Thomas Henry

28/05/1869

Thomas Lyon was an English architect and the first Director of Design at the Cambridge School of Architecture. His first major work was St George’s Church and Rectory at Goodwood, South Australia, a gift in memory of his sister.

Thomas Henry (Harry) Lyon was born in Ilsington, Devon, where his father, a former tea merchant in Wigan, moved south buying land and farms near Dartmoor, hoping to profit from mining tin, iron and copper. He had a number of sisters and step sisters and as the eldest surviving son became heir. He was educated at Trent School, where he was cox of the rowing team, choir member, excelled in divinity but was an average pupil in mathematics and Latin. Upon leaving school he was apprenticed to a firm of architects in Torquay where, he later wrote, “I was an articled pupil in an office where I saw nothing that was not quite hopeless from an aesthetic point of view” (Lyon 1932 p.1). After two years he went up to Corpus Christi College intending to read theology, but changed to read law.

Cambridge defined Thomas Henry Lyon. As an undergraduate he made a circle of friends that would influence the rest of his life. John Harmer was to become bishop of Adelaide, and Percy Wise, the Anglo-Catholic priest at St Georges Church, Goodwood. The most renowned of these was the writer John Cowper Powys, whose works include frequent references to Lyon, known by his intimates as Harry Lyon, prompting members of the Powys Society to learn more about him. Thus, Powys’ biographer writes that while it had been assumed that Lyon, “who so often upbraided him, was a conventional, sports-loving Christian of limited horizons [he was] in fact a distinguished architect and aesthete, in some ways more unconventional that John” (Rands 2000). Both Powys and another Cambridge friend, Louis Wilkinson, used Lyon as inspiration for characters in their novels.

Powys was two years below Lyon and had few close friends, but was immediately captivated. He wrote that “Thomas Henry Lyon, of whose striking personality rumours came to me the minute I set foot in Corpus, soon became, not only the most intimate, but the most beguiling of these” (Rands 2000 p. 5). Small of stature, Lyon coxed the rowing team at Corpus and then Cambridge, was a member of the prestigious chess club and the exclusive Gravediggers Club, formed to read plays. Many of his friends enjoyed his hospitality at Middlecott, his family home at Ilsington, and three were married to his sisters, including Powys who married his sister Margaret (Truran 1993).

After graduating he resumed his training in architecture, taking night classes at the Architectural Association (AA) and working in the office of W.D. Caroe, a specialist in church design and restoration. He was awarded the bronze medal for the advanced class in design by the AA in 1896. In the previous year he had started his own practice in Kensington High St, London. He had been elected to the AA in 1893, and was therefore still working towards the RIBA’s voluntary examination. This must have been something of a gentlemanly occupation, boosted by his father’s practice of selling off land at Ilsingon with a condition that Lyon was to design the houses. Nor was it is only source of income, for in 1895 he accompanied Percy Wise and his newly wed sister on his first visit to Adelaide. Later, he was to live for several months in Boston, Massachusetts where he paid Powys’s considerable medical bill.

It was on this long voyage that Wise influenced Lyon to become a practicing Anglo-Catholic, an event, Powys wrote, that “brought down not only the satiric wit but a great burst of sheer schoolboy ribaldry” from his Cambridge friends (Powys 1934 p.269 cited in Rands 1995). In Adelaide he would no doubt have spent time with Bishop Hamer, deliberating ideas for the completion of St Peter’s Cathedral. After five years Wise’s wife died suddenly on the voyage to England and Lyon designed a reredos to be installed in her home church at Ilsington. Father Wise returned to Adelaide and became priest at St George’s Anglican Church, Goodwood where he cautiously introduced Anglo-Catholic practices (which would later result in a lengthy dispute with Archbishop Nutter, famous in ecclesiastical circles.)

The congregation at St George’s increased and with fundraising and a substantial donation, land was bought for a new building. Lyon offered to design it as a memorial to his late sister and made his second trip to Adelaide, embarking on the R.M.S. Ormuz at Marseilles arriving in late April, so that in May 1902, the plans could be presented to the Parish. The plan was precisely what was advocated by the Cambridge Camden Society and contrived to promote the liturgical practices advocated by the Oxford Movement.

Detailed drawing could then proceed and rather than calling tenders for the construction, the work was entrusted to highly regarded and experienced builder, Walter C Torode, on a cost plus basis. Torode, who had built Elder Hall at Adelaide University, was completing St Peter’s Cathedral and was well known to Wise from his time at Crafers. Moreover he owned stone quarries and directly employed the best tradesmen. This arrangement would enable Lyon to call on his local experience and with a limited budget, maintain control on costs. To maintain absolute control of the design, he prepared over sixty drawings (‘St George’s Church, Goodwood’ 1903 p.6) and sent out items of furnishing made in the plain arts and crafts style.

The foundation stone was laid in October of that year and the Advertiser newspaper gave a terse description: “The main outer walls are to be constructed of hollow brickwork, which will be plastered inside and rough cast outside, whilst the piers and arches of the nave and aisles and the window arches will be Murray River freestone” (‘A New Church’ 1902 p.10). But nothing in that account, or the stark barnlike exterior prepares one for the finely crafted atmospheric quality of the interior. Stone is used sparingly and cost effectively, following Pugin’s “two great rules” for design – there being “no features which are not necessary for convenience, construction of propriety, and that “all ornament should consist of the essential construction of the building” (Pugin 1841). In this light, the often perplexing contrast between the gothic revival interior and the arts and crafts exterior can be seen as sharing the same roots. Then too, while the plan was predetermined, the exterior form was open to interpretation and with its free expression of the mason’s craft; asymmetrical window dressings and untreated stucco walls could be seen as a precursor to modernism.

It was during this period that St Peter’s Cathedral was being completed, to designs by William Butterfield modified and supervised by local architect Edward Woods. Lyon was instrumental in the design of the reredos, no doubt because of his connections with Bishop Harmer and Percy Wise. This was a significant undertaking, estimated to cost more than the construction of St George’s. It was carved in oak by Herbert Read at St Sidwells Artworks in Devon with the Nathaniel Hitch carving the coloured and gilded figures in his studio in Vauxhall, South London and so it would have involved considerable project management. One could leave it at that except for the intriguing reports in the Advertiser (‘St Peter’s Cathedral’ 1903 p.8) and the Register (12 Dec 1904, p.5) attributing the design to Mr Lyon and Mr Greenslade. This is most likely to be a reference to Exeter born Sidney K. Greenslade, the assistant of J.H. Eastwood, architect for the Arts and Crafts Gothic Revival style Leeds Cathedral, then under construction, who had designed the new reredos. What, if any, their relationship was, is not known, and it may simply be a misreporting of a speech made on the occasion. However, Lyon does not list it in his entry in ‘Who’s Who in Architecture’ (1923) nor is it mentioned in any of three obituaries.

In Cambridge he designed his most admired work, the enlargement and fit out of Sidney Sussex College Chapel as a centre for Anglo-Catholic life in the University. Two other churches followed and a number of fine University buildings and memorials. Architectural education at Cambridge grew out of the History of Art and teaching of Classics. Lyon is recorded as being the first principal teacher of design, leading to being the first Director of the architecture department until his retirement in 1937. Professional training did not fit well into the Oxbridge model and for many decades the final two years remained a diploma course. This may explain why, although he was given rooms and dining rights at Corpus Christi and his portrait is hung in the Combination Room he was never made a Fellow.

His theories on art were written as a series of lectures delivered at Corpus and later published as The Attribute Proper to Art: Pure Art Value. His second book, Real Architecture: The Rights and Wrongs of Taste, rather illustrates Powys’s observation of Harry Lyon being a “man utterly confident in the correctness of his own opinions”.(Graves 1983). Gavin Walkley, the second Head of the School of Architecture at the South Australian School of Mines and Industries read for his Bachelor of Arts and Master of Letters at Cambridge during the years 1935-39 and so would been influenced by Lyon. Both of Lyon’s publications are held in the Gavin Walkley Special Collection in the University of South Australia City West Library.

John Schenk

Schenk, John, 'Lyon, Thomas Henry', Architecture Museum, University of South Australia, 2017, Architects of South Australia: [http://www.architectsdatabase.unisa.edu.au/arch_full.asp?Arch_ID=149]