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Finella, Mansfield Forbes, Raymond McGrath, and Modernist Architecture in Britain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2012

Elizabeth Darling
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Journal of British Studies , Volume 50 , Issue 1 , January 2011 , pp. 125 - 155
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Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2011

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References

1 Sale catalogue for Finella, July 1936, box 8, Raymond McGrath Papers (RMP), Irish Architectural Archives, Dublin.

2 Typescript of article on Finella (with no title) by Sigrid Danius, trans. Count Patrick Hamilton; and Barman to Forbes, 17 August 1929, CCHR/2/FOR/5/5, Mansfield Duval Forbes Papers (MDFP), Clare College, Cambridge.

3 Clough Williams Ellis, “Twentieth Century Houses,” London Town, February 1935, 46, box 14, RMP.

4 “Mansfield D. Forbes,” The Times, 29 January 1936, 17.

5 Jackson, Anthony, The Politics of Architecture: A History of Modern Architecture in Britain (London, 1970), 32Google Scholar.

6 Arts Council of Great Britain, The Thirties (London, 1979), 101, 192Google ScholarPubMed.

7 Powers, Alan, “The Search for a New Reality,” in Modern Britain, ed. Peto, James and Loveday, Donna (London, 1999), 19Google Scholar. See also Dean, David, The Thirties: Recalling the Architectural Scene (New York, 1983), 72Google Scholar; and Powers, Alan, Britain: Modern Architectures in History (London, 2007), 35Google Scholar.

8 Powers, Alan, Modern: The Modern Movement in Britain (London, 2005), 16Google Scholar.

9 Finella has been considered only in wider discussions of McGrath’s work or in passing in accounts of Forbes’s life. Of the former, see Hanson, Brian, “Rhapsody in Black Glass,” Architectural Review 162 (July 1977): 58–64Google Scholar; Powers, Alan, “‘Simple-Intime’: The Work of Raymond McGrath,” Thirties Society Journal, no. 3 (1982): 2–11Google Scholar; O’Donovan, Donal, God’s Architect: A Life of Raymond McGrath (County Wicklow, 1995), chaps. 13 and 14Google Scholar; and Forster, Kurt, “The Haunting Reflections of Raymond McGrath: A Rediscovery,” Abitare 464 (2006): 178–85Google Scholar. Of the latter, see Carey, Hugh, Mansfield Forbes and His Cambridge (Cambridge, 1984), chap. 8Google Scholar.

10 See, e.g., Daunton, Martin and Rieger, Bernhard, eds., Meanings of Modernity: Britain from the Late Victorian Era to World War II (Oxford, 2001)Google Scholar; Esty, Jed, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton, NJ, 2004)Google Scholar; Heynen, Hilde, Architecture and Modernity: A Critique (Cambridge, MA, 1999)Google Scholar; LeMahieu, Daniel, A Culture for Democracy (Oxford, 1988)Google Scholar; Corbett, David Peters, The Modernity of English Art, 1914–30 (Manchester, 1997)Google Scholar; and Tickner, Lisa, Modern Life and Modern Subjects: British Art in the Early Twentieth Century (New Haven, CT, 2000)Google Scholar.

11 See Berman, Marshall, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London, 1982), especially its “Introduction.”Google Scholar

12 I use the term “modernity” here to frame a general periodization for this article of, in Lisa Tickner’s phrase, “the cumulative effect” of the processes of modernization that emerged in the wake of the technological, economic, and political upheavals of the Industrial Revolution on “social conditions and modes of experience” (Tickner, Modern Life and Modern Subjects, 184). More specifically, I refer to that particular phase of modernity signaled by Raymond Williams that was inaugurated toward the end of the nineteenth century and was characterized by a renewed phase of technological innovations, the emergence of new forms of popular media, campaigns for mass democracy, and, ultimately, world war. See Raymond Williams, “When Was Modernism?” in Raymond Williams, Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (1989; repr., London, 2007), 33–34.

13 Corbett, The Modernity of English Art, 1914–30, 5–6.

14 Ibid., 5, 6, and 9.

15 Hitchcock, Henry-Russell and Johnson, Philip, The International Style: Architecture since 1922 (New York, 1932), chaps. 5–7Google Scholar.

16 Goldhagen, Sarah Williams, “Something to Talk About: Modernism, Discourse, Style,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 64, no. 2 (June 2005): 145. For an exemplar of such approaches, see Heynen, Architecture and Modernity.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 There are relatively few accounts that seek to make explicit links between modernity and architecture in the interwar decades; see, e.g., Saler, Michael, The Avant-Garde in Interwar England: Medieval Modernism and the London Underground (Oxford, 1999)Google Scholar; Gold, John, The Experience of Modernism: Modern Architects and the Future City, 1928–53 (London, 1997), and also his recent overview of revisionist trends in Planning Perspectives 23, no. 2 (April 2008): 254–56Google Scholar; and my Re-forming Britain: Narratives of Modernity before Reconstruction (London, 2007). The more typical tendency has been to expand the field of study though the inclusion of references to the work of noncanonical architects in studies that are otherwise devoted to modernists; see, e.g., Powers, Britain, chap. 1.

18 Forbes to Jack Pritchard, 4 February 1931, PP/34/1/A/45, Jack Pritchard Archive (JPA), University of East Anglia, Norwich. Throughout this article, 2009 prices (the most recent data set available), versus those of the particular year in question (signaled by the price today in parentheses), are calculated using the retail price index factor at www.measuringworth.com (information retrieved 19 August 2010).

19 Forbes to bursar of Gonville and Caius, 10 November 1931, Department of Estate Management file (DEM), BUR: C/03/007, Gonville and Caius College Archives (GCA), Cambridge. In March 1929, Forbes owned £4,800 (£216,000) in securities (Forbes to Pritchard, 9 March 1929, PP/34/A/11, JPA). The documents held in the Gonville and Caius Archives have not previously been deployed in historical accounts of the house, yet among them are what seem to be a unique, though incomplete, set of drawings and plans, as well as correspondence.

20 Forbes originally had the house only on a seven-year lease. In January 1930, this was changed to a fourteen-year lease, and Forbes indicated that, finances permitting, he would like to commit to a twenty-one-year period. Forbes-Caius bursar, January 1930, DEM: BUR: C/03/007, GCA.

21 Figures are taken from a letter by Coates, 14 July 1932, cited in Laura Cohn, The Door to a Secret Room: A Portrait of Wells Coates (Aldershot, 1999), 105. On that interior, see Coates, Wells, “Furniture To-day, Furniture To-morrow: Leaves from a Meta-technical Notebook,” Architectural Review 72 (July 1932): 29–38Google Scholar.

22 See The Times, 29 January 1936, 17; McGrath, Raymond, “Mansfield D. Forbes: An Intimate Appreciation,” Architectural Review 79 (April 1936): 173–75Google Scholar; Bagenal, Hope, “Mansfield D. Forbes,” Architectural Association Journal 56 (February 1936): 348Google Scholar; Astragal [pseudo. Hubert de Cronin Hastings], “Mansfield Forbes,” Architects’ Journal 83 (30 January 1936): 185; Anonymous, “Lecturer and Art Patron: Death of Mr Mansfield Forbes,” Cambridge Standard, 31 January 1936.

23 For example, Howarth, T. E. B., in his Cambridge between Two Wars (London, 1978), 120Google Scholar, recalled Forbes’s tendency to spend hours lecturing on Moby Dick when he was supposed to be discussing Shakespeare.

24 Freeman, Gwendolen, “Queenie at Girton,” in The Leavises: Recollections and Impressions, ed. Thompson, Denys (Cambridge, 1984), 14Google Scholar.

25 Baudelaire, Charles, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. and ed. Mayne, Jonathan (London, 1995), 8–9Google Scholar.

26 Forbes’s family is discussed in Carey, Mansfield Forbes, chaps. 1 and 2.

27 One of the few pieces of published work by Mansfield Forbes is an article, “Scottish Architecture from Examples in Aberdeenshire,” Architectural Association Journal 37 (January 1922): 142–48.

28 Throughout his life Forbes suffered periodic breakdowns following frenetic periods of activity; these are described in Carey, Mansfield Forbes, chap. 2.

29 See Ackerley, J. R., My Father and Myself (London, 1968), 118–20Google Scholar, for insight into gay life in Cambridge at this time. I will develop the idea of the closet and its relationship to Forbes’s patronage of Finella further on in this article.

30 Sayle, Charles, ed., Archibald Don: A Memoir (London, 1918), 1–5, describes this japeGoogle Scholar.

31 “Sir Roland Penrose in Conversation with Alan Young,” PN Review 4, no. 4, 5 (n.d.), CCHR/2/FOR/2/5, MDFP.

32 Keynes to Forbes, 9 February 1921, CCHR/2/FOR/5/3, MDFP.

33 McGrath cited in Hanson, “Rhapsody in Black Glass,” 60. This may have been Clare’s Dilettante Society, with which Forbes was also closely involved.

34 Tillyard, Eustace, The Muse Unchained: An Intimate Account of the Revolution in English Studies at Cambridge (London, 1958), 88Google Scholar.

35 Don’s diary entry for 21 January 1915 is cited in Sayle, Archibald Don, 98. It was Don who instigated the exhibition prank.

36 Ibid.

37 Palmer, D. J., The Rise of English Studies: An Account of the Study of English Language and Literature from Its Origins to the Making of the Oxford English School (Oxford, 1965), 152–54Google Scholar.

38 For this necessarily truncated account of Cambridge English, I draw on Ibid.; Baldick, Chris, The Social Mission of English Criticism (Oxford, 1983)Google Scholar; and Eagleton, Terry, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford, 1996)Google Scholar.

39 Eagleton, Literary Theory, 27.

40 “By himself Forbes would have achieved nothing tangible. He needed Richards through whom to work” (Tillyard, The Muse Unchained, 88).

41 The key texts are Richards, I. A., Principles of Literary Criticism (London, 1924), and Practical Criticism (London, 1928)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42 Eagleton, Literary Theory, 38–39.

43 Marchand, Philip, Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger (Cambridge, MA, 1998), 38Google Scholar. McLuhan attended lectures by Forbes in the mid-1930s. My thanks to Alan Powers for this reference.

44 Richards, Practical Criticism, cited in Eagleton, Literary Theory, 38.

45 Tillyard, The Muse Unchained, 88.

46 Leavis would thank Forbes for the recommendation that secured him a research fellowship at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in a letter of 22 February 1921, CCHR/2/FOR/5/3, MDFP.

47 Willey, Basil, Cambridge and Other Memories (London, 1968), 21.Google Scholar

48 Tillyard, The Muse Unchained, 122.

49 SirGodwin, Harry, FRS, Cambridge and Clare (Cambridge, 1985), 99Google Scholar.

50 Forbes, Mansfield, Clare College, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1928)Google Scholar.

51 In his correspondence, Forbes frequently referenced Douglas’s scheme, also sending friends pamphlets. See also Carey, Mansfield Forbes, 132–33.

52 There is a real paucity of literature that explores such architects in interwar Britain. Both Jackson, The Politics of Architecture, and Powers, Britain, do, however, offer some useful insights to their, and their ilk’s, practices.

53 Raymond McGrath cited in Hanson, “Rhapsody in Black Glass,” 60.

54 Correspondence between Caius bursar and Bidwell and Sons surveyors and with Forbes, 14 April 1928–31 May 1928, DEM: BUR: C/03/007, GCA.

55 Forbes would share the house with Godwin, a fellow of Clare, and his wife. Since the house was not physically separated, it is unclear exactly how this relationship functioned. See Godwin, Cambridge and Clare, 127. According to Mary Crozier, McGrath’s fiancée, they had moved out by 1930; letter to her father, 3 September 1930, box 16, RMP. Forbes also had a cook, a gardener, and sometimes maids.

56 Correspondence between Forbes, Caius bursar, and the surveyor; February 1928 to July 1929, DEM: BUR: C/03/007, GCA. The rent would be £214 (£9,650) per annum.

57 Forbes quoted by McGrath, “Mansfield D. Forbes,” 175.

58 Anonymous [pseud. Mansfield Forbes], “An Imaginary Conversation with Mansfield D. Forbes, Esq.: An Experiment in Modernism,” Varsity Weekly 4 June 1932, 1.

59 Raymond McGrath, “Recalling the ’20s and ’30s,” typescript of a lecture to the Architectural Association of Ireland, 1972, copy in the National Art Library, London.

60 “Raymond McGrath,” Architecture (Sydney), no. 15 (May 1926): 11.

61 McGrath diary, 7 March 1927, box 19, RMP. McGrath’s contacts with Cambridge at this point seem to have been entirely separate from his acquaintance with Forbes; it is clear from his diaries that his tutors in Sydney had furnished him with numerous letters of introduction, which may well have resulted in his direction toward Cambridge.

62 Oscar Wilde (1895), cited in Richards, Jeffrey, “Passing the Love of Women: Manly Love and Victorian Society,” in Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800–1940, ed. Mangan, J. A. and Walvin, James (Manchester, 1987), 93–95Google Scholar.

63 McGrath diary, 16 March 1927, box 19, RMP.

64 No student records for McGrath have survived. Correspondence with Clare College archivist, June 2009.

65 McGrath’s diary for 1926–28, box 19, RMP.

66 Hatt, Michael, “Space, Surface, Self: Homosexuality and the Aesthetic Interior,” Visual Culture in Britain 8, no. 1 (Summer 2007): 105, 115Google Scholar.

67 Houlbrook, Matt, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis (Chicago and London, 2005), 129Google Scholar.

68 Urbach, Henry, “Closets, Clothes, disClosure,” in Desiring Practices: Architecture, Gender and the Interdisciplinary, ed. McCorquodale, Duncan, Rüedi, Katerina, and Wigglesworth, Sarah (London, 1996), 248Google Scholar.

69 Anonymous [pseud. Forbes], “An Imaginary Conversation with Mansfield D. Forbes, Esq.,” 1.

70 See “A Symphony in Glass: Decorations at ‘Finella’ by McGrath, Raymond,” Architects’ Journal 68 (25 December 1929), 974Google Scholar; for a more poetic account, see The Kaim of Mathers: A Legendary Tale and Verses on Den-Finella (Brechin, 1853).

71 Houlbrook, Queer London, 7.

72 Forbes, cited in Bradbrook, Muriel C., “I. A. Richards at Cambridge,” in I. A. Richards: Essays in His Honor, ed. Brower, Reuben, Vendler, Helen, and Hollander, John (New York, 1973), 62Google Scholar.

73 An elision between Beckford and Forbes is particularly tempting, given that both men were sons of colonial merchants and inhabited interiors designed to be performed through light effects and other devices. There was certainly a literature by this time on Beckford and Fonthill that Forbes could have consulted for reference, not least Rutter’s, JohnAn Illustrated History and Description of Fonthill Abbey (London, 1823)Google Scholar.

74 Sir Walter Scott had gas lighting installed at Abbotsford in 1823. See Wainwright, Clive, The Romantic Interior: The British Collector at Home, 1750–1850 (New Haven, CT, 1989), chaps. 6 and 7, esp. 183–85Google Scholar.

75 Stewart, Susan, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC, 1993), 152Google Scholar.

76 Perry, Gill, “Primitivism and the ‘Modern,’” in Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction: The Early Twentieth Century, ed. Harrison, Charles, Frascina, Francis, and Perry, Gill (New Haven, CT, 1993), 3–85Google Scholar. For Esty, Forbes’s interest in a British primitivism formed part of what he calls the “(re)substitution of England’s [sic] own primitive past for the vanishing pleasures of colonial exoticism”; see Shrinking Island, 41–42.

77 Reed, Christopher, Bloomsbury Rooms: Modernism, Subculture and Domesticity (New York, 2004).Google Scholar

78 Reed, Christopher, “A Room of One’s Own: The Bloomsbury Group’s Creation of a Modernist Domesticity,” in Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Architecture, ed. Reed, Christopher (London, 1986), 148Google Scholar.

79 McGrath diary entry, 25 February 1927, box 19, RMP.

80 Raymond McGrath, Twentieth Century Houses (London, 1934), 85. His undergraduate dissertation had been on Chinese architecture.

81 McGrath, Raymond, “Spanish Moonshine: Some Fragments of a Travel Diary,” Architectural Review 64 (August–October 1928): 47–50, 98–101, 138–41Google Scholar.

82 McGrath, Twentieth Century Houses, 86.

83 McGrath, “Recalling the ’20s and ’30s.”

84 Strathdon [pseud. Mansfield Forbes], “Finella,” Country Life 67 (22 March 1930): 437; this was also described as “a cool rose-wash” in A. C. Frost’s “Finella: A House for Mansfield D. Forbes, Esq., McGrath, Raymond, Architect,” Architectural Review 66 (December 1929): 265Google Scholar. The color may have been a reference to the pink harl with which the castle of Craigevar, Forbes’s family seat, was covered. On Craigevar, see Tranter, Nigel, The Fortified House in Scotland, vol. 4, Aberdeenshire, Angus and Kincardinshire (Edinburgh, 1966), 36–37Google Scholar.

85 McGrath to Mary Crozier, June 15 1929, CCHR/2/FOR/5/5, MDFP.

86 McGrath to Forbes, 10 September 1928, CCHR/2/FOR/5/5, MDFP.

87 McKellar, Elizabeth, “Populism vs Professionalism: John Summerson and the Twentieth-Century Creation of the ‘Georgian,’” in Articulating British Classicism, New Approaches to Eighteenth-Century Architecture, ed. Arciszewska, Barbara and McKellar, Elizabeth (Aldershot, 2004), 35–56Google Scholar.

88 Richards, J. M., “The Condition of Architecture and the Principle of Anonymity,” in Circle, ed. Martin, J. L., Nicholson, Ben, and Gabo, Naum (London, 1937), 185Google ScholarPubMed.

89 Strathdon [pseud. Forbes], “Finella,” 437.

90 McGrath to Forbes, 20 September 1929, CCHR/2/FOR/5/5, MDFP.

91 The pilasters cost £3 (£134) each; McGrath to Forbes, 25 September 1928, CCHR/2/FOR/5/5, MDFP.

92 McGrath, “Spanish Moonshine,” 139.

93 Anonymous [pseud. Forbes], “An Imaginary Conversation with Mansfield D. Forbes, Esq.,” 1.

94 Described in McGrath to Mary Crozier, June 15 1929, CCHR/2/FOR/5/5, MDFP.

95 Finella, Cambridge: An Essay in Modern Decoration (London and Birmingham, n.d., ca.1932), RMP.

96 Anonymous (pseud. Forbes), “An Imaginary Conversation with Mansfield D. Forbes, Esq.,” 1.

97 Plans and drawings of Finella, PD/15, GCA.

98 Julian Trevelyan to Hugh Carey, 2 February 1982, CCHR/2/FOR/1, MDFP.

99 Caius surveyor to Caius bursar, 31 May 1928, DEM: BUR: C/03/007, GCA.

100 Work did continue, as funds permitted, after the major work had been undertaken during 1928–29. June 1930 saw work carried out on the bedrooms, and the landing hall was clad in black marmorite glass (Forbes to Caius bursar, 28 June 1931 DEM: BUR: C/03/007, GCA). Lost to posterity, however, were a plan to place somewhere in the house “a knight in armor done in glass on his tomb, with daisies for eyes” (McGrath to Mary Crozier, June 19 1929, box 8, RMP) and a 1932 scheme to build a portable house in the garden in which I. A. Richards and his wife would live (Forbes to Caius bursar 22 June 1932, DEM: BUR: C/03/007, GCA).

101 “A Symphony in Glass,” 974–80.

102 McGrath to Mary Crozier, 11 September 1929, CCHR/2/FOR/5/5, MDFP.

103 Anonymous [pseud. Forbes], “An Imaginary Conversation with Mansfield D. Forbes, Esq.,” 1.

104 Forbes to Pritchard, 12 June 1932, PP/34/1/A/56, JPA.

105 “Aladdin at Cambridge,” The Studio 99 (July 1930): 183–85; Holme, C. Geoffrey and Wainwright, S. B., ed., Decorative Art, 1930: The Studio Yearbook (London, 1930): 27Google Scholar; Todd, Dorothy and Mortimer, Raymond, The New Interior Decoration (London, 1929)Google Scholar; “A Modern House in Cambridge” Vogue (11 December 1929), 60–61.

106 Typescript of article on Finella by Sigrid Danius, CCHR/2/FOR/5/5, MDFP.

107 “Ambienti D’Eccezione,” Domus, November 1930, 50–52.

108 McGrath, Twentieth Century Houses, 85–87; McGrath, Raymond with Frost, A. C., Glass in Architecture and Decoration (London, 1937), 322–24Google Scholar.

109 N. L. Gall, “Furnishing and Decoration at ‘Finella,’” Good Housekeeping, November 1929; offprint in CCHR/2/FOR/2/3, MDFP; “Colour and Reflected Light,” Ideal Home, April 1930, 257–64.

110 Forbes to Lance Sieveking, 6 April 1930, Lance Sieveking Papers (LSP), Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington.

111 Forbes to Sieveking, 18 November 1935, LSP.

112 John Betjeman to Carey, 7 July 1983. CCHR/2/FOR/1, MDFP.

113 On Coates, see my “Wells Coates: Maker of a Modern British Architecture” Architectural Review 224 (September 2008): 82–87, and my Re-forming Britain, chaps. 1 and 3.

114 Forbes to Pritchard, 4 February 1931, JPA, PP/34/1/A/45, in which he asks for a contribution of “not less that £50” (£2,520). Docker brothers would produce a small advertising brochure in recompense (cited in n. 95).

115 Pritchard to Forbes, 2 and 15 August 1929, PP/9/25/1 and PP/34/1/A/22, JPA.

116 On Venesta, see Kermik, Jyri, The Luther Factory, Plywood and Furniture, 1870–1940 (Tallinn, 2004)Google Scholar.

117 Betsky, Aaron, Queer Space, Architecture and Same-Sex Desire (New York, 1997), 5Google Scholar.

118 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), cited by Potvin, John, in Material and Visual Culture: Beyond Male Bonding (Aldershot, 2008), 1Google Scholar. One of McGrath’s first commissions after Finella was for another key site for the performance of modern subjectivity and identity, a nightclub, the Embassy Club, London; see O’Donovan, God’s Architect, 139–41.

119 Godwin, Cambridge and Clare, 127; Forbes to Caius bursar, 1 October 1932, DEM: BUR: C/03/007, GCA.

120 In June 1931, Forbes allowed Finella to host the display of Jacob Epstein’s “Genesis.” This attracted enough visitors (some 5,000) to raise £200 (£10,300). The money helped buy a historical local windmill under threat of demolition (Forbes-McGrath, 25 June 1931, box 8, RMP). The money raised at this exhibition made Forbes realize that he could profitably charge a one shilling (£2.52) entrance fee to visitors to the house; Forbes to Caius bursar, 7 August 1931, DEM: BUR: C/03/007, GCA.

121 Forbes to Pritchard, 4 February 1931 and 28 March 1931, PP/34/1A/45 and /50, JPA, respectively.

122 Constable quoted by Forbes in letter to Sieveking, 9 September 1930, LSP.

123 Strathdon (pseud. Forbes), “Finella,” 439.

124 “Agenda for meeting at Arts Club, Dover Street, 26.2.31,” box 12/D, Wells Coates Archive (WCA), Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal.

125 Raymond McGrath, “Modern Synthetic Facing Materials,” 595–98; Wells Coates, “Materials for Architecture,” 588–89; and Chermayeff, Serge, “A New Spirit and Idealism,” 619–20, all in Architects’ Journal 74 (4 November 1931). McGrath’s article was available as an offprint to visitorsGoogle Scholar.

126 See Sieveking, Lance, The Eye of the Beholder (London, 1957), 71Google Scholar.

127 McGrath would write an addendum to The Times obituary of Sieveking, noting his pivotal role in his career; see The Times, 20 January 1972, 16.

128 McGrath to Sieveking, 30 September 1930, LSP.

129 Ibid.

130 Forbes to Sieveking, 7 November 1930, LSP.

131 Mosley, Sydney A., Broadcasting in My Time (London, 1935), 48Google Scholar.

132 On the modernism of the BBC, see Avery, Todd, Radio Modernism, Literature, Ethics and the BBC, 1922–28 (Aldershot, 2006)Google Scholar.

133 McGrath appears to have played no role in their selection, or at least that of Coates, who was approached separately by Goldsmith, who had been alerted to the architect’s work by Paul Nash. Letters 28 October 1930 and 25 March 1931, box 7/C, WCA.