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William Mitcheson Timlin (1893 – 1943)
‘He is a smith of fancies, an arrant rebel against machinery’ R G Stevens (Cape Times, 1927) William Timlin was born in Ashington, Northumberland. He was educated at Morpeth Grammar School and, as a result of a scholarship, at Armstrong College. In 1912 he followed his parents to Kimberley, South Africa, and was articled to the architect D W Greatbatch. This led to the formation of a successful architectural partnership for which Timlin designed several major buildings in Kimberley, including the hospital, high schools and war memorial.
However, his most representative architectural project might be considered the fantastic interior of Johannesburg's Colosseum Theatre. For, in parallel to this career, he worked as a prolific and popular painter and illustrator, drawing on the achievements of Dulac and Rackham.
This double focus may be compared to that of William Henry Romaine Walker. While still studying with Greatbatch, Timlin passed with honours art examinations held in Kimberley for the South Kensington Board of Education. In a short time, he was both exhibiting his own work and contributing to the development of the artistic institutions of South Africa. He founded the Art Section of Kimberley's Athenaeum Club (1914), was a member of the South African Institute, and was elected to the membership of the South Africa Society of Artists and the Institute of South African Architects. He designed the first cover of the Outspan and illustrated many of its stories.
In 1923, Timlin published an illustrated fantasy entitled The Ship that Sailed to Mars; this gave him an international reputation, particularly in the USA, where the film-rights for the book were purchased, though the film was never finished. Four years later, in 1927, he began to build up a series of drawings for a book to be called The Building of a Fairy City; however, this most ambitious project, which seems a perfect fusion of his architectural and graphic skills, also remained incomplete, and may, indeed, have been impossible to finish. Timlin had greater success with more limited endeavours, such as individual fantasies and topographical subjects. He published a series of landscape pencil sketches as South Africa (1927), and illustrated Hedley Chilvers's Out of the Crucible and the Hobsons' Kees van die Kalahari. In 1936, and again in 1939, journeys to Java, via Zanzibar, resulted in a number of drawings and paintings. Additionally, he wrote stories and music. He died at the age of fifty as a result of pneumonia after fracturing his arm in a fall.
