1 Newton won the studentship for his design for a public library, in the style of Norman Shaw’s New Scotland Yard, which was shown at the Royal Academy (No. 1588, 1895) and illustrated in The Builder, 69 (9 November 1895), 336-37; Academy Architecture, Supplement (1895), 11; and The Studio, 4 (1894), 154.

2 Newton entered for the Soane Medallion in 1890 (see note 27). His first public recognition for an entry was in 1896, for a design for an Institute of Architects — a classical building with a sculptural frieze much influenced by the Institute of Chartered Surveyors building, which he praised in the first letter (see note 24). Newton’s design was shown at the Royal Academy (No. 1646, 1896) and illustrated in The Builder, 72 (9 January 1897), 38. Five years later another of his failed Soane entries, this time for a chapter house, was exhibited at the Royal Academy (No. 1754, 1890) and illustrated in The Builder, 79 (29 December 1900), 590 and Academy Architecture, 17 (1900), 1.

3 Illustrated in the ‘Architectural Review’ section of Academy Architecture, 12 (1897), 65, 77.

4 Newton exhibited his design for the great corridor of Queen’s College, Harley Street at the Royal Academy (No. 1670, 1898). Illustrated in Academy Architecture, 14(1898), 10.

5 Architectural Review, 34 (November 1913), 102. My thanks to Paul Cannon, Assistant Curator, Newbury District Museum, for identifying the house.

6 SirWeaver, Lawrence, Small Country Houses of To-Day, II (London, 2nd edn, 1922), pp. 151–56 Google Scholar.

7 Summerson, John, The Architectural Association 1847-1947 (London, 1947)Google Scholar.

8 Newton was nominated and elected a member of the Architectural Association in 1890 (from ‘AA Membership Book, 1885-1905’).

9 The Housing of the Working Classes Branch was formed in 1893 as part of the London County Council Architects Department. Newton joined in January 1894, at two guineas a week (from ‘LCC Pocket Book and Diary, 1894-March 1895’). Many of his fellow staff members were AA graduates with strong links to the Art Workers’ Guild. Newton has confused the scheme he worked on, which was not the Millbank Estate, Westminster, designed in the late 1890s, but rather the earlier Boundary Street Estate, Bethnal Green, where many of the buildings are treated in polychromatic brick stripes. Owen Fleming (1867-1955) was Head of the branch (and in 1948 still very much alive, despite Newton’s supposition). Charles Canning Winmill (1865–1945) fully distinguished himself as a designer when he joined the Fire Brigade branch in 1900. The Superintending Architect of the LCC whom Newton ribbed was Thomas Blashill. See Beattie, Susan, A Revolution in London Housing: LCC Housing Architects and their Work, 1893–1914 (London, 1980)Google Scholar.

10 Leonard Aloysius Scott Stokes (1858-1925) was a major architect of principally Roman Catholic churches. He was President of the Royal Institute of British Architects from 1910-12 and Royal Gold Medallist in 1919.

11 Roland Wilmott Paul (d. 1935). A fine draughtsman, best known for his illustrations of abbeys and cathedrals, Paul was on staff at Trie Builder.

12 Richard Phené Spiers (1836-1916) was for more than thirty-five years Master of the Architecture School and Surveyor at the Royal Academy.

13 Alfred Waterhouse’s (1830-1905) St Paul’s School, Hammersmith Road, London (1881-87) was in dark red brick and red terracotta.

14 Richard Norman Shaw (1831-1912) admitted to hating terracotta and only used it twice as window surrounds for Sutton Place, Surrey (1875-76) and Parr’s Bank, Liverpool (1898-1901). See Saint, Andrew, Richard Norman Shaw (New Haven and London, 1976), p. 461 Google Scholar.

15 George Thomas Hine (1841/42–1916) was a major asylum architect. See Cochrane, David, ‘“Humane, economical, and medically wise”: the LCC as Administrators of Victorian Lunacy Policy’, in The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of Psychiatry, ed. Bynum, W. F. and others, 3 vols (London, 1985—88)Google Scholar, III: The Asylum and its Psychiatry (1988), pp. 247-72 (pp. 253-60); and Taylor, Jeremy, Hospital and Asylum Architecture in England 1840-1914: Building for Health Care (London, 1991)Google Scholar.

16 Presbytery for the Church of All Souls, Peterborough, Cambridgeshire (1896).

17 The first exhibition of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society was held at the New Gallery in Regent Street, London in 1888. As this exhibition predates Newton’s quarrel with Stokes in the mid-i890s, Newton’s recollection is hazy.

18 Edward Schroder Prior (1852-1932), a leading figure of the Arts and Crafts movement, had been a pupil of Norman Shaw. Prior’s design, rejected by Spiers for hanging at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, was for the billiard room at Coran House, Mount Park Road, Harrow, London.

19 Hugh Hutton Stannus (1840-1908) taught modelling at the Royal Academy Schools from 1881 to 1900.

20 Hubert Christian Corlette (1869-1956) was, like Newton, from Sydney, Australia. Nicholson and Codette were in partnership from 1895 to 1916.

21 Sir Mervyn Edmund Macartney (1853-1932) was Surveyor to St Paul’s Cathedral from 1906 to 1920. In defense of Macartney’s supposed neglect of duties is the glowing tribute from W. Godfrey Allen, Macartney’s successor at St Paul’s, who wrote: ‘The Cathedral never had a more zealous surveyor nor one in greater harmony with the spirit of Sir Christopher Wren.’ (RIBA Journal, 40 (12 November 1932), 25-26). Of course, this does not preclude the possibility, as Newton says, that Macartney’s elusive assistant E.G. Hardy played a leading role in the Cathedral’s upkeep.

22 Macartney was one of eight architects invited to enter a competition in 1900 for the creation of the Aldwych, linking the Strand to the new Kingsway.

23 Sir Walter John Tapper (1861-1935): Nymans, which burned the night of 19 February 1947, is now in the care of the National Trust. The ruins of the house survive and are, as Newton notes, difficult to distinguish as created in the twentieth and not the sixteenth century.

24 The Institute of Chartered Accountants (1890), Moorgate Place, London, is now generally attributed to Arthur Beresford Pite (1861-1934), who was chief assistant in the office of John Belcher (1841-1913). See Hanson, Brian, ‘Masters of Building. The Office of Beresford Pite: Building with Art’, Architects’ Journal, 193 (1 May 1991), 30–39, 42-49Google Scholar. John James Joass (1868-1952) was in partnership with Belcher from 1905 to 1913.

25 Henry Vaughan Lanchester (1863-1953) was in partnership with James Stewart (d. 1904) and Edwin Alfred Rickards (1872-1920) from 1898. Rickards may have sounded like a cockney to Newton’s ear, but was in fact born in Chelsea and raised in the Fulham Road, where his mother had a drapery business. Rickards’s Deptford Town Hall, Lewisham, London (1908) has sculpture by Henry C. Fehr and Paul Montford. Newton has mistakenly, or humorously, called the Methodist (originally Wesleyan) Central Hall, opposite Westminster Abbey, the ‘Westminster City Hall’.

26 William George Blackmore Lewis (d. 1913) was in William Burges’s office. Burges’s brother-in-law R. P. Pullan more correctly describes the famous chimneypiece in Tower House, Melbury Road, Kensington and Chelsea, London in The House of’William Burges, A.R.A. (London, 1885), p. 8: ‘The rich corbelling which supports these figures [of the allegory of’The Dispersion of the Parts of Speech at the Time of the Tower of Babel’] has all the letters of the alphabet interwoven with it except the letter H, which has unfortunately dropped on to the slab below — a salutary hint to cockneys.’

27 John Begg (1866-1937) spent most of his career in India as consulting architect to the Government of Bombay (1901-08) and architect to the Government of India (1900-21), before returning to private practice in Edinburgh. The student competition which Begg won was the 1890 RIBA Pugin Studentship for a set of drawings of Lincoln Cathedral (‘Central Tower’ and ‘Chapter-house’ illustrated in The Builder, 58 (1 March 1890), fp.156; ‘Bishop’s door’ was exhibited at the Royal Academy, No. 1817, 1890).

28 Robert Weir Schulz (Weir, 1861-1951) was indeed still alive, having outlived his close friend Francis William Troup (1859-1941). Both Schultz and Troup were members of the Art Workers’ Guild, with Troup designing the Guild’s hall at its premises in Queen Square, Bloomsbury, in 1914. Schultz’s house, The Barn, in Hartley Wintney, Hampshire, built around 1900, with its famous garden, was a mecca for Arts and Crafts architects; W. R. Lethaby and Ernest Newton (1856-1922) became neighbours.

29 Edward Prioleau Warren (1856-1937) made additions to many colleges, including Magdalen, Balliol, Merton, and St John’s in Oxford, and in Cambridge at Gonville and Caius. The house he built for himself and his merry wife (Mark Tapley was the jolly manservant to the young architect hero of Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit) was Beech House, in Cholsey, Oxfordshire. The Lutyens house at Ilkley, Yorkshire is Heathcote, which in its neo-Baroque grandeur was the antithesis of the comfortable simplicity of houses by Warren and Ernest Newton.

30 Henry Wilson (1864-1934) was in the office, although not a partner, of John Dando Sedding (1838-91). Both were active members of the Art Workers’ Guild.

31 Charles Robert Ashbee (1863-1942) was a major force behind the Arts and Crafts movement and the Art Workers’ Guild. The workshop of the Guild of Handicraft was at 34 Commercial Street, Tower Hamlets, London during its first few years, 1888-91, and then moved in the summer of 1891 to Essex House, 401 Mile End Road, Tower Hamlets, London, which is probably where Newton stayed the night. See Crawford, Alan, C. R. Ashbee: Architect, Designer and Romantic Socialist (New Haven and London, 1985)Google Scholar.

32 Mrs Emily Constance Cook published a number of books in the Highways and Byways series which were illustrated by the architect and highly-respected artist of buildings Frederick Landseer Maur Griggs (1876-1938). Highways and Byways of London was first published in 1902, not 1920, and was also illustrated by Hugh Thomson. When Mrs Cook’s Highways and Byways of Berkshire appeared in 1907, Newton criticized it in a letter to the AA Journal, 22 (July 1907), 164: ‘It is wearisome to read and practically valueless, and it is a thousand pities that Mr. Griggs’ exquisite drawings (for which alone the books is well worth buying) should be associated with it.’

33 The atelier in Heddon Street, near Piccadilly Circus, was set up by Walter John Nash Miliard (1854-1936) and his partner Frank Thomas Baggallay (1855-1929) as an architectural studio in the Beaux Arts manner. W. G. B. Lewis was the master.

34 Newton was in Lincoln’s Inn around 1900 with Arnold Dunbar Smith (1866-1933), Cecil Claude Brewer (1871-1918), Sir Charles Nicholson (1867-1949), whose father was for a time Speaker of the House of Assembly in Sydney, Hubert Christian Corlette (1869-1956), who was born and educated in Sydney and was accepted at the Royal Academy Schools in 1890, the same year as Newton, and William Henry Finch (1869-1942): London Post Office Directory, 1, 1902.

35 Mrs Mary (Humphry) Ward was a best-selling author and keen social worker. Passmore Edwards Settlement (now Mary Ward House), Tavistock Place, Bloomsbury, Camden, London opened 12 February 1898. The building is an exemplar of the Arts and Crafts movement, with fireplaces by W. R. Lethaby, C. F. A. Voysey, Ernest Newton, and Guy Dawber.

36 Smith and Brewer won the competition for the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, in 1910. The foundation stone was laid by King George V in 1912, but the building was delayed by the First World War with the result that the first section was not opened until April 1927. It was never completed to Smith and Brewer’s design. The commission for the University College of South Wales, which Newton so despised, was won in limited competition by William Douglas Caröe (1857-1939) in 1903.

37 Smith and Brewer created additions to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, between 1924 and 1933. Prior, who was Slade Professor at Cambridge, described Smith and Brewer’s design as ‘a blotch … an ill-digested design’, but was overruled by Sydney Cockerell, the Director of the Fitzwilliam. See Blunt, Wilfrid, Cockerell (London, 1964), pp. 233–35 Google Scholar.

38 Ditton Place, Balcombe, Surrey, was built in 1904 for A.B. Horne. The formal garden was designed by Reginald Blomfield. (Country Life, 30 (1 July 1911), 18-25).

39 Smith and Brewer designed the store in Tottenham Court Road, Camden, London, for the furniture-maker Sir Ambrose Heal in 1916. Sir Edward Brantwood Maufe (1883-1974) designed an addition in 1937. Maufe also designed major additions to Heal’s country house, Baylins, near Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, in 1927. Maufe’s Playhouse Theatre, Oxford, had opened in 1938.

40 See note 9.