The Young Lutyens And His Thursley Houses by Wing Commander D. Q. Watson.
*Former name of Thursley History Society
Contrary to some local belief, 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 did not 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 twenty eight. 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”; it was built for the Knowles family in Regency times and was probably so called because it was considerably smaller than the near-by mansion which was their main home. 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 principle subjects were racehorses and portraits but he also produced a number of small watercolours of putti*, 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 several Thursley inhabitants still remember “Miss Lutyens”. She was Aileen, one of Charles' numerous daughters who, amongst other things, ran a kind of club to keep the young boys of the village occupied in their spare time. She held 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.
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. G. Tosswil RN. By then it had become “Lutyens House” as it was thought that the former name was inappropriate. In 1970 the property was bought by a Mr. & Mrs. Nicholas Charrington who were then living at The Dye House, a short distance to the west. The Charringtons added an additional wing increasing the size of the house by twenty to twenty five prercent.
Street House
The work was sympathetically done and the external symmetry was in no way spoilt. Nicholas Charrington was not, however, a lover of Lutyens' work, so he gave the property the rather boring name of Street House.
Edwin Lutyens, always known to his family as Ned, was a delicate boy and not sufficiently robust to go to a boarding school. Instead, most of the time he shared his sisters' governesses and supplemented his education by meandering through the Surrey countryside on a bicycle, looking at old buildings and comparing them with the new ones going up. He is said to have carried with him a small pane of glass and, with a small sliver 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.
The family still leased the house in Onslow Squre and in 1885 Edwin was sent to the South Kensington School of Art to study architecture, He did not finish the course: after two years he decided he had learnt all that the school could teach him and in 1887 he became an apprentice in the practice of Earnest George. With hindsight this may be considered a strange choice as George's style was very different from that of Edwin's architectural heroes at that time: Norman Shaw, then in his classical period, and William Morris of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
Whilst he was still apprenticed to George, Ned Lutyens worked at night on his own designs and it was presumably during one of his visits to his parents that he succeeded in interesting Edmund Gray, then living at The Corner, the house opposite the Lutyens' family home in Thursley. He commissioned young Ned, still only about nineteen years old , to design a drawing room for The Corner, with two bedrooms above it. To this day Edmund Gray remains something of a mystery. In the first place the house was not his property; it was owned by William Karn Fosberry, the local builder, and leased for twenty years to a certain John Gray, who was possibly Edmund's son. A conjecture is that Edmund, after his wife's death, came to live with his son, the house having to be enlarged to accommodate him. It had originally consisted of two joined cottages, built about 1700, one of which contained the village shop. These had been made into a single building some time before John Gray leased it.
The Corner
The original plans and a photograph taken when the work was almost complete, show that Lutyens' design was accepted without alteration. The Grays 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 west.
These extensions were grandly described as “two additional wings”. They were duly completed about 1896, the work having been carried out by the building's owner, W. K. Fosberry, who had also built the first extension. Since the turn of the century, apart from a narrow bay being added to the drawing room, there have been no changes to the exterior of the house.
Lutyens' only other building in the actual village of Thursley is what is now known as Prospect Cottage. It was originally built as a working mens' club, and the Parish Register held in the chuch, contains the following record “the site for the institute was given by Captain H. Rushbrooke, the architect was Mr. E. L. Lutyens, the builder was Mr. W. K. Fosberry. The building was formally opened and given to the Parish Council on February 11 1901”. Actually it seems that Captain Rushbrooke, who lived nearby at Cosford House, did rather more than just give the land; he is said to have paid for much of the building itself and to have taken a paternal interest in the running of the club.
Plan for The Institute
The institute comprised a reading room, a billiards and games room and accommodation for the caretaker. Until about 1914 one of the bedrooms amd the sitting room were used by the Thursley Parish Nurse, thereafter the whole of the private part was used by the secretary, his wife who was also the caretaker, and their family.
Prospect Cottage, formerly The Institute
The institute was disbanded in 1959 because the building needed more money spent on it than the Parish Council was in a position to pay. There was much controversy in the village as to the future of the building but it was eventually sold in 1968, planning approval having been given for conversion to residential use. The conditions of sale included an interesting clause, presumably inherited from the rules of the institute, forbidding the purchaser to use the building for the “discussion of political or religious subjects.... or for the consumption of intoxicating liquors”. The building was bought by a Mrs. Le Marx, who instructed local architects to modernise the interior and this has been further improved in recent years but the exterior still retains virtually all of Lutyens' original design.
Edwin Lutyens first met Gertrude Jekyll in 1889 when he was still returning fairly frequently to the village. Robert and Barbara Webb, who lived at Milford House, befriended the rather shy young architect and it was they who introduced him to Miss Jekyll who was, of course, many years his senior. Their work together in later years is well chronicled and although there is no known collaboration between them in Thursley, when the garden of The Corner was remodelled between the wars, several of the features appear to have been copied from examples in the neighbourhood.
In Thursley churchyard, not far from the grave of the poet John Freeman, is a cross designed by Edwin Lutyens, 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.
Warren Mere
Apart 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. This was probably in 1890 when he was still studying under Earnest George. 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 are in the neighbourhood, for example Munstead Wood (1896) and Tighbourne Court, Witley (1899).
Munstead Wood and Tigbourne Court
In later years of course, Lutyens achieved great fame, particularly with his designs for the Viceroy's House and other buildings in New Delhi and for the Cenotaph in Whitehall. Only the crypt was completed of what he considered his finest design, the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, Liverpool, on which he worked, off and on, for fourteen years (1929 – 1943). He died in 1944, believing that this vast building would be built when the war had ended.
*Putti is the plural of putto (Italian) meaning the figure of a child, especially a cherub or cupid-like. It is usually used in connection with Rennaissance paintings.