The reinforced concrete specialist in Britain in the early 1900s was of recent vintage and essentially foreign (French) origin and it was as something of a ‘parvenu’ that he was criticized by British architects from the time that he became properly established. Reinforced concrete then existed as a multitude of patented ‘systems’, or methods of disposing reinforcement, controlled by patentees. Among these, the most prolific was François Hennebique’s French-Belgian system. Hennebique’s success was due not only to the system itself; it depended largely on the specialist commercial-technical organization which he evolved, and extended worldwide, to control both the design and construction of his reinforced concrete works (and which was imitated by others). When Louis Gustave Mouchel became Hennebique’s agent in Britain, from 1897–98, his business organization followed Hennebique’s model with specially trained regional engineers to execute working drawings (after initial designs by an architect or engineer), contractors ‘licensed’ to execute them in return for royalties, and nationwide expansion. By 1905, most reinforced concrete works and all framed buildings in Britain were in Hennebique’s system. It was from about this date that growing criticism of the ‘system specialist’, and of Mouchel personally, was voiced there. Three institutions were initiated, which were intended both to curtail the ‘specialist monopoly’ of reinforced concrete in Britain and to promote the knowledge and use of the material among architects in particular. These were: the RIBA Committee on Reinforced Concrete (1905–07), a journal, Concrete and Constructional Engineering (1906) and the Concrete Institute (1908).