How the Huddart Drawings Came to The MERL

PATRICIA MALCHER

Lancelot Arthur Huddart, or rather, his wonderful drawings, came into my life in the late 1980s. I was in the throes of a mid-life crisis in both my work and private life which caused me to decide upon a career change.  Initially, my thoughts on a new career revolved around computers but gradually this changed to the thought that perhaps I could re-train as a garden designer. My leisure time obsession for some years had been with plants, foliage, gardening and garden design.

A lucky find

And that was when my father made me a gift of a bundle of large rolled-up drawings plus a couple of bound handwritten notebooks which he thought might interest me.  Indeed they did!

The drawings were slightly distressed at the edges and probably had not been stored with much care by their previous owner.  They were a strange mixture: some were plans of municipal sites (a cemetery, memorial garden, leisure facility), and a large housing development, and others were private, much smaller, garden layouts.  Some were ink drawings and others were delicately coloured.  Several bore the title ‘Competitive Design’.

They were enchanting, beautifully drawn and written and, of particular interest to me, crammed full of planting detail. There were also various designs of ‘furniture’ ie gates and other individual features.

Huddart’s Plan for Garden Improvements for The Kursaal, Southend-on-Sea

© The Museum of English Rural Life/Landscape Institute

Huddart’s Design for a Public Park

© The Museum of English Rural Life/Landscape Institute

The two notebooks, one in the form of an A-Z index, were filled with landscape, gardening and horticultural notes and numerous sketches.  I would describe these as student notes and they are visually far less interesting than the drawings and plans

Geographically, the drawings ranged from Leicester to the Home Counties and the coast (Portsmouth, Southend-on-Sea). Together the drawings and notebooks provided a wonderful educational resource as well as, in the case of the drawings, a visual treat. The name and signature on the drawings and notebooks was L. A. Huddart (I didn’t discover what L A stood for until some time later.)  The dates ranged from 1927 to 1947.

How my father came by this collection I can only now guess - I expect he told me but I have forgotten. My parents were both enthusiastic scavengers of car boot sales, and my father in particular was also friendly with a local house clearer whose warehouses he frequently visited so I guess that he bought or was given the drawings at one of these sources. Much later, when I came to try to find out more about Huddart, I discovered that he had at one time worked in Farnham, which is not so far from where my parents lived (near Grayshott, Hants).  His last, and most prestigious post, though, was that of Chief Officer of the Parks Department, London County Council, so presumably he lived in London. Maybe he, like my parents, quit ‘The Big Smoke’ for the countryside on retirement.  Maybe the drawings last belonged to a descendant?  

A change of direction

I didn’t follow through with my idea of being a garden designer.  I did a ‘taster’ two weeks of a four-week course with the late John Brookes whose work and books I greatly admired, intending to do the second two weeks the following year.  However by the time I should have been applying for weeks 3 and 4, I had thought better of the idea and abandoned it.  I came to realise that probably fulfilling client expectations might be rather too hard for me, given my own rather fixed views on plantings!  Instead I took a year-long course learning how to create CBT (computer-based -training) materials and ended my working life in technical documentation.

Horticulture continued to be my main leisure obsession. Occasionally, when I revisited the drawings, I considered whether they should be framed and displayed more permanently but they repay closer scrutiny than might be allowed by display on a wall in a domestic situation (well, ours, anyway). Their large size meant that I continued to store them rolled up, and to look at them properly I had to hold them down with weights on a large table or clip them to a drawing table or easel. Eventually, I decided that they deserved a better home than I was giving them. Finding somewhere appropriate was going to be time-consuming and I didn’t have enough spare time to devote to it.  It would have to join my list of retirement projects ….

The Mawson connection

So, fast forward to late 2008…..

I was newly retired with finally some time on my hands and the ‘Huddart drawings re-homing’ project was resurrected.  But where to begin?  One of my (many) favourite drawings, the design dated 1927 for the Saffron Hill (what a lovely name!) Cemetery in Leicester seemed a good starting point.  Maybe a Leicester museum would like this? Or the city archive, if it was not a duplicate.

Huddart’s Planting Plan for Saffron Hill Cemetery, City of Leicester

© The Museum of English Rural Life/Landscape Institute

 I think it must have been when I was researching this that I realised there might, after all, be a single organisation that would appreciate the collection as a whole:  because of a second name that appeared on this particular drawing – Thomas Mawson.  Actually, two other drawings also had Mawson’s name on them. 

Thomas Mawson, I discovered, was a well-known landscape designer (he called himself ‘landscape architect’) and a founding member and first President of the Institute of Landscape Architects, the predecessor of the current Landscape Institute.  Huddart was for a time in the late 1920s and early 30s an employee/trainee in Mawson’s (and subsequently his son’s) landscape design consultancy/practice before going into private practice on his own account. Surely the Landscape Institute would be the perfect home?

I sent an exploratory email to the Institute, addressed to the archivist, Annabel Downs, describing the style of drawings and their number and condition. I had decided not to part with the notebooks just yet, they being in a far more convenient format for me to store and study and I wanted something tangible to keep for sentimental reasons, to remind me of my late father and his wonderful and insightful gift.

Near miss?

I was delighted then dismayed in equal measure by the reply I received from Annabel:  I learnt that the LI (much to the consternation of many of its members) was on the point of disposing of its library and archive and had just made her redundant.

What unlucky timing! Things suddenly looked much less hopeful as far as my plan was concerned. However, nothing venture… and buoyed by Annabel’s suggestion that the drawings might prove useful ammunition in the fight to save the library and archive, I set about attempting to photograph  some representative items (tricky on account of their size).  These elicited even more excitement plus a request to borrow one of the drawings to display at the EGM that was being called to attempt to reverse the decision to dispose of the archive and this was duly arranged. 

Wheels grinding slowly

From then on (March 2009) things went rather quiet, or seemed to.  Actually, new homes for the Institute’s archive were being sought and evaluated. Annabel also identified further possible homes for the Huddart drawings separately.  Some of the LI archive was lodged with the Garden Museum for a while.  Annabel sent occasional progress reports but the archive’s final resting place was not decided until 2013 when the Institute members voted for the Museum of English Rural Life (MERL) at the University of Reading as the archive’s new home (where the archive would have a dedicated archivist).

These drawings were finally re-homed at the MERL in March 2015 as part of the Landscape Institute archive and there they now reside, a legacy from a bygone age and a link to the early days of the Institute and its founding members. I hope they prove an inspiration to others as they did to me.

Annabel and I finally met in person in May 2015. Over lunch she questioned me more about how my father had acquired these drawings and of course I told her as much as I knew.  And we fell to talking more about my father because in recent months I had learnt, to my astonishment, that the citizens of his home town (Chwalowice near Rybnik, Poland) were proposing to make a short film about him! They considered him one of their local heroes and in 2014 had already mounted an exhibition devoted to his origins and wartime exploits to mark the centenary of his birth. It turned out that we, his children, did not know the half of it. Like many who lived through traumatic times, he didn’t talk about his experiences apart from a few derring-do episodes to amuse us. We had little idea of their significance.

So, how did my father, born in an impoverished mining town in Upper Silesia, a student of Law and Administration, then Political Studies at Krakow University, whose graduation coincided with the outbreak of war, end up a senior British civil servant heading the linguists section of the British Ministry of Defence?   All that is another story.  

Part 2 of this fascinating blog will be posted in due course. 

Many thanks to the Museum of English Rural Life for allowing the drawings another airing.