Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens was an English architect who designed many war memorials, English country houses and public buildings in the UK and abroad
The article below was written in two parts in November and December 2022 for the Parish Magazine by Jackie Rickenberg Sir Edwin Lutyens.
The architectural historian Gavin Stamp described Lutyebns as "surely the greatest British architect of the twentieth (or of any other) century". He was the designer of many, many grand Arts and Crafts houses, war memorials and public buildings, both in the UK and overseas. From his humble beginnings in Thursley (Prospect Cottage in The Street being an early example), Lutyens’ career famously culminated in his design of The Cenotaph in Whitehall.
On 11th of this month, The Cenotaph will celebrate the centenary of it’s unveiling in its current form. Previously it was a wooden structure, commissioned by David Lloyd George as a temporary structure to be the centrepiece of the Allied Victory Parade in 1919. After an outpouring of national sentiment, it was replaced in 1920 by a permanent structure. Lloyd George proposed a catafalque, a low empty platform, but it was Lutyens' idea for the taller monument. An annual Service of Remembrance is held at the site on Remembrance Sunday, the closest Sunday to 11th November (Armistice Day) each year. Lutyens' cenotaph design has been reproduced elsewhere in the UK and in other countries of historical British allegiance including, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Bermuda and Hong Kong.
In 2015 a memorial to Lutyens by the sculptor Stephen Cox was erected in Apple Tree Yard, Mayfair, London, adjacent to the studio where Lutyens prepared the designs for The Cenotaph.
The following is the story of Lutyens’ early life in Thursley, to be continued next month with more about his career and buildings.
The Young Lutyens and his Thursley Houses
Contrary to some local belief, Sir Edwin Lutyens was not born in Thursley, but in London. His parents were living at 16 Onslow Square when Edwin, their tenth child, was born in March 1869 and they didn’t move to Thursley until some seven years later.
Lutyens’ father, Charles, had been an ambitious artillery officer: he had invented an instrument for judging distances called a Stadiometer which was used by the Army for nearly forty years. However, early in his career, he found that he preferred painting to being a soldier and he retired from the Army in 1859 when he was only 28. Three years later the first of his paintings was accepted by the Royal Academy and he exhibited there regularly until 1903.
The house Charles Lutyens leased in Thursley was called The Cottage (now Street House); it was built for the Knowles family in Regency times. Although The Cottage was a fairly substantial house with a large garden, it was not, as claimed by Mary Lutyens in the biography of her father, “by far the largest house in the village”.
Charles Lutyens did much of his painting from his Thursley home. His principal subjects were racehorses and portraits but he also produced a number of small watercolours of putti (the plural of putto, Italian for the figure of a child, especially a cherub or cupid-like one usually used in connection with Renaissance paintings) possibly as pot-boilers, for his financial state deteriorated as the years went by and his eyesight weakened. Several of his paintings can be seen at Goddards, the house at Abinger Common built by Frederick Mirilees as a rest home for “ladies of small means” and now the headquarters of the Lutyens Trust.
Charles died in 1915 but the Lutyens family continued to rent The Cottage for many years and until fairly recently a couple of village inhabitants still remembered Miss Lutyens. She was Aileen, one of Charles’ numerous daughters who, amongst other things, ran a sort of youth club to keep the young boys of the village occupied in their spare time. She was of the opinion that girls, with their domestic duties and their sewing, were well able to look after themselves, but that boys, unless suitably guided, developed into hopeless drifters! Enough said.
Aileen Lutyens died in 1926 and the house was then let for a while to various tenants, including Army officers from Aldershot. It was afterwards sold, first of all to a Mrs Patricia Peto, a widow, who soon re-married and, in 1956 it came into the possession of Captain R. C. Tosswill RN. By then it was popularly known as Lutyens House as it was thought that the former name was inappropriate. In 1970 the house was bought by Mr and Mrs Nicholas Charrington who were then living at The Dye House. The Charrington’s added an additional wing substantially increasing the size of the house. Nicholas Charrington was not, however, a lover of Lutyens work, so he gave the house the rather more mainstream name of Street House. As most of us will know, the house is currently undergoing a further sympathetic refurbishment and we look forward to seeing the house finished and looking splendid again.
Edwin Lutyens, always known to his family as Ned, was a delicate boy and deemed not sufficiently robust to go to boarding school with his brothers. Instead, most of the time he shared his sister’s governesses and supplemented his education by meandering through the Surrey countryside on a bicycle, looking at old buildings and comparing them to the new ones going up. He is said to have carried with him a small pane of glass and, with a slither of soap, drawn the outline of any building he found interesting. He also spent hours in the carpenter’s shop, then owned by “Old Tickner” of Milford, watching him at his craft and questioning him on why he did things in a certain way. By the time he was fifteen it was clear, both to himself and to his father, that architecture was to be his profession.
Sir Edwin Lutyens and his latter life and career
In 1885, Edwin was sent to the South Kensington School of Art to study architecture. He did not finish the course as he felt he had learnt all that the school could teach him, and left after two years. He became an apprentice in the practice of Ernest George and worked at night on his own designs. It was presumably during a visit home to his parents in Thursley that he succeeded in interesting Edmund Gray, then living at The Corner, the house opposite his family home, into commissioning him for a major extension. Young Ned, still only nineteen years old, designed a drawing room for The Corner, with two bedrooms above it. Originally, it was two small cottages, built around 1700, one of which had once contained the village shop. The Gray’s were obviously satisfied with it as, in 1895, Ned was asked to draw up plans for a morning room and a bedroom above to be built on the southern side of the house, and for four smaller rooms to be added to the western side. These extensions were grandly described as “two additional wings”. They were duly completed about 1896 and until recently, apart from a narrow bay being added to the drawing room, there had been no changes to the exterior of the house. Most of us know that the house has recently been given a lot of sympathetic tender loving care by the recent new owner.
Lutyens’ only other building in the actual village is what is now known as Prospect Cottage. It was originally built as a working men’s club, the land and building work costs donated by Captain Rushbrooke of Cosford House. Lutyens designed it seven years after the much grander and more flamboyant nearby Tilford Village Institute, and some say it was a reflection of his more simplified style – or perhaps it was just they had very differing briefs!
In Thursley churchyard, not far from the grave of the poet John Freeman (another month, another article!), is a cross designed by Sir Edwin, bearing the names of his parents and his sister Aileen. Nearby is Edwin’s memorial stone to his nephew, Derek Lutyens, who was killed in 1918 whilst serving in the Royal Air Force. Aside from the buildings in Thursley village already described, on the outskirts of the parish Lutyens designed two lakeside boathouses for Whitaker Wright in Witley Park. In 1901 he built the cottages at Warren Lodge and in 1909 he planned alterations to the main house there. Many of his more famous houses in the neighbourhood; Munstead Wood (1896) and Tighbourne Court, Witley (1899).
In later years of course, Lutyens achieved great fame, particularly with his designs for the Viceroy’s House and other impressive government and palatial private buildings in New Delhi and for The Cenotaph in Whitehall (covered in last month’s article). Only the crypt was completed of what he considered his finest design, the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King in Liverpool. This crypt is now part of the present cathedral, a magnificent fragment of what might have been. He worked, on and off, on this dream for fourteen years (1929 – 1943) before his death in 1944. He died believing that this grandiose Romanesque super-structure, which was to house the largest organ in the world, would be built when the war had ended. Tragically, it became cost prohibitive and never was.
Thank you to Jane Ridley for her kind permission to reprint this wonderful photograph.
If anyone would like more information on Lutyens, The Lutyens Trust can be contacted on general@lutyenstrust.org.uk.