Margaret Richardson

Hands over Chairmanship to Martin Lutyens

It is difficult to pay an adequate tribute to Margaret Richardson who retired as Chairman of the Lutyens Trust in February of this year. She was elected to chair the Trust in 1994 and has been in every way an impeccable chairman. Margaret has always been the steady rock in the Lutyens world. She and I first shared our enthusiasm for Lutyens, as a man and an architect, when we worked on the Lutyens Exhibition – as long ago as 1981. It was then that I really learned to rely on her quiet effectiveness, dealing first of all with the Royal Academy (which failed in the end to support an exhibition of the work of one of their greatest Presidents) and the Arts Council who nobly came to the rescue. The exhibition owed a great deal to Margaret’s scholarship – she had already catalogued the Lutyens drawing in the RIBA Drawings Collection – and was one of the first to appreciate the need to revive his reputation. Margaret has always been catholic in her architectural tastes and judgement, but she has always had a strong interest in the architects of the twentieth century especially those who created the English Arts and Crafts movement.

During the preparations for the Lutyens exhibition Margaret and I especially enjoyed the friendship that developed with Mary Lutyens and her husband Joe Links. We had so many enjoyable drinks with them both in their flat in Hyde Park Gate and later when they moved to their house in Little Venice. I know how much Mary loved Margaret and really valued her intellectual support for the architectural work of Sir Edwin.

Following the exhibition there was the whole question of whether or not to create a Trust to “protect the memory” of Lutyens and his work. Initially both Mary and I had doubts about what exactly a Trust would do – I think we had a bit of committee fatigue after working for a long time on the exhibition. It was Jane Brown’s persuasiveness and Margaret’s determination that got the Trust going with the help of many other Lutyens enthusiasts. And then came Goddards, the incredibly generous gift to the Trust bringing enormous responsibilities alongside inadequate funds. All was resolved satisfactorily with the immense help of the Landmark Trust and Margaret supported these developments.

It is good news that Margaret will continue as a Trustee and that her place as chairman is being taken by Martin Lutyens who brings a very welcome family continuity. He will bring a very different emphasis coming as he does from a business, not an architectural background. His company Watson Wyatt and Partners is a worldwide leader in the field of Renumeration Actuarial and Human Resource consulting Martin is a director of the Sir John Soane Museum Society and the Glyndebourne Arts Trust and has two sons working in the arts, one as a writer and the other as an artist working in electronic media.

Colin Amery