John Newman (1936-2023)
We have suffered a death in the family. On April 19 my brother-in-law and Joan’s only sibling, the architectural historian John Newman, 86, died peacefully in his sleep at his home in Wye, Kent, a few miles from Canterbury. He had long been ill and in his last days in obvious terminal decline. But death is no less final for being expected. His widow Margaret, and his two daughters Elizabeth and Hilary and their families survive him in England. And here his slightly younger sister Joan is left to balance grief and many happy memories.
This personal tribute to John will not compete with that currently on the blog page of the Courtauld Institute in London, of which he was a post-graduate alumnus, a long-time teacher, a one-time Deputy Director, and a distinguished emeritus fellow. I encourage you to consult this lovely memorial (https://courtauld.ac.uk/news-blogs/2023/john-newman-1936-2023/), which surveys the main currents of John’s extraordinary professional career. I merely want to add a few of my own remarks and personal and affectionate memories. The Courtauld Institute is sometimes described as the Art History Department of the University of London. It is actually an independent college of that university, and one of the most distinguished art historical institutes in the world. It is appropriately housed in one of Britain’s most distinguished buildings, Somerset House (near the Savoy and Temple tube station). Many visitors to London are familiar with the Courtauld’s fabulous art gallery which is also housed there.
John Newman and his sister Joan, my wife, were born respectively in 1936 and 1938, the only children of Arthur and Wynifred Kate Newman. His father was a scientist, an industrial chemist, and an executive in a prominent pharmaceutical firm. My dear mother-in-law Kate Newman was a homemaker and domestic horticulturist with considerable musical talent who imbued her children with broad cultural interests. Naturally the War loomed large in the children’s earliest memories. The family removed for a while to Derbyshire, but John spent several of his early years in rural Kent. It was there that he nurtured his lifetime fascination with the English built environment, travelling on solitary bicycle tours through the villages and countryside on the trail of big houses, old churches, indeed of any architectural monuments of interest or distinction.
The family moved nearer to London, and John attended Dulwich College, where his classical education prepared him perfectly to pursue the Greats (classical studies) course at University College, Oxford. He seemed to be following a well-beaten path when he became a classics master at the Tonbridge School in Kent. He was by training well suited for this career, and good at it. But he then did something very courageous under the circumstances of those times. His love was architecture, and he chose to follow his bliss. Giving up his nascent and safe career as a teacher of classics, he applied to, and was accepted into, the postgraduate program of the Courtauld Institute. This was a bold move, not without financial risks, that led to no certain or even likely employment prospects. But the rest is, as they say, history. So conspicuous were his talents as an architectural historian that he never left the Courtauld, merely moving to the other side of the desk, so to speak, and to the outstanding career outlined in the memorial notice to which I have referred.
John’s most notable public scholarly role was that of successor to Sir Nikolaus Pevsner as supervisor (and author of several volumes) of the monumental Buildings of England series. Once again, we see the serendipitous pattern of John’s life. The relationship between these two giants of British architectural history began when Pevsner put a notice on a message board seeking a chauffeur to drive him around the county of Berkshire looking at buildings to write up. John, then a student, leapt at the chance. Sir Nikolaus died in 1983. By then John was driving the Buildings of England in a very different sense. One of my own happiest memories of John was attending the festivities about ten years later—held in an amazing medieval crypt on the High Street of Canterbury—celebrating the publication of his second fat volume devoted to Kent, his home county. I am sure that Sir Nikolaus, his early patron and colleague, was beaming down from the empyrean. The breadth and range of the architectural expertise displayed in the Kent and other volumes wholly written by John must be described as awesome.
Public eminence and achievement deserve our honor and our admiration, but the best part of a man’s life, as Wordsworth reminds us, are his “little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love.” Around such acts John’s life seemed to be organized. He was almost culpably modest and self-effacing; and I don’t think he had a mean bone in his body. He was kind, equably tempered, quietly energetic, socially concerned, an unostentatious but ethically engaged Christian. He and his life partner Margaret were the unassuming regents of a happy, well regulated, culturally rich life lived in modesty and calm. Their two lovely adult daughters, now on the cusp of middle age, are living monuments to their upbringing. John was very proud of his accomplished children and grandchildren and particularly pleased, I think, when one of his grandsons matriculated at his old Oxford college.
Relations with one’s inlaws are often the stuff of lame mirth. One of my own father’s favorite quips was this: “Of all my wife’s relations, I like myself the best.” Friendship almost perpetually practiced across the width of the Atlantic has its own special character. We had a few episodes of happy professional collaboration. I remember teaching one of his classes at Tonbridge; I tried, not altogether successfully, to summarize the Latin literature of a thousand years of the Middle Ages in fifty-five minutes. On two of our alumni tours of Britain I prevailed upon John to lecture about the extraordinary medieval church and alms houses at Cobham in Kent. Of course there were hard-wired differences between of us, temperamental and national, of which we were not unaware. Our friendship was different from the easy intimacy of childhood chums. But all the same qualities that won the admiration of another father, the professional acknowledgement and praise of other deeply learned and productive experts, and not least the affectionate esteem of generations of Courtauld students whom he had taught, guided, and encouraged, made their enduring impression also on a brother-in-law. John was indeed my only brother-in-law. The sense of loss is deep and—how to put it?—mature. Various circumstances have led to the postponement of the funeral until mid-May; and even then I shall not be able to accompany Joan and our son Richard to England for the ceremony. (“Uncle John” was important figure in Richard’s early ornithological career, among other things.) But my own heart and mind will indeed be there to bid farewell to this man of such admirable independence of character, such steady quality of mind and, indeed, spiritual character of such unwavering decency. May he rest in peace. Peace, too, to all who loved him.
