Partnerships and Networks
I’ve never done anything entirely alone, always with other people.1
Mary Crowley, although a talented and creative architect, made education her starting point and her achievements are best understood through the relationships she forged in her life between architecture, art and education. These key relationships were nurtured over a lifetime developing and sustaining a close rapport between administrators and designers. As we have seen, appreciation of art at the centre of the education process and the importance of the built environment in nurturing art through school began early in Mary’s life through the work of her father and the relationships he made with others. Henry Morris in Cambridgeshire and John Newsom in Hertfordshire were already challenging the fundamental concept of school hitherto held, and engaging with visual arts to bring the best of an aesthetic education to ordinary children. At the heart of this process was a strong intellectual and emotional commitment to an experience of education, for teachers and pupils alike, rooted in egalitarianism and social justice. Relationships between art, architecture and nature understood in particular social, cultural and geographical spaces, also infused Mary’s work. Through a refusal to set apart the professional disciplines of architecture and education but rather to see them united with a joint purpose, a new kind of knowledge was generated, nurturing careful and sensitive relations with those at the chalk face, influencing a generation of teachers towards visualizing school in a new form.
As in any movement, achievements come not just through the talents of individuals but also by means of their ability to recognize and connect with potential in others. Mary kept a diary throughout her life, not only for functional purposes, but also to record detailed notes and drawings made from her extensive reading and travel.
In her book of notes for the year 1948, she copied phrases from her reading that must have resonated with her mood as she prepared to marry David. She was drawn to the words of Virginia Woolf on the ultimate isolation of the human individual even as unknown to the self. ‘We do not know our souls, let alone the souls of others.’ and to Albert Schweitzer on the question of intimacy with others while maintaining an essential separateness.
No one should compel himself to show to others more of his inner life than he feels it natural to show … The essential thing is that we strive to have light in ourselves. Our strivings will be recognized by others and when people have light in themselves, it will shine out from them. Then we get to know each other as we walk together in the darkness, without needing to pass our hands over each other’s faces, or to intrude into each other’s hearts.
This seems an anthem for a life of mutual respect and united effort, describing very well Mary’s chosen path in marriage.2
‘Only connect’, and ‘live in fragments no longer’ the famous phrase from E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End also finds a place in her diary during 1949, the year of her marriage and hence the beginning of a special relationship that fused personal, professional and artistic interests.
Mary married David Medd on 11 April 1949 and they honeymooned in Scotland, taking long walks and cycling with hired bicycles through Kirkcudbright, Tongland and Ringford. Typically, David kept a tally of the miles they had covered, which came to 107 including a 32 mile cycle (Laurieston) and a 17 mile walk (Gatehouse). From the time of their marriage until they built their own house at Welwyn North, the Medds (as we shall now call them) lived for about 5 years in a second floor flat in Frognal Lane, Hampsted, with magnificent views southwards over London ‘but with an urge to walk on grass and among trees whenever possible’.3
This year of major changes saw Mary join David and others in a newly-formed team of architects at the heart of government; the Architects and Building Branch at the Ministry of Education. While Mary worked mainly on development projects for younger children, she was equally interested in secondary education and throughout her career maintained a professional connection with the challenge of envisaging a new form of secondary school for the majority of the population. Her early work in this respect, as well as her contribution to the Newsom Report (1963) Half Our Future and her contribution to Building Bulletins of the 1960s on Secondary School design reflects this concern.
Mary’s appointments diary for her first year at the Ministry of Education records meetings with Alex Bloom, a progressive secondary head teacher at St George in the East, Cable Street, Stepney who was achieving remarkable things with the education of very poor children in an old run-down building.4 She also had meetings with the architect Ernő Goldfinger who was working on the design of two new primary schools in Hammersmith and Putney.5 There were school visits with the leading schools architect Cecil Stillman, and travel to Holland to attend an ‘educational conference’ which is discussed below.6 This pattern of meetings, speaking engagements and school visits, punctuated by holidays abroad and homemaking, came to shape Mary’s life at this time.
The primary relationship for Mary was now with her professional partner and husband David Medd with whom she built the rest of her life, a home and a range of school buildings. Close friends were more often than not colleagues and fellow travellers in the cause to envisage and realize an entirely new form of education for the young in a stimulating and constructive environment. A ‘common vocabulary of design’ was forged from these relationships and Mary carved out a role that was less to do with the technicalities of the design process and more to do with detailed educational planning. But most importantly, she continued to remind architects and teachers she worked with of the possibilities envisaged decades earlier by her father Ralph, and by other pioneers such as Carlton Washburne in the United States. The post-war school in the USA and on the continent of Europe was a fresh concept born from the destruction of war, beginning to be understood in material terms as illustrated in Alfred Roth’s book, first published in 1950.7 Energy and imagination infused the team of mainly young and newly qualified architects at the Ministry of Education, and a growing confidence that their approach to the urgent work in hand was leading in the right direction. Mary was a senior and leading figure in this group.
4.1 David and Mary Medd on holiday in Italy, October 1949. DLM personal collection
During the 1950s, through international exchange, close observation, planning, building and writing, Mary came to be recognized alongside David as the centre point of a philosophy of practice shared by an influential group of educationalists. Key relationships were formed at this time with the national school inspectorate (HMI) and with advisers in the local authorities. Significant figures in orchestrating relationships at primary school level were Louis Christian Schiller, a maths educator appointed first Staff Inspector for primary education in 1946; Robin Tanner, artist and teacher appointed HMI for Oxfordshire in 1956; and Edith Moorhouse, primary education adviser in Oxfordshire LEA.8 Moorhouse, who became a close friend of the Medds, had been head teacher of Thorley school, Bishops Stortford, Hertfordshire in 1940, managing an old building with two classrooms ‘where the arrangement of furniture inside and the use of opportunities outside provided a richer life than the building was intended to provide’.9 Through these innovating and influential educationists the Medds became friends with Alec Clegg, Chief Education Officer for the West Riding of Yorkshire and with the pioneering progressive education partnership of Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst of Dartington Hall.10 National inspectors and local educational advisers at this time were expected to perform a pastoral role, professionally, supporting and encouraging teachers, independently of government. Most HMI had a talent or subject knowledge that they exercised alongside their inspectorate responsibilities. This loose arrangement came to be criticized and reformed by governments from the late 1970s onwards, bent on accountability and exerting more control over teachers’ work, but in the 1950s and 1960s such independence worked to the advantage of the A&BB by creating opportunities to research and enhance ‘best practice’. Mary’s deep interest in the condition of childhood and possibilities of education, combined with David’s exceptional energy and application to solving design problems made the couple a powerful force for change.
THE ARCHITECTS AND BUILDING BRANCH DEVELOPMENT GROUP11
The idea at the Ministry was to pick an actual LEA and work on a school and see the thing through from a–z.12
Between 1945 and 1973 around 10,500 primary schools were built throughout England and few remained uninfluenced by ideas and practices generated within the A&BB Development Group. During the same period hundreds of secondary schools were constructed in response to a government drive to reorganize education for older children in accordance with the 1944 Education Act, and later circular 10/65 requiring LEAs to make arrangements for Comprehensive secondary schools.
The A&BB Development Group was formed in September 1949 to pioneer new forms of design meeting new educational requirements, in collaboration with manufacturers and led by research. The A&BB was headed jointly by Antony Part (1916–1990) and Stirrat Johnson-Marshall (1912–1981) after the latter had agreed to move from Hertfordshire in 1948.13 Johnson-Marshall wanted to continue the methods established at Hertfordshire and to work with trusted colleagues committed to collaborative approaches to new school design. Mary Crowley and David Medd both in effect moved from Hertfordshire with him. Quantity Surveyor James Nisbet joined them, bringing with him a cost planning model developed at Hertfordshire. The Development Group was formed as a research arm established on three foundations: administrative, architectural and educational.14 The Development Group was intended to act as ‘a vanguard removed from everyday tasks’ charged with ‘research, building theory, collaboration and experiment.’15
As David Medd recalled, ‘We were new and inexperienced. All we did know was that the schools behind us were part of another world which the War had obliterated.’16
When Mary was asked later in life whether she and David had ever considered going into private practice after the war, she replied it had not occurred to them since all the very interesting large scale building programmes were at that time in the public sector. This work allowed the most integrated possibilities in attending to the finest details within the larger project. Here it was possible to link research to construction, taking in all kinds of finer elements of the building interior in so doing, ‘about heating or lighting or colour … down to the door handles.’17 Such work also offered continual opportunities for developing knowledge through research and innovation and for publishing and disseminating the results nationwide. But there was a further drive for progressives such as Mary whose life so far had been deeply influenced by principles of design for the public good coupled with self-sacrifice and hard work as modelled by her parents, particularly her father. School buildings, funded from taxation, were collective statements about the public value of education, created for the good of the community.
The ideological and political context supported such deep personal engagement in building a better society though education. In the USA and northern Europe a new attitude towards education with its roots in the inter-war years, was emerging confidently within a political climate committed to the notion of human rights and the strengthening of democracies. National governments with straitened budgets nevertheless recognized that modern schools were a sign of and conditional foundation for civilized society. Such an attitude concurred with Carlton Washburne’s precept that, ‘the child has a right … to a building which is sanitary, safe, well heated, well ventilated and well lighted. It should also be a building which is pleasant to live in, colourful, homely, comfortable and adapted to his needs and activities’.18
The design implications of this humane philosophy were embraced by progressive educators in the UK, Europe and the USA at this time and their realization was generated through innovations in engineering and construction with the use of new materials affording rapid building by the use of standardized parts.
There were powerful voices, closer to home, that recognized the potential of transforming school through a radical reappraisal of building design and its interior organization. Attention was drawn at this time to the specific needs of primary school children and their teachers given that the Education Act of 1944 had in effect left all school buildings in England and Wales outmoded.19 Moreover, the teaching force in the nation’s cities, towns and villages had been trained before the war as elementary teachers, their attitudes and practices shaped to a large extent by the nature and form of those schools from a previous era. In a Ministry of Education publication, Seven to Eleven (1950) which set out for the first time the educational requirements of this age group, the Senior Inspector for Primary Education, Christian Schiller, recognized and specified the interconnected relationship between educational ideas and physical surroundings. But he realized that a good building was never going to be sufficient to bring about the required modernization of education. What was necessary was a fundamental change of attitude and perspective within the teaching profession. He explained, ‘As well as the problem of old buildings there is the problem of old ideas. Sometimes, the ideas which lived when the old building was planned seem to linger in the walls and surround the minds of those who work there.’20
As an admirer and friend of Schiller, Mary understood this complex problem and was well placed to take up the challenge it posed. They agreed that it was not enough merely to consult the present teaching workforce about their needs. Outstanding practitioners needed to be identified and observed in situ to see where education was heading, and so to design material conditions that would support these new approaches to teaching. The task was to release children and their teachers, with as much ease as possible, from the rigid structures of schooling embodied in traditional elementary school layouts into new light, bright and flexible environments. This revolution would not happen overnight, and Mary and her colleagues were well aware that the vast majority of teachers were not yet ready to change their practice. For this to succeed, a new approach to initial teacher training and in-service professional development was also essential, the seeds of which were sown during the war, eventually coming to fruition in the 1960s and 1970s.
The Ministry of Education offices were located in Mayfair, London. The building had been partly completed in 1939 and meant for office or hotel accommodation but on the outbreak of war was requisitioned by government for offices, and fitted out with ‘unplastered breeze blocks, cheap wobbly door-frames and brown Bakelite door handles so close to the edge that one couldn’t avoid grazing one’s fingers’.21 The ground floor was buttressed by massive rough concrete blast walls and entry was through small, dark, inconspicuous doors. A&BB occupied the fifth floor, with rooms mostly looking out over Curzon Street. The Medds worked in a room together where they had fashioned office furniture from what they could find. As David recalled, ‘We made home-made furniture for ourselves – my desk was a massive door for which I made some metal legs.’ Significantly, the walls were decorated with children’s art.22 Mary had a drawing board and a desk with left hand light, David had the same next to her.
The Development Group attracted many of the country’s most idealistic and talented architects, many of whom, like Mary, had trained at the Architectural Association. By 1952, the team included Bruce Martin, Donald Barron, Maurice Lee, Guy Oddie, John Price, Pat Tindale, Barbara Price, John Kitchin, Dargan Bullivant, Michael Ventris and Peter Newnham.23
As late as the mid-1960s, the wartime atmosphere still prevailed, as accounts by new recruits testify. ‘The whole ambience was one of austerity. The predominant colour was brown; brown lino floors, brown paint, utility oak stained furniture, brown coloured ministry files, brown covered notebooks and dark brown tea served in the cream painted corridor by a brown aproned “tea lady”.’24
Mike Hacker and Guy Hawkins, recently qualified architects, joined the team in 1965–1966. Hawkins shared a room with the Medds. Hacker joined the Building Productivity Group in an adjoining room with an interconnecting door.25 Hacker reflected on the incongruity of an architect such as Mary, ‘steeped as she was in the modern movement and in particular the Scandinavian interpretation of modern architecture’ working in such a grim building.26 And we know from her records of visits to architectural practices in the 1930s how much she appreciated the aesthetics of a well designed and functional office environment. But such conditions were made up for by an intellectual environment which provided, ‘opportunity for politicians, administrators, educators and building professionals (working) together towards a common aim’.27
By this time, the Medds were perceived by others within the Branch and wider afield as a ‘power couple’.28 They took part together in hundreds of presentations and talks up and down the country and abroad, David with his carefully prepared lantern slides and Mary doing most of the talking. In design, ‘David mostly ran the technical and design side while Mary worked out how to stretch the potential of teachers and children. Their roles were inseparable.’29
One colleague remembered the Medds as,
a self contained unit, efficient and fairly formidable, not really sociable, and somewhat guarded and unrelaxed. When together, they always acted in concert, almost defensively. If you spoke to one, you assumed the other one was monitoring the conversation. They did not really see themselves in any positive role in relation to younger people in the office – you picked up what you could from them. They were generally slightly wary of other architects, suspecting them of excessive concern with formal or abstract ideas of design, or not having high enough standards.30
The distance in which they held themselves apart from others appeared to some colleagues to be unfortunate and tending towards a less than democratic way of working. Contemporaries sometimes found this frustrating and, especially those joining the department in the 1960s explained it in generational and cultural terms: they literally came from and inhabited another world. They were a partnership with no children or other major commitments apart from building their own house and garden together. Many of those who knew the Medds have recalled that they were occasionally slightly sharp with each other: even on public occasions when presenting together, one might contradict the other openly. If they were both in the office at lunchtime they would always go to the English Speaking Union in Charles Street, just around the corner, which became a London Club for HMI and so was effectively an informal space for conversation and collaboration.31
Mary’s informal but pervasive influence on younger colleagues included certain principles and values that mirrored her own approach to life, and one can read through these the continuing influence of her Quaker background and commitment. They were ‘to observe and record, to be economical, not to indulge in conspicuous display or consumption, to avoid waste, not to be motivated by personal gain or hope of celebrity but to seek to find the greatest satisfaction and happiness in a difficult job well done’.32
Such high standards were exacting and some found Mary to be unyielding, with a personality somewhat sharp and cold. Occasionally, her assertiveness could be terrifying to even the hardiest individuals, and as she and David worked closely together a kind of distance between them and others was experienced by some colleagues. A physical separation of the Medds from the team was underscored by their tendency to work at home. Colleagues recall that up to half of their time was spent away from the office in London. All drawing was done there and it would be futile to speculate about who did or thought what. One colleague recalled a fairly strict division of labour. ‘When acting in concert, Mary took the lead, set out the rules, defined the problems and indicated the way to go, and did the groundwork to support all this, while David delivered the answers, and showed how it could and should be achieved in practice.’33
Unlike others in the team, David valued the mode of operation that they had established. Mary and he ‘didn’t succumb to the hierarchy of office routine and, fortunately, became stateless citizens’.34 As such they were able to pursue their own interests, respond to international invitations to advise, and build relationships within parts of the educational community. Such independence was to their benefit as they could spend enormous amounts of time without the distraction of administrative demands, but appeared to some colleagues as a form of aloofness that was not helpful to the whole organization. From the Medds’ point of view, it seems clear that they were by this time so engaged in the work and fearful of its dilution that a degree of separation was necessary.
Much of the content for the influential and esteemed Building Bulletins was prepared at home. Drawings were all by David, with his distinctive handwritten labelling and captions. Mary tended to write first drafts then they would pore over the text together making detailed amendments.
Evolution of the design process that developed in these years is outlined in some detail below. In general and for practical purposes each project or technical group ran its own affairs with its own group leader but a vivid illustration of the process in action is recorded in Building Bulletin 36, in notes of a visit to an infant school where Mary’s personal authorship, is suggested by references to brass rubbings and pin boards.
… Leaving the head’s room, we edged our way between the tables covered with masks, rattles and books on Africa, and the two six year olds who were entering on a graph pinned on the corridor wall the day’s out put of eggs. The school’s chickens were kept in a run on the far side of the playground. The door to the classroom stood open and we walked in, almost stepping on a little girl stretched full length on her back like a fifteenth century church brass on a roll of paper, while another drew her outline ready for a life-size painting. Several of these paintings formed a frieze down one wall, insecurely tacked to the hard plaster, the small pin board having been submerged long ago.35
In these descriptive pieces, pupils are often referred to as ‘the painters, the builders … the actresses … the curators’ asserting a certain respect for their position as creative agents of their own learning, in the spirit of Christian Schiller’s notion of children as artists.36 In Building Bulletins and other texts, the Medds would generally refer to children not as pupils but rather as people, signifying the regard that they held for them as individual growing characters and personalities.
NOTES
1 British Library Architects Lives. Tape 2, 7 September 1998.
2 MBC notebook, 1948. ME/A/6/1.
3 DLM notes, p. 11.
4 MBC diary, 17 February 1949; For Alex Bloom see M. Fielding ‘Alex Bloom: Pioneer of Radical State Education’, Forum, 47 nos 2 & 3 (2005) pp. 119–34; Michael Fielding and Peter Moss (2011) Radical Education and the Common School: A Democratic Alternative. London. Routledge.
5 Westville Road Primary School, Hammersmith and Brandlehow Road Primary School, Putney, both 1950.
6 Cecil Stillman became County Architect for Middlesex County Council in 1946. MBC and DM also travelled on holiday, in Italy and Zurich where they visited a Kindergarten at Alsletten and noted the three classrooms, with their very spacious ‘doors open(ing) out direct from (the) room … and back wall cupboarded complete with pull out trays’. The white paint she also noted perhaps making connections with the Cheshunt infant school.
7 Alfred Roth (1950) The New School. Zurich. Girsberger. Second edition 1957.
8 Robin Tanner (1904–1989) became a teacher in 1924 and in 1935 HMI working in Leeds, Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire. The Medds first met Edith Moorhouse ‘in the garden court’ of Woodside school at Amersham and were ‘close friends ever since’. DLM letter to W. G. Morris, 29 March 1971. ME/E/4/11.
9 DLM notes on sketch plan taken during a lecture given by Edith Moorhouse in Manchester in 1972. 24 August 1972. ME/M/10/5.
10 Michael Young, The Elmhirsts Of Dartington, The Creation Of A Utopian Community. London. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982.
11 Ministry of Education until 1964; Department of Education and Science up to and beyond 1972.
12 DLM British Library Architects Lives interview.
13 For Stirrat Johnson-Marshall, see Dictionary of National Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com/index/31/101031292/. Accessed: 29 August 2012. Antony Part (later Sir Antony) went on to be a most distinguished civil servant, having entered Board of Education in 1937, rising through the ranks to Deputy Secretary MoE (1960–1963), then went on to be Permanent Secretary in three departments of trade and industry.
14 DLM notes on the archives, 1946–1972. p. 3.
15 A. Saint (1987) pp. 115–16.
16 DLM (2009) p. 19.
17 BL Tape 4 (23 September 1998) p. 43.
18 Carlton Washburne (1940) A Living Philosophy of Education, Newark. Van Rees Press. p. xvi.
19 S. Charlton, E. Harwood. and A. Powers (2009) British Modern. Architecture and Design in the 1930s. London. The Twentieth Century Society.
20 ‘Seven to Eleven’, Ministry of Education Pamphlet, no. 15 (1950) London. HMSO. p. 27.
21 DLM (2009) p. 23.
22 Ibid. p. 24.
23 A. Saint (1987) p. 117.
24 Mike Hacker (unpublished, August 2008) Memories of Mary Medd.
25 The Buildings Productivity Group was set up c. 1964 to co-ordinate development work in the consortia, and to bring the systems together through common dimensions and and shared components.
26 Mike Hacker (2008).
27 Ibid. p. 1.
28 The term ‘power couple’ was used by Guy Hawkins in email correspondence with the author.
29 Andrew Saint, ‘Obituary of David Medd’, The Guardian, 14 April 2009.
30 Guy Hawkins, correspondence with author, September 2009.
31 The ESU made invaluable reciprocal arrangements for Mary and David when they visited the USA in 1958–1959. DLM personal account, p. 24.
32 Mike Hacker (2008). The Department of Education and Science was created in 1964 with the merger of the offices of Minister of Education and the Minister of Science.
33 Guy Hawkins, correspondence with author, September 2009.
34 DLM letter to author, 21 August 2006.
35 BB, 36, p. 12.
36 BB, 36, p. 13–14.