Edwin Lutyens was the tenth child and ninth boy in a family of thirteen, of Charles and Mary Lutyens of of Onslow Square, London, and Thursley in Surrey.
Edwin, always called Ned, was so delicate as the result of rheumatic fever as a child that he was the only one of the boys not to go to public school or university. This brought him very close to his mother whom he worshipped. He shared his sisters’ governess and received some extra schooling in the holidays from a much older brother.
His feelings about his lack of education were ambivalent; he felt at times that if he had gone to a public school he would have been more at his ease in the world of men, particularly when working on committees and for Government officials; on the other hand he told Osbert Sitwell, ‘Any talent I may have was due to a long illness as a boy, which afforded me time to think, and subsequent ill-health, because I was not allowed to play games, and so had to teach myself, for my enjoyment, to use my eyes instead of my feet’.
Ned, a nervous boy who, unlike the rest of his family, disliked riding (the only sport he ever cared for was fishing), spent his time when in the country indulging in his passion for looking at houses, watching all the stages of buildings going up, haunting the carpenter’s shop at Thursley and a builder’s yard in Guildford.
He had a flair for drawing and mathematics, and had further taught himself to draw by a simple self-devised method: he would take with him on all his walks a small pane of clear glass, a penknife and some pieces of soap sharpened to fine points; he would look at some portion of a building through the glass and trace what he saw with the soap. Cleaned with a damp rag, this ‘sketchbook’ would serve him over and over again.
At fifteen it had become apparent that Ned was cut out to be an architect, a career encouraged by Ralph Caldecott, a Surrey neighbour, the illustrator of so many delightful children’s books depicting Surrey cottages.
Early in 1885, therefore, he became a student at the Kensington School of Art. He did not finish the course, feeling after only two years that he had no more to learn there, nor did he stay more than a year in the office of Ernest George and Peto where he next went as a paying apprentice.
There he made friends with Herbert Baker, the chief assistant, seven years his senior, who was afterwards to collaborate with him in the building of New Delhi - an unhappy partnership that ended in what Ned called his ‘Bakerloo’.
In 1897 Edwin Lutyens married Emily Lytton, daughter of a Viceroy of India, whose father had died five years earlier. These five children, Barbra, Robert, Ursula, Elisabeth and Mary, were born by 1908. For all his love for Emily, Ned was not able to give her the companionship she craved. They had no interests in common. She loved reading and he scarcely read anything; his main recreation, when he indulged in one at all, was playing patience and, later on, doing The Times crossword puzzle.
With a nanny and nurserymaid to look after the children, Emily was bored and dissatisfied, yet, detesting social life, she had always pressed Ned to go out without her, so that now his clients felt no obligation to invite her when he went to visit them, a condition that added greatly to his popularity.
Many people who met Ned in later life found it hard to believe that he never lost his intrinsic shyness. ‘He had a wonderful way with his clients,’ one assistant recalled. ‘He was marvellous not only in dealing with materials but with human beings.’
He always got them to spend what he wanted them to spend. He said himself that he had to try to make his clients “purr” with his blandishments while bringing them round difficult corners. He got the best out of the workmen as well as the clients, for he had a deep respect for their craftsmanship as well as a knowledge and understanding of it from watching them at work in the years he had roamed the Surrey countryside as a boy. Only to Emily did Ned show the true seriousness of his nature in the thousands of letters he wrote to her during his absences in India and elsewhere. Having read so little, his ideas were always fresh; he seemed incapable of a commonplace thought.
He once wrote to Emily from India apropos of Herbert Baker, who was a great reader of poetry and whose work at the new city looked to Ned ‘distressing’: “I believe that no designer should ever read poetry. There is in the hearts of all men a natural desire for poetry. If read it is easily acquired and satisfied. If not read you have to get your eventual quota of it through and in your work and not be doped by other people’s adjectives.”
Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens
While he gained confidence in his work, his social diffidence remained. Forced into society in dealing with clients, he hid his shyness and inarticulateness behind a barrage of puns and drawings. He was never without a block of paper and pencils in his pocket with which to draw with equal ease and rapidity some detail of a house for a client or a comic sketch. It was characteristic of him that in after years when he had to entertain a mixture of people in his bungalow at New Delhi he had a round blackboard top made for the dining-room table and provided each guest with a piece of chalk.
Punning became a bad habit of Ned’s, though some of his puns were very witty - for example his remark at the Garrick Club when served with some fish: ‘This piece of cod passeth understanding’, and his opening words of a speech to the Owls Club in Cape Town, ‘I wish I had t’wit t’woo you.’ He certainly had the wit to woo Lady Hardinge, wife of the Viceroy, with his irresistible apology for some minor offence: ’I will wash your feet with my tears and dry them with my hair. True, I have very little hair but then you have very little feet.’ His picture jokes were more generally appreciated, such as a drawing of Gandhi riding a camel with the caption, ‘You should see Mysore’, and an imaginary tombstone for Lord Inchcape, Chairman of the P & O Shipping Line, engraved ‘R.I.P & O’.
John Loughborough Pearson was born in Brussels on 5 July 1817, the grandson of William Pearson, topographical artist and son of a Durham lawyer. He was educated in Durham and articled to Ignatius Bonomi, the County Surveyor in 1831 with whom he remained until September 1841 when Bonomi took John Augustus Cory into partnership, ending Pearson's hope of inheriting Bonomi's practice.
Pearson then commenced practice on his own account in Durham but had little work and in January 1842 he left for Sunderland to assist George Pickering on a short-term basis. In the following month he moved to London first as assistant to Anthony Salvin for six months, and then as assistant to Philip and Charles Hardwick, both of whom became ill, leaving him with the responsibility of building New Hall, Lincolns Inn. Having made some Tractarian connections he commenced independent practice at Delahay Street, London in 1843. He made his reputation with Holy Trinity, Bessborough Gardens, Pimlico in 1849 but at that date his clients were mainly in Wales and the East Riding of Yorkshire. In the 1850s he resumed travelling on the continent, having made an early visit to Hamburg in 1836, his studies there having a marked effect on his practice, particularly in the design of vaulting. He was admitted FSA in 1853 and FRIBA on 5 March 1860.
On 5 June 1862 Pearson married Jemima Christian at Hampstead. She was the sister of the architect Joseph Henry Christian and cousin of Ewan Christian, a close friend of Pearson's. They lived in a combined house and office at 22 Harley Street to which he had moved in 1855 or 1856. They had one son, Frank Loughborough Pearson, born 14 January 1864. Jemima died of typhoid fever on 25 March 1865, their son being then sent to Cronkbourne, Isle of Man, to be brought up by her unmarried sister Sarah in the household of their married sister Hannah Moore.
In the aftermath of Jemima's death Pearson found it difficult to concentrate on work and the Sykes connection in the East Riding was lost to Street. In 1867 he moved house and office further along Harley Street to number 46. But in 1870 his practice picked up dramatically with his appointment as architect to Lincoln Cathedral, inaugurating a somewhat controversial career as a restorer of major churches, and in 1874 he was elected ARA. The commission for Truro Cathedral followed in 1878, and in the same year he was awarded the Gold Medal at the Paris International Exhibition of 1878 and made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. In the following year he was awarded a bronze medal at the Sydney International Exhibition, and in the year after that (1880) he was made Royal Golf Medallist and elected full academician.
In May 1881 Pearson moved to 13 Mansfield Street, a house by Robert Adam, but his health was severely affected by the deaths of William Andrews Nesfield, Dr Spreyers, Salvin and George Edmund Street with whom he had recuperated at St Gervais and Aix-les-Bains, and he began to depend increasingly on his assistant William Douglas Caröe to see his designs carried out. Frank Loughborough Pearson joined the office in 1881. He had been brought back from the Isle of Man in 1871 to attend Dr Spreyers' school at Halstain Lodge, Weybridge prior to being sent to Winchester. He had hoped to go to Cambridge and become a civil engineer, but was persuaded to become an architect because of the very long timescale of the building of Truro Cathedral. He had to undertake exceptional responsibilities very early as Caröe left in 1883 to become the partner of Pearson's brother-in-law Joseph Henry Christian, leaving John Ernest Newberry, only two years older than Frank, as the most experienced person in the office. Frank was formally taken into partnership in 1890.
The elder Pearson died of asthenia following an operation at Mansfield Street on 11 December 1897, leaving moveable estate of about £52,000. His only known Scottish assistant was William Leiper who was with him for about twelve months about 1861; John Thomson worked on the drawings for Truro, but apparently on a fee-paid part-time basis only.