Mary Lutyens, President of the Lutyens Trust since 1994 died on 9 April [1999]. A founder of the Trust she was its most loyal and effective supporter and friend. Her connection with it will be described in the next Newsletter.

A Family Bond

by Russell Morris

Mary was amused by this piece and three weeks before she died we agreed that it should appear in this newsletter.

It was once quite the custom for sons to follow the trade or profession of their fathers, not least in the world of building. Lutyens’s son Robert was an architect, but the urge to build, albeit in a rather more modest way, was also inherited by another of Lutyens’s children. This I discovered quite by chance in a Dennis Wheatley book. ‘Saturdays with Bricks’ (published in 1961) is an almost surreal mixture of Wheatley’s memoirs of First World War service in France and his later passion for building garden walls at him home in Lymington. I might add that some of the self-taught bricklaying techniques that he describes would have been utterly condemned by Lutyens.

It was though one short paragraph that arrested my attention. After describing how quickly it is possible to run up a potting-shed with concrete blocks, Wheatley continues:

Should your ambitions exceed mine, you could build a garage. Fired with enthusiasm at the sight of my walls, my dear friend J G Links (who collaborated with me in the ‘thirties’ on the Murder Dossiers, containing bits of bloodstained curtain and hair as clues), and his wife, Mary Lutyens, the well-known author, built themselves a garage at their country retreat near Haslemere – and they worked on it only during week-ends.

I interrogated Mary and demanded that she confess. Was it true? Indeed it was, and the garage survives still on a hillside in Sussex, just across the border from Jekyll’s southwest corner of Surrey.

I sought out Mary’s former home. It is the dream image of a writer’s country retreat, and could easily star in a Merchant-Ivory film. Its airy southerly view stretches out across the Weald, and is framed by a pergola itself the work of Mary and Joe.

Then on a slope above the house, the little garage. The light filters onto its walls, tiled roof and weatherboarded gables through the leaves of a vast chestnut tree. There it is, just as Dennis Wheatley promised.

Mary recalls that she and her husband built one half each. Joe’s wall rose quickly and crooked while hers went slowly but straight. I fancied it is still possible to identify Mary’s bricklaying by its greater care and precision. But then she is her father’s daughter.