The Middle Child
In any family, it is not easy being in the middle. The epithet had to wait a couple of generations for it to be coined by his biographer Gavin Stamp, but the confusingly christened George Gilbert Scott Junior was as different as he could be from his famous father. A natural academic, Middle Scott won a scholarship to Eton followed by a fellowship to Jesus, Cambridge. He was articulate, artistic and, in the words of his grandson, the better architect of the two. By comparison, GGS’s education was more than modest, benefitting from neither school nor university. His remarkable skills in design, organisation, and business development were all self-learnt as was his extensive understanding of Gothic buildings. His origins meant that throughout his life he was unsure of himself and sensitive to criticism.
The family was historically low church, evangelical, and robustly Church of England. Great-grandfather Thomas’s commentary on the Bible was widely appreciated, the family was still siring ranks of Anglican priests and the established church provided most of the office’s architectural commissions. At a time when religion and its segmentation were taken more than seriously, it was even more shocking that Middle Scott and his wife Ellen should convert to Rome.
As a young man, he worked extensively with his father. While at Cambridge, he handled
commissions at King’s and at Peterhouse, where he restored the Hall and Combination Room. He helped his mentor, G.F. Bodley, his father’s first pupil and a decade his senior, to restore Jesus College Chapel using the recently founded Morris & C° to decorate the new roofs. He also added a new block at Pembroke and extended the Wren Chapel.
Newspaper cutting featuring an article about designing Liverpool Cathedral
He had strong views on design which upset his father, favouring Perpendicular for churches and Queen Anne for secular buildings. The contrast can be seen at St John’s Cambridge where the Chapel is clearly the work of the father, but the Masters Lodge that of the son. John Oldrid, who married the daughter of the founder of Bradfield College, stayed on in the Spring Gardens practice, and on their father’s death took over the 49 commissions still in hand.
Middle Scott and his wife, Ellen King Sampson
With his new wife Ellen King Sampson of a Sussex land-owning family, a renowned beauty 15 years his junior, he bought a house in Church Road, Hampstead, where the young couple enjoyed an active bohemian social life. Ellen was an accomplished pianist, dressed beautifully, and hosted frequent dinners at which it was forbidden to discuss either Home Rule for Ireland or affairs of the Church.
Three years later, following a period of drink and overwork, his unstable behaviour caused the family to have him confined to Bethlem, Britain’s oldest lunatic hospital, which had welcomed Pugin a generation earlier. While interned, despite intermittent periods of paranoid obsession and enthusiasm for brandishing knives, he continued to make extensive notes for a critical treatise on Kant. Three months later he escaped through the laundry window and made his way to Rouen where he was to reside for a number of years.
Middle Scott proves that being ‘in the middle’ is not about obscurity—it’s about standing at the crossroads of tradition and transformation.