Holford

A Study in Architecture, Planning and Civic Design

Gordon Cherry, Leith Penny

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000134735
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Originally published in 1986 Holford is not just a biography of a major architect, planner and civic designer. In describing the life and times of the man, the authors provide a fascinating analysis of the developments in British architecture and planning from the 1930s to the 1970s. The book explains the story of a wartime policies for post-war reconstruction and examines policies which have had a major influence on the shaping of modern towns and cities. Holford's involvement in planning in the post-war period shows how gradually the concept of 'civic design' has been discarded to the detriment of the urban landscape. His position in the thick of development conflicts, such as that of Piccadilly, have much to tell us about the workings of developers and planning authorities, and the failings of the planning system in the pressures for growth in the 1960s. In this key period of British architectural and planning history, Holford was a leading actor, and describing his role the book provides a very readable account of a little explored area.

Chapter One
Prologue

William Graham Holford was born on the 22nd March, 1907, in a semi-detached suburban house on the northern escarpment overlooking the city of Johannesburg.¹ He was the second son born to his parents George and Kathleen, and the first to survive infancy. Both of Holford’s parents came from the small, predominantly English-speaking world of the eastern Cape Province: both had impeccably respectable connections going back to the settlers of 1820. His mother’s family, the Palmers, descended through a line of naval officers and Anglican clergymen who had moved in the convivial social atmosphere of Port Elizabeth, a place of rest and recreation for the British in India in the days before the Suez canal was opened: while his paternal grandfather had been a Manchester exciseman, from whose wife three generations inherited a distinctive long upper lip. These Manchester Holfords were devout Wesleyans; and the exciseman had a son, William, who in 1855 sailed for South Africa as a Methodist missionary.² For the next 25 years he worked at the Mission Press at Mount Coke, preached in English and ‘Kaffir’³ and raised, with his Cape-born wife, a family.

Holford’s father, the eldest of the Reverend William’s sons, was taken to England at the age of twelve to complete his education at a private school in Birmingham. He served an engineering apprenticeship in Leeds, and from there moved to the even deeper Victorian gloom of Manchester; but in 1884 he returned to South Africa and a career as a railway and mining engineer. When the Boer War broke out he joined the Colonial Division and, as a subaltern in 2nd Brabant’s Horse, was wounded in action. He returned to the Rand in 1900 and married Kathleen Palmer at Port Elizabeth the following year.

George Holford was a man of substance in whom were combined many of the qualities of the Methodist man of affairs: independence of mind, emotional reticence, practical experience won in a hard school, and a profound moral sensibility. He was in addition sensitive and clever, and although no celebrity was both popular and respected. When he was offered the position of general manager with Apex Mines it seemed as though his career was to be crowned with success and assured security. Apex was a part of East Rand Proprietary Mines, one of the most successful mining companies ever floated: but George Holford was no ‘company man’, nor did Kathleen like living in the East Rand. In 1912, with two sons to educate, he resigned his post over the ethics of a prospectus which the company was to issue. Whether his motives were primarily personal or moral we do not know, but his family were later to have reason for regretting this abandonment of security in favour of independence.

George Holford.

Source: Holford Papers, University of Liverpool.

If George Holford was very much the Methodist in some things, other facets of his personality were less obviously in that mould. Though retaining the social and moral values of his upbringing throughout his life, he had read Darwin and Huxley and had lapsed into a scientific agnosticism. He was also a keen self-taught amateur draughtsman and water-colourist, and he enjoyed the far-from-provincial social life of Johannesburg. Yet although a certain flair and polish added a gloss to his more fundamental qualities, George was outshone in the social graces by his wife. When they met she had just returned from Lausanne where, with her sister, she had spent the war years acquiring a cosmopolitan ‘finish’. Her vitality, dominating character and social gifts were a great asset to George, and the Holford family became a tight-knit adult society in which the division was not so much between parents and children as between Kathleen and a male court consisting of her husband and two sons. The similarities between the mannerisms and deportment of the mother and her eldest son were very striking. If it was from his father that Holford derived his seriousness, his moral integrity and his practical intelligence, it was his mother who gave him his social brilliance and ambition. The exquisite, rather formal consideration which was later to give birth to the maxim that ‘no-one ever gets through a door behind Holford’ was learned from the deference which the family paid Kathleen.

Holford and his mother Kathleen.

Source: Holford Papers, University of Liverpool.

The physical endowments which William inherited were out of the ordinary. His eyesight was abnormally good: in later life he would use the Bates method of exercise to maintain it.⁴ He noticed everything and retained it in a remarkable memory, apparently classified and available for instant recall. At the command of this mind was a resilient physique and a constitution indifferent to hunger, cold or fatigue. Without this equipment Holford could not have achieved what he did, but equally, this capacity for unflagging work meant that he recognized no physical reasons for limiting or selecting the demands he placed upon himself. He was not immune to illness, and after his departure for England suffered terribly from asthma.

When George Holford gave up his job with Apex Mines, the family returned to the Johannesburg suburb of Berea, where William had been born. Their circumstances were now reduced, but life was still comfortable. Their new home was a modest single-storey house with an iron roof and a front verandah. The plot was narrow, but there was a small public park at the bottom of the road, and a back gate that opened onto the Kopje, a small grassy hill from which one could see all Dormfontein. That there was no longer a strict English nanny to supervise them can have been no hardship to the boys and there would have been, as in all middle-class white households, one or more black servants to do the chores. There was money enough to have them well-educated; William and his younger brother Neil were sent to Park Town School, a good preparatory school with a headmaster who had taught at Harrow. When it moved from Park Town to Mountain View, on a crag looking towards Pretoria at the far end of the ridge from Berea, the boys became boarders. Many years later Neil Holford told Richard Gray that the most valuable thing they learned at Park Town was to enjoy standing on a platform and performing without embarrassment. An advantage of which they were less conscious was the social confidence which such an education imparted. Both brothers were to go through life without a thought of social inferiority, but nor, it might be added, did they become socially arrogant.

William was an enthusiastic correspondent. A typical letter to his mother, written at PTS at the age of twelve, runs thus:

Dear Mother,

I am sorry I have not written before but I have not been able to procure a stamp. I came second this week, Grieveson came first, Cohen third, Buckle fourth and Pullingen last which was very unusual. Neil came first … and Netherson came fourth for a wonder so he scored off him this week. There is a First Eleven Match against King Edwards this afternoon and I am-going to be linesman. I am very busy setting Homework and hanging up pictures and various other jobs, and can only get time to write between times. I am singing a song called the Big Bamboo at the Prizegiving. It is a ripping tune and the whole school sing the Chorus.

I must end now, love to Dad,

Yr loving son Billy.

As Richard Gray remarked, ‘To anyone who corresponded with Holford in later life this letter is of fascinating interest. The familiar formula is already established: the transparent introductory apology, the noting of the state of play, the preoccupation with more important affairs, the casual announcement of an important forthcoming public appearance, and the omission of any mention of personal feelings’.⁵

The Holfords had many cousins on both sides with whom they were in constant contact. Being themselves in Johannesburg they lived always at the centre of a busy family world. In the holidays there would often be not two but four boys in the house, the sons of Kathleen’s younger sister Nellie. The family’s favourite recreation was the theatre. London productions came frequently to Johannesburg and the Holfords never missed an important one. This was their main indulgence: otherwise their social life revolved around the tennis club, the houses of friends and relations and, in George Holford’s case, his numerous professional associations and clubs.⁶

At the age of thirteen Holford left Park Town for ‘Bishop’s’ - the Diocesan College School, a thousand miles away at Rondebosch near Cape Town. Johannesburg, though wealthy, had been a grid-iron mining town, and the trees in its park-like outer suburbs had then only just been planted. Cape Town was a different world. Rondebosch was one of a string of small satellite towns along the lush sub-tropical valley on the landward side of Table Mountain. The school stood in wooded grounds bought by its founder, the first Bishop of Cape Town, Robert Gray.⁷ The buildings, a mixture of heavy Gothic and colonial styles, looked across the valley to the lower slopes and cliffs of Table Mountain, and to what would one day become the site of the modern University of Cape Town. The regime was a spartan one. During the Great War, when the younger masters were away, discipline had got out of hand, and order was now being restored. School House, of which Holford was a member, was in the care of Colonel the Venerable Archdeacon Bull. Known to the boys as ‘Oxo’, he was an old-fashioned muscular Christian with a very traditional attitude to discipline, who is said to have worn riding boots and spurs under his cassock in chapel. His mother kept house for him and played Gilbert and Sullivan on the piano for the boys on Sunday evenings.

The influence of religion within the school was strong. Sewell, the founder of Radley, had been an Oxford friend of Bishop Gray, and the South African foundation was largely modelled on the first of the new High Church public schools in England.⁸ Under Canon Birt, principal in Holford’s time and a former assistant master at Radley, Bishop’s continued to follow the example of a strict, almost monastic ethos allied with high Anglican observance. Holford took his daily dose of Anglicanism seriously but it remained, even in his family circle, a private affair. As he confided to his diary some years later, religious ritual appealed deeply to him - but to what part of him he could not or did not say.

As in other such institutions, sport was also a dominating influence. Holford was a passable games-player but in the winter of his first year he contracted diphtheria and was seriously ill. As a result, he was forbidden to take strenuous exercise for a year, and was thereafter regarded as a ‘non-athlete’.⁹ He would nevertheless list rugby football as an enthusiasm in his Who’s Who entries well into middle age, and played tennis past his sixtieth birthday. More important to him as a schoolboy, however, were drawing and acting. There were no drawing classes at Bishop’s, but Holford had presumably learned from his father, and some of his early work survives in South Africa. The earliest are pen and ink studies of architectural subjects, influenced perhaps by the work of Charles E. Peers, who at about this time was publishing black-and-white drawings of Cape Town. Holford was also Honorary Secretary of the Debating Society in 1924, but it would seem that his star shone brightest on the stage. On 1st November, 1922 there was a Commemoration Concert, in which ‘A bright scene from Shakespeare’s Henry V given by W. G. Holford, A. Devenish and J. M. Robb added a dash of colour to the programme which was concluded by a Musical Monologue by Holford’.¹⁰ A month later he was playing Mark Anthony in an entertainment put on by the Chapel choir. His greatest triumph, however, was in the 1924 summer production of The Rivals. The school magazine reviewed his performance thus:

If we turn to the male characters we think it is time to say that the outstanding production was that of W. G. Holford in the part of Captain Absolute. To be gay, debonair, dashing and audible when one’s heart feels like a sinking ship, to laugh naturally for some five minutes when one is not really amused, to look completely at home on the stage while trying to remember one’s next line - to do all this and make it look quite easy is the art of a real actor, and we can say nothing more of Holford’s performance than that he succeeded in doing all this.¹¹

His success was apparently greater on stage than off. One contemporary remembers that he had quite a sharp tongue, and did not suffer fools gladly.

Perhaps inevitably, therefore, he was not popular because of these two things. Nor, I think, was he unpopular, but he tended to be left alone, and seemed to want this.¹²

Neither was his academic record particularly distinguished. He matriculated in December 1923 with middling grades: ‘B’ in History and English, ‘C’ in Latin and French, and ‘D’ in mathematics.¹³ He was, it seems, jogging along comfortably enough, neither especially stimulated nor oppressed by the atmosphere of the school. It was not until his last year that this more than usually impressionable boy was fired by a strong personal influence.

When Canon Birt had come to Bishop’s in 1919 he brought with him the idea of a Post-Matriculation Class, and invited his brother-in-law Hubert Kidd to join the staff and take charge of it. Kidd, who later became the first lay Principal, was a classicist and modern historian. Though shy, he was an approachable and enthusiastic educator. He ran history and discussion groups for the boys, which served to disseminate something of his own discrimination and culture. Kidd took a personal interest in Holford which would continue after the boy’s departure, when he was to give him the unusually generous leaving present of a book of etchings by D. Y. Cameron.¹⁴ Under the influence of adult interest rather than the exercise of adult authority, Holford did much better than before, and he gained seven passes with credit in the Oxford and Cambridge Schools’ Certificate exams before he finally left. He was not a typical product of the school, any more than he had been a typical pupil; yet in later life he attended Old Boys’ Dinners in London, something which those who themselves enjoy such occasions will be best placed to understand. Though he evidently had some affect...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part One: The Making of an Architect
• Part Two: A Promising Career
• Part Three: The New Planning
• Part Four: Principles and Practice
• Part Five: A Very Public Life
• Part Six: Holford in Perspective
• Notes
• Index