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