LITMIR.BIZ

      Henry Mew’s trade card.

      H. E. Kendall, articled to his father, loved him. He had more imagination than the old man, but was less confident, and partly suppressed it. They worked well together, and were both active in the ‘formation of an institute to uphold the character and improve the attainment of Architects’ which met, at first, at the Thatched House Tavern and Evans’ Cave of Harmony. These were the very early days of the R.I.B.A.

      H.E.K. specialized in private houses, from a villa to a mansion, Board Schools, and lunatic asylums. In 1857, when he took Fred Mew, the country boy, into his office, he was also district surveyor for Hampstead, and a very busy man. The pages of his publication Kendall’s Modern Architecture, with its handsome illustrations, showed the clients exactly what to expect. Gothic was always in stock, but as tastes changed you could have Greek, Italian Renaissance, Early English (or Tudor), Jacobean, Queen Anne, or a combination of two or more. Several of the office’s pupils had distinguished themselves – for example, J. T. Wood, who discovered the remains of the Temple of Diana at Ephesus – but what was needed, with the 1860s in sight, was a hard-working young man who for a salary of fifteen shillings a week would make the working drawings and collect the details and ‘appropriate ornament’ which were the hackwork of the conscientious Victorian architect. Professional examinations were not compulsory until 1863, and Fred Mew never took any. He settled down to the assistant’s work in Spring Gardens. Although he was not without temperament – in fact he was given to occasional black depressions – he dedicated himself whole-heartedly to Kendall’s service. He left his lodging in his brother’s house, and took a room in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. This gave him only three miles to walk to work in the morning, a great improvement. Then, in 1859, Kendall nominated him as associate of the R.I.B.A.; old Kendall, in very shaky handwriting, supported the nomination. In 1860 Fred was made a junior partner.

      Fred, in the old phrase, ‘filled a place’. H.E.K. had a son of his own, Edward Herne, who had been articled to him in the accepted family manner but, for reasons which were not talked about, had never finished his training. A nephew, Thomas Marden, had also been articled, but never practised. After these two failures, Fred became what he could never have expected to be, a confidant. When Kendall drew up his will he made Fred not a beneficiary, but a joint executor. In 1860 he offered him a junior partnership. Fred, on the strength of it, took the lease of a house, No. 30 Doughty Street, which was close to (though much less expensive than) Brunswick Square, where the Kendall family lived. The house, though modest, was too large for a single man, and it can hardly have surprised anyone when, early in 1862, he asked Kendall for the hand of his daughter.

      Anna Maria Marden Kendall may perhaps have been in love with her father’s tall, countrified assistant, or she may have felt that, at twenty-six, she oughtn’t to let this chance slip. What is certain is that she was a tiny, pretty, silly young woman who grew, in time, to be a very silly old one. But she had the great strength of silliness, smallness and prettiness in combination, in that it never occurred to her that she would not be protected and looked after, and she always was.

      The wedding took place at St George’s, Bloomsbury on December 19th 1863, and the witnesses were Henry Kendall, his sister Mrs Lewis Cubitt, and Sophia Webb, wife of the proprietor of the Fountain Inn, West Cowes. But Fred was not allowed to put down his own father’s profession as ‘innkeeper’. It was given as ‘Esquire’.

      The intention is clear enough. As Anna Maria’s husband, Fred was of course bound to keep her in the style to which she was accustomed, and to do this he had, in the first place, to set about making himself into a gentleman. The architect’s profession, even though since the 1830s it had been organizing itself as something distinct from the building trade, was not, as has been said, able to do this quite on its own. Fred, it was recognized, was not likely to be anything up to his father-in-law. H.E.K. was on easy terms with his titled clients and with Bishop Wilberforce, to whom he had dedicated his Designs for Schools and Schoolhouses, Parochial and National. Mrs Lewis Cubitt, Anna Maria’s aunt, was married to the youngest brother in the famous firm, and though the Cubitts had been the sons of a Norfolk carpenter, look at what, through hard work and royal patronage, they had become! But Fred could at least see to it that he did not fall too far short. This pressure on him, as might be expected, came from the women. To Henry Kendall he was simply a young friend and assistant whom he liked, and could trust completely.