near Peebles. He then proceeded to Galashiels, where he had procured employment as a millwright. On the way Walter Scott gave him a lift in his carriage to Galashiels, though Kemp did not discover the name of the owner till he had been set down. Once afterwards, while sketching Melrose, he saw Scott, who looked over his shoulder; but Kemp was too timid to speak. Some of the drawings then made were used for Scott's monument.
While working as a journeyman at Galashiels, his business frequently took him to Melrose, Dryburgh, and Jedburgh. Afterwards, when employed in Edinburgh and Glasgow and in England, he made long journeys on foot to study Gothic architecture. In 1824 he reached London, and the next year he passed over into France, intending to travel through Europe, while maintaining himself as a millwright, and devoting any leisure to his favourite study. Though ignorant of French, he had made his way to Paris, when news of his mother's death recalled him to Scotland. Failing in an attempt to make a business of his own in Edinburgh, he devoted himself to the study of perspective, and the beauty and fidelity of his drawings soon brought him patrons, one of the earliest being William Burn [q. v.] For him Kemp constructed, in 1831–2, a large model in wood of a proposed new palace for the Duke of Buccleuch (still preserved at Dalkeith). Kemp was employed to prepare drawings for a projected volume of Scottish ecclesiastical remains, similar to Britton's ‘Cathedral Antiquities.’ Some of these drawings are in Messrs. Blackie's ‘Old Glasgow’ (pp. 101, 105, of 3rd ed. 1888). The plan failed, but kept him in congenial employment on a mechanic's wage for several years.
Kemp also prepared drawings for a proposed restoration of Glasgow Cathedral, which were lithographed for a volume privately printed in 1836. In the same year the first competition was held for the proposed Scott monument in Edinburgh, and the third prize was awarded to his design. The committee ordered a second trial, and in 1838 Kemp's design, meanwhile greatly improved, was adopted. The foundation-stone was laid on 15 Aug. 1840, and Kemp supervised the erection of the monument. But before its completion, on his way home through a foggy night from the contractor's, he fell into the canal at Edinburgh, on 6 March 1844. His body was found the following week, and interred in St. Cuthbert's churchyard, where a monument with a medallion portrait, by Handyside Ritchie, was erected by public subscription. Kemp was a singularly lovable man, ‘almost culpably modest and diffident.’ His genius appears in his one finished work. A bust by Ritchie and a portrait by his wife's brother, William Bonnar, R.S.A., are in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh. Kemp's model of the Scott monument is preserved in the Edinburgh Museum of Science and Art.
[Short biographies of Kemp are in Chambers's Journal (21 April 1838) and the Biog. Dict. of Eminent Scotsmen (1875), as well as in the Edinburgh newspapers of March 1844; but all previous accounts are superseded by the Life by Thomas Bonnar (Edinb. 1891).]