That Tiresome Lady Architect: The Life and Work of Annabel Dott

By Lynne Dixon

At a time when female architects were still as rare as hen’s teeth, a seemingly unlikely entrant to the profession, a middle-aged vicar’s wife – Annabel Dott, was taking tentative steps on building projects in South Africa. A few years later she built ten houses in a North Yorkshire moorland village. Intended at first as holiday lets nine of the houses were then donated for the use of disabled officers of the First World War, which she claimed as the first completed scheme of its kind in the country. Annabel Dott went on to write at length about schemes for disabled soldiers, rural reconstruction and labour saving for women before embarking on her second ambitious and innovative building project in East Sussex. Other projects included a couple of church buildings and the renovation of houses including vicarages and rectories. At one point she aligned herself with a project to provide accommodation for single professional women. For more than thirty years and in five different parishes her marriage to Revd Patrick Dott provided both opportunities and support through personal and parish difficulties. Tiresome or tireless, she was a woman of determination and vision.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brown Dog Books
• Release date: Apr 3, 2024
• ISBN: 9781839527692

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First published 2024

Copyright © Lynne Dixon and Dorothy Reed 2024

The right of Lynne Dixon and Dorothy Reed to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Published under licence by Brown Dog Books and The Self-Publishing Partnership Ltd, 10b Greenway Farm, Bath Rd, Wick, nr. Bath BS30 5RL, UK

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ISBN printed book: 978-1-83952-768-5

ISBN e-book: 978-1-83952-769-2

Cover design by Kevin Rylands

Cover illustration ‘Annabel Dott’ by Andrew Prescott

Internal design by Mac Style

Printed and bound in the UK

This book is printed on FSC® certified paper

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Contents

Preface

Introduction

Acknowledgements and Photo Credits

Prologue

Chapter 1 Sarah Frances Annabelle Hall

Chapter 2 Bournemouth

Chapter 3 Cape Town

Chapter 4 Dringhouses and Goathland

Chapter 5 Blandford, Dorset

Chapter 6 The Goathland Homes for Officers

Chapter 7 Woodside

Chapter 8 The Grey Wood Estate

Chapter 9 The Move to Barnes

Chapter 10 Winterslow

Epilogue

Appendix 1: ‘The Goathland Homes for Officers’ in Context

Appendix 2: Grey Wood: Labour Saving and Electricity

Select Bibliography

Notes

Index

Preface

Dorothy

It was when I was asked to work on the archives of St Edward the Confessor Church, Dringhouses, York, that I decided to write up and present the story of the church using the focus of its incumbents. Reaching the era of the fifth vicar, William Patrick Dott, I came across frequent newspaper reports about the work of his wife Annabel during the First World War.

It was then that the cottages she had designed and built in the North Yorkshire village of Goathland attracted national interest. As a young person I had often visited the village as it was then on a popular rail line from York to the East Coast, but I had never seen The Orchard cottages. In July 2014 I contacted the Goathland churchwarden who put me in touch with Eileen Peirson, an elderly resident with local history knowledge. I took a bus ride from Dringhouses to Goathland and began to explore further. Eileen kindly shared much information with me and I soon found the cottages tucked away beyond a gated entrance.

By chance, one of the residents was outside her home and I was able to explain my interest in the buildings. She took me inside her cottage and showed me her garden – images that would remain with me and be so useful later when I would become deeply involved in the life and career of Annabel Dott due to an enquiry from a London-based researcher, Lynne Dixon in 2017.

Lynne

It might be unfortunate to recount that one of the first things I remember hearing about Annabel on 4 April 2017 was the story about her forgetting to include the staircase in a house she designed. I was introduced to this eccentric woman architect when I was a volunteer on a U3A Shared Learning Project for the Women’s Pioneer Housing centenary. I was given free rein to research her and within days I was a lost woman, committed to finding out as much as possible about her. My early researches were focused on any leads I could find using internet searches, visits to the RIBA library, emails to anyone who might be able to help and family history research into the Dott family. I identified a request on the internet for information about her and even though it was several years old, I was able to make contact with Jane Seabrook, a local historian in East Hoathly, location of Annabel’s second significant housing scheme. She generously shared her own discoveries and joined in finding out more.

In June 2017 in an attempt to uncover more about Annabel’s life in Dringhouses, where her husband Patrick had been vicar from 1909, I emailed the parish office at St Edward the Confessor, Dringhouses. My request was forwarded to the church archivist, Dorothy, and the joint project was tentatively begun, although initially this was just about researching Annabel’s life with a view to enjoying the process and giving a talk or two.

Lynne and Dorothy

There were times when emails about our research discoveries were flying to and fro several times a day and the frenzy of activity led in late July 2018 to a short meeting at York station. Later in the same year we were FaceTiming to aid discussion. In April 2019 we were able to visit Goathland together with time to explore Annabel’s buildings, and then the idea of writing the biography emerged.

It should be said that there are a few others who have researched parts of Annabel’s life and her work and they have published information about her in a number of ways. Jane Seabrook, local historian of East Hoathly, has included a chapter on Annabel’s second significant housing scheme, Grey Wood, in her extensive volume on the village history of East Hoathly. Alice Barrigan published a lengthy eleven-part account of Annabel’s life and work on her North Yorks blog site. Nick Capey, whose grandfather had purchased two of The Orchard cottages, uploaded a family tree for Annabel on Ancestry. Professor Elizabeth McKellar, an architectural historian at The Open University, gave a short talk on Annabel’s work at the 2018 Society of Architectural Historians’ annual symposium and has now published a chapter in an academic book. There were also a few short references to Annabel in a couple of online books and a PhD thesis. In spite of these we still knew that there was material that we were finding which no one else had uncovered. We dug deep everywhere on the internet, especially the newspapers, emailed countless people we did not know with specific and general enquiries. We searched catalogues from a range of archives.

All the time we were gathering additional, though often small, fragments, pieces of information about Annabel’s life. How we wished for a diary, a personal letter by her or even a decent photograph! We revisited former contacts and renewed our effort to uncover the mysteries of how the Dotts funded their two main housing schemes. A visit to Grey Wood established an enjoyable relationship with one of the residents there and she was instrumental in making possibly the last significant discovery of information in the archives of Eton College in Spring 2021. And just as we thought we were finished, we found some tantalising references about Annabel’s maternal family in the north-east. But we do have to draw the line somewhere and so, for now, our efforts rest here.

Lynne Dixon and Dorothy Reed, November 2023

Introduction

The story that follows is structured around both the life and the work of Annabel Dott. It is an attempt to do justice to the challenges she faced as an unqualified woman architect-cum-builder, the domestic and public life she led as a vicar’s wife and to the outpouring of her ideas about both her own projects and for wider social change of the time. Our project was begun because we were amazed at her achievements as an untrained woman working in what was still a man’s domain and yet maintaining her role as a vicar’s wife. With limited higher education, with limited social and cultural capital, with the restrictions imposed on her for the two decades she spent as a single woman in the late Victorian age limited by her dedication to her mother, she managed to develop the confidence, skills and knowledge enabling her to leave lasting legacies in the form of her buildings and her articles.

To write a biography of someone for whom there are no personal papers is a challenge indeed. Alongside the lack of any diary or personal letters, there is the puzzle and frustration of the lack of any clear and authenticated photo of Annabel. The Dott family have many photos from the early twentieth century and although quite a few include Annabel’s husband, Patrick, there are none that can be identified for certain as Annabel. There is one poor quality newspaper image of a youngish woman alongside a 1928 Daily Mail article and a few indistinct group photos from church events. There is also a tantalising glimpse of a painting of a woman hung on the wall of The Stone House featuring in the sales brochure for the house. None of these show Annabel clearly enough to reproduce.

The woman we refer to throughout as Annabel was born in 1868 and baptised Sarah Frances Annabelle Hall but known for all her married life as (Mrs) Annabel Dott, only occasionally as Mrs Patrick Dott. The only daughter of a couple from the north-east, Annabella and Robert Hall who moved to East London in the 1850s, she was brought up as the single child of a widowed mother after her father’s death when she was two years old, and she did not find her independence until she was over thirty.

Her long stay in Hackney must have laid the foundations for her later achievements in ways we can never fully understand but two things are clear: that she was tremendously widely read and that she was strongly influenced by a vicar’s wife working at that time in the East End – Henrietta Barnett. There was also here the beginnings of an interest in architecture although it is one of the frustrations of the research that exactly how that came about or what form it took remains unproven. It is also likely to have been the time during which the foundations of her future partnership with Patrick Dott were laid.

There remain indeed many unanswered questions about Annabel’s life and perhaps the most significant concern being her first thirty-five years. Very little in effect is known for certain about her upbringing, her education, her social life as a young woman, her involvement with Henrietta Barnett and the church, and the first years of her relationship with Patrick. Much of what we have been able to put together has come from clues in her later writing supported by our background knowledge and assumptions about the places where she lived, about the nature of her family background and about the times she was living through. Annabel had no siblings and her parents had left behind their own families in Newcastle when they settled in London. Whether or not she had contact with them is debatable, although there is one tiny clue in a reference to wartime travel on a Tyneside train. We also have learnt that she had holidays in the north-east in places connected with her maternal grandfather’s lineage. We have hypothesised that her maternal family – the Coplands – influenced her through her mother’s inherited ownership of property and certainly, as an only child brought up by a single parent, theirs may have been an intense and close relationship. It also appears that she had a great deal of pride in her father’s maternal lineage.

Annabel was born at a point in time when women’s activism to secure more rights for themselves – including the right to vote – was growing from its tentative origins amongst a few individuals. Suffrage groups were being formed and Acts of Parliament were starting to make a difference to women’s rights during the early and mid-nineteenth century.¹ Opportunities through higher education and the first intimations of access to the professions were beginning. Even if Annabel’s mother did not engage directly with such changes they were nevertheless part of the backdrop of her daughter’s formative years. It is also likely that, without a man in the house, Annabel’s mother would have needed more than a degree of confidence in her own dealings with the world, including her finances and her property business affairs. These social and personal backgrounds may well account for Annabel’s own confidence in business and professional matters.

It would not be possible to write about Annabel without references to Patrick and it has sometimes been difficult to strike the balance about how much reference to make to him. Their married partnership and his vocation as an Anglican priest was undoubtedly significant not only in terms of the places they lived in, but also in terms of the role Annabel needed to adopt as a vicar’s wife, and in the support they gave each other. Our understanding of Patrick has been helped by references to his education from his time at Oxford and to the nature of his Christian belief and role as a priest. He acquired over the years a large circle of contacts, many but not all connected with the church, and these influenced the posts he was offered and presumably his social standing. There has also been more information available on his family context because it has been possible to learn something of his siblings and their families both through our own researches and through information from their descendants. We have also scrupulously noted references Annabel and Patrick made to each other on public occasions and these indicate the mutual respect there was between them.

Annabel’s first experiences in building works were in response to opportunities in Cape Town where she lived for the first years of her married life, but this was to be just a foretaste. Several years later, in coming to terms with a personal tragedy in North Yorkshire, she drew on reserves of strength, on her interests going back into her youth and on her experiences in South Africa, and she took a decision that informed the following three decades. The buildings that were the result of her energy, determination and creativity can still be seen in the five places where she lived or could travel to while carrying out her dutiful role as the vicar’s wife: Goathland, Woodside (Croydon), East Hoathly (Sussex), Barnes and Winterslow in Wiltshire.

Our approach to writing this biography has been to acknowledge our individual strengths and interests and we divided the chapters between us according to those. Thus, Dorothy’s chapters (Chapters 2, 3, 4, 5 and 10) give a context and help reveal Annabel’s personal development and Lynne’s (Chapters 1, 6, 7, 8, and 9 plus the appendices) illustrate her gifts, determination and perseverance through her work. We hope in this way a balanced view of Annabel’s life and work becomes apparent. Endnotes have been used primarily to indicate our sources, but also in some instances to add additional information.

Acknowledgements and Photo Credits

One of the pleasures of the research has been making contact with others who have an interest in ‘our Annabel’ as we have come to think of her.

In Sussex, Jane Seabrook responded to a first late-night email and provided early information on Annabel’s work in Sussex, which was part of her wider study of the village of East Hoathly. One of the current residents of The Quad, Linda, has offered so much help in the form of providing access to the little estate and its woodland, providing information on its history, sharing her most surprising discovery of Annabel’s correspondence with Eton College, not to mention her encouragement and hospitality.

The administrator at Barnes and the churchwarden of St Luke’s, Woodside, provided access to their churches and the halls designed by Annabel. In Wiltshire, the late Norman Thorne, who lived in Winterslow parish all his life, gave us really helpful information about the trials faced by the Dotts when they were resident at the old rectory there. Jim Weal helpfully provided detailed research into the Halls during their residence in the parish of St John, Bournemouth.

Several descendants of former occupants of the Goathland cottages have provided information about their soldier ancestors, and in some cases wonderful photographs, and further photographs and information about his grandfather’s time at The Orchard have also been given by Nick Capey. Several people invited us into their Annabel-designed homes. A number of residents of Goathland, including Keith Thompson and Michael Trimble, have responded to our queries, and the owner of The Orchard farm sent an invaluable collection of material, including Percy Ward’s history of The Orchard. Descendants of The Orchard builders kindly looked out the watch that the Dotts presented on completion of The Orchard houses. We are indebted to Mary Trimble for checking church records, arranging a liaison with the current owner of The Stone House, and also general information about village personalities and geography. Lesley and Kevin showed us around The Stone House and shared wonderful photos of the house from its early years.

Others whose help has been very much appreciated:

Special thanks are due to Lisa Thompson for introducing Lynne to Annabel with such enthusiasm.

Descendants of the Dott family who have shared information about their family genealogy, photos and other memorabilia, especially Catherine Brown for her encouragement in supporting our project.

Canon Philip Cousins in Dringhouses, who has helped with invaluable insights into all things Anglican, and other friends in Bishopthorpe and Dringhouses for advice and support.

Professor Elizabeth McKellar for kindly sharing her work pre-publication and offering insights from her perspective as an architectural historian.

A number of friends were persuaded to read individual chapters, amongst whom Lynne would like to acknowledge Philip Leather who commented helpfully on several chapters. Women’s historian Ann Dingsdale has always been willing to lend an ear as the project developed. It has also been immensely encouraging to have the support of life-long friend Alison Petch in facilitating fundraising to ensure a quality publication. Special thanks are due to Ann Kingdom for her work on the index and to the staff of Self Publishing Partnership who have helped ensure our words have found their way into published form. Errors and annoying omissions may remain; we are happy to receive comments and further information about them.

Of course our thanks to our partners Derek and Tony for their continuing love and support, to other family members and supportive friends.

* * *

Credits for photos that appear in the text are used courtesy of the following:

3 & 4 Bournemouth images – Jim Weal, local historian

5 & 6 St Mary the Virgin, Woodstock – Tim Davidson

7 St Edward’s Vicarage, Dringhouses – Dringhouses Local History Group

8 & 13 Images of Goathland – Goathland Village Hall Trust

10 Internal image of an Orchard house – Crothers-Capey family

11 & 12 Images of the watch – Harland family

14, 35 & 47 Images of the Dott family and Patrick – Catherine Brown on behalf of the Dott family

15 & 16 Internal images of The Stone House – Lesley and Kevin Mayes

17, 18, 19 & 20 Images of Harry Irish – Tim Noble

21 Ernest Allfrey – Pauline Francis, Ernest’s granddaughter

22 George Briggs Smith – Angela Jones, George’s great-niece

23 Captain Stanley Brown – Iain Catanach and family

26 Drawing of the pergola – Helen Chambers

30 The vicarage at Woodside – John Coulter, local historian

33 Lancaster Road – The Norwood Society

38, 39, 41, 45 & 46 Early images of Grey Wood – Jane Seabrook and family

44 The Little House – Nigel Ricardo, grandson of the owner of the house in the 1930s

All other photos are the authors’ own.

1917 plan of The Orchard from conveyancing documents, courtesy of Simon Caunt.

Prologue

When Clifford Kirby, a man born and bred in Cardiff, settled at Number 5, The Orchard, Goathland, he was returning to landscapes that would have been familiar to his father and grandfather. His father had been born in Whitby, the son of a seafaring man, Captain William Edward Kirby. This destination of a village on the North Yorkshire Moors within ten miles of Whitby may therefore have represented a coincidence of interests for him: on the one hand the availability of suitable accommodation and on the other the family connection that he would surely have known about from his father. When Clifford, a former lieutenant in the 1st battalion of the Monmouth Regiment, arrived with his wife in about 1925 he was joining a small group of other former officers of the war, almost all of whom, like him, had been invalided out of the conflict through injury.

Clifford had signed up in April 1915 at the age of twenty-two, leaving behind his office job as a clerk at a colliery. He fought with his regiment in France as a sergeant, then a second lieutenant, but quickly became a lieutenant in the autumn of that year. He was hit in the scalp and leg in April 1916 and even though these injuries were classified as relatively light – contusions and wounds – he was poorly enough to be in hospital for nearly three months before being discharged to the Endsleigh Palace Hospital for Officers in Central London. He then needed to spend some time in a sanatorium in Switzerland and from October 1917 he was receiving a disability pension. What had led him to find out about The Goathland Homes for Disabled Officers in about 1925 remains unknown, but discover this small colony he did and he moved into Number 5 after its first disabled officer occupant, Harry West and his family, moved out.

The straggling moorland village of Goathland on the bleak North Yorkshire Moors, which at one time had only agriculture as its economic base, had become, since the arrival of the railway in 1865, a popular destination. Daytrippers and holidaymakers were attracted by the heather moors with their small peat-coloured streams flowing into deep wooded valleys where they formed picturesque waterfalls. There were opportunities for fishing and enjoying the hunt if they were staying in the area and perhaps a game of golf on the eccentric golf course as it criss-crossed the centre of the village. Some middle-class folk had their own holiday or retirement homes there but many others would rely on the several hotels, guesthouses and apartments to let. By the 1920s the economy of the village had expanded to provide more facilities for residents and holidaymakers alike. Had Clifford and his wife arrived in the summer they would have found groups of keen walkers and others who had travelled by train, car or charabanc enjoying the village with its long main street and informal, untamed and in places boggy green spaces crossed by the very distinctive ancient stone trods and tracks. For those not wishing to venture across the moors, in the village there were wonderful open views to enjoy and the traditional stone buildings of the farming community. As the village had grown over the past fifty years, late Victorian and Edwardian houses, some in an arts and crafts style, had slotted into gaps between the dispersed rural dwellings. This had helped to shift the centre of the village from its church in the south to an area around the Post Office, the Hydro and hotel that were barely a quarter of a mile west of the station.

One of the newer houses – named then as now ‘The Stone House’ on the road south towards the church and being used at that time as a summer home by the Rowntree family – had been built by Annabel Dott, wife of the onetime vicar of Dringhouses, a smart suburb of York. It was to the generosity of Annabel Dott, together with her husband Patrick, that the Kirbys owed their new home in The Orchard. Annabel was a self-trained architect and was for a short time a prolific advocate of the role of disabled officers in rural regeneration, and for ensuring that homes were designed with labour-saving for the housewife in mind. She was, perhaps not surprisingly, viewed as an eccentric by the villagers, and had built this group of nine houses originally as holiday lets. She had identified and bought the plot of land, designed the houses, organised the finances and then appointed and supervised the builders as well as arranging the necessary local permissions. With their