Old Farnhamians' Association
Special Obituary

Bruce George (1928 – 1932)

Died 27 January 2016

It is a mystery that, until his recent death, we in the Association knew virtually nothing of this old boy, who left FGS to have a very distinguished career. Had we known, he could have featured alongside the special articles we had on our famous living colleagues from FGS.

This special obituary will serve to rectify our innocent omission. We are grateful to Michael Dawson for researching this.

_______________________________

Bruce George aged 16
(School Photo 1931)
Awaiting a later picture to add here.

___________________________

Architect of the Guards’ Chapel and former Far East Prisoner of War

In 1956, Her Majesty the Queen attended the dedication of the Household Brigade’s War Memorial Cloister, the first stage in rebuilding the Royal Military Chapel - the Guards’ Chapel – in Birdcage Walk, destroyed by a V1 bomb during a service in June 1944 at the cost of 124 military and civilian lives. The Cloister’s architect, H.S.Goodhart-Rendel, a former RIBA President who served as a Grenadier Guards officer in 1914-18, was working on designs for a new Chapel when he died in 1959, and a competition followed to find a new architect.

Bruce George ARIBA, a partner of George, Trew and Dunn, then establishing a good reputation for building hospitals, was selected against very strong competition and commissioned to prepare a design, which was agreed in 1961. A contemporary building on the existing ground plan was required: it had to include G.F.Street’s surviving (1879) Lombardo-Byzantine apse with its gold mosaics, John Richard Clayton’s Arts and Crafts stained glass and the new Cloister. The feeling was that the many darker types of marble and prominent memorials dominating the old Chapel should be replaced by a building of light and space. The Standards and Colours of the Household Cavalry and Footguards, lit from above, would bring colour to the white walls. Bruce George drew on some Finnish ideas (including the 1941 Turku Resurrection Chapel) and housed Street’s apse within walls of Portland stone and white Pantelic marble panels. The Archbishop of Canterbury dedicated the Chapel in November 1963, again in Her Majesty’s presence: happily, both the architectural establishment and all ranks of the Household Brigade (soon to become the Household Division) acclaimed the new Chapel, a judgement unchanged since. Bruce George was active as the Honorary Surveyor of his creation until he was aged 93.

William Norman Bruce George was born in Bombay, where his Father, of Scots origins, was Deputy Head of Port Customs, on 3 December 1915. Bruce’s father died in 1922, and seven years later the Family returned to England, where Bruce attended Farnham Boys’ Grammar School. In 1933, Bruce started an Architecture degree at Liverpool University aged 17 by special dispensation; a talented cricketer, he was invited to play professionally for Lancashire, but declined in favour of a career as an architect. He gained a First in 1937, and joined Pite, Son and Fairweather, an architects’ practice in London specialising in hospitals. He studied Scandinavian ‘Functionalist’ influences on architecture while at Liverpool, touring Sweden, Denmark and Finland, where Alvar Aalto’s work impressed him greatly.

When War broke out, Bruce George joined the Artists’ Rifles (28^th London Regiment) then an Officer Cadet Training Unit before attending the Royal Artillery (Anti-Aircraft Command) OCTU at Shrivenham, Wiltshire. He was commissioned in November 1940 and initially served with the Territorial Army in Bristol. Posted to 315 Battery, 5^th Searchlight Regiment RA, he embarked for the Middle East in late-1941 although, with the Japanese threat looming, the Chiefs of Staff diverted the convoy to Singapore. Some officers were evacuated from Singapore before the Japanese attack but Second Lieutenant George stayed, choosing to look after his 120 Gunners. When 18^th (Japanese) Division crossed onto Singapore Island, Bruce soon found himself fighting as an infantryman with the ‘British Battalion’ in the South-Western sector for four days.

Following Singapore’s capitulation on 15 February 1942, Bruce was confined with 50,000 others in Changi Jail, although he soon joined a party of 1000 prisoners sent to the docks in Saigon, before being moved to the Japanese Burma-Thailand Railway in June 1943. He managed to keep many of his Gunners together but, as Bruce wrote later, “we were thrown straight into work on the railway, commencing before dawn and worked for 14-16 hours a day . . . the Japanese engineers were absolute fiends and drove the men unmercifully, often beating them with bamboos and crowbars at the slightest provocation”. Trench foot, dysentery, other illnesses and injuries soon took their toll.

After two months the 200 fittest men marched for seven days in a monsoon to another camp; there the regime involved only a 12-hour working day. When work on the railway in their sector was complete in November 1943, the prisoners were sent to build a road further South, and then moved again in mid-1944 to a prison camp near Bangkok, where their unmarked huts were occasionally bombed by Allied aircraft. Bruce George, a most conscientious subaltern, kept records of his Searchlight Gunners, noting their movements and fate where he could: his report survives in the National Archives.

Bruce, a fit sportsman at the outset, with a strong religious faith, ascribed his survival and that of others to inoculations that the first prisoners received before being sent to the jungle: later reinforcements to the working parties suffered more heavily. News from concealed radio sets aided morale, although some stories were not revealed: the announcement that atom bombs had been dropped was not passed on for fear of Japanese reprisals. In August1945, the prisoners were released and evacuated to Ceylon before boarding the troopship Ormonde, which arrived in Britain that October.

Bruce George seldom mentioned his wartime experiences: he admitted that they had given him greater mental toughness, albeit with a higher degree of introversion. He attended Far East Prisoners reunions until the Association was wound up in 1995; by 1993, Bruce reckoned that only six of the Saigon Thousand were still alive. Remarkably, he kept in touch with former prisoners and their families for sixty years or so more.

While recovering in Britain, Bruce George met Donald Gibson, his mentor from Liverpool, now City Architect and Planning Officer for Coventry who was restoring the city following the Luftwaffe raid that destroyed its Cathedral in November 1940. Bruce joined Gibson’s team, broadening his experience in town planning at the same time. By 1947, Bruce had rejoined Pite, Son and Fairweather as a Partner: in 1952 he published The Architect in Practice with Arthur Willis, a handbook still in print today. The firm was reconstituted as George, Trew and Dunn in 1958, and designed hospitals in Huddersfield, Wolverhampton, Halifax, and at King’s College Hospital and Medical School, Denmark Hill, London. Bruce, architect to Aberdeen University, built Aberdeen Royal Infirmary: his frequent visits necessitated either hazardous flights by DC3 Dakota or discomfort in sleeper trains.

As well as designing the Guards’ Chapel, George, Trew and Dunn also submitted plans for rebuilding Wellington Barracks behind its 1830 façade. Troops left the old Barracks in the early 1970s but an MOD cost-moratorium prevented reconstruction. The IRA bomb in June 1974, which set fire to the historic Westminster Hall, sharply reminded Ministers of the value of a local security base between Parliament and Palace, and within days approved the rebuilding of Wellington Barracks. In 1985, the 2^nd Battalion Coldstream Guards marched into the ‘new’ Barracks, where Bruce had also designed its Officers’ Mess. Two years later, Bruce George retired, aged 72, but attended the ‘Wellington Lunches’ he initiated for his Project Team until recently.

Urbane, courteous and unflappable, Bruce George was quickly able to establish a happy rapport with any professional team. He never married, but kept in touch with numerous cousins, Godchildren and offspring of fellow architects: he leaves a niece, Mrs Skans Victoria Airey, a cultural historian who has worked in museums and museum education. Bruce was a generous donor to charities helping the young in Nepal and Sudan. His lifelong interests included golf and cricket (he designed his club’s pavilion at Hayes) and the opera. He regularly visited Salzburg, Bayreuth and Glyndebourne. Late in life, he took up portrait painting and sculpture, staying each summer in Tuscany where he completed, with great skill, busts of the composers he most admired.

Awarded a Civic Trust Award for his Livingston Road, Battersea, Development in 1968 (the Trust had commended him highly for the Guards’ Chapel) Bruce George’s legacy stands in numerous hospitals of the National Health Service’s expansion era, and in his finest creation, the Guards’ Chapel overlooking St. James’s Park in the heart of London. Many Far East Prisoners of War incarcerated in Singapore, or forced to work in Saigon, Thailand or Burma, and their families, were also immensely grateful to this most compassionate and capable man.

Bruce George ARIBA, born December 31915, died January 27 2016.

_______________________

Some Extracts from
The Farnhamian

March 1931

December 1932

July 1934

March 1936

March 1937

Posted Monday, 07 March, 2016

Return to Homepage