A Liverpool Exemplar - Sir Charles Reilly

Painted two years before he retired by his close friend Augustus John

Charles Reilly was born on the 4th of March 1874 on Seven Sisters Road at 3 Manor Villas, Stoke Newington, London, the son of the architect and surveyor Charles Reilly. He was educated at Merchant Taylors' School and Queens' College, Cambridge and after graduating from Cambridge with a first class degree in mechanical science, in 1898 he became an Associate of the Royal Institute of British Architects and then in 1902 applied unsuccessfully for the chair of architecture at University College, London. In the same year he entered the open competition for the design of the proposed new Liverpool Cathedral and his design was one of eight highly commended entries that failed to gain inclusion in the final shortlist of five. It was the only classical design among them, being in the tradition of St Paul's, London, however he had made influential contacts in Liverpool, where much of his career came to be centred.

Charles Reilly's design for Liverpool Cathedral

In 1904, Charles was invited to succeed Frederick Moore Simpson as Roscoe Professor of Architecture at Liverpool and in the ten years up to the 1914–18 war he made the Liverpool School of Architecture a thriving and influential institution to which students would come to from all quarters of the globe. Here he founded the degrees of Bachelor and Master of Architecture and would establish Liverpool at the forefront of architectural education. Charles was largely responsible for the triumph of university training over the old system of apprenticeship and was a powerful advocate of American-style classicism and, later, European modernism. Under his influence the Liverpool School of Architecture, previously called the School of Architecture and the Applied Arts, became the first university School of Architecture to design and run RIBA accredited degrees in architecture with the school going on to have six Gold Medal winners among its graduates and staff and to establish an international reputation as a centre of excellence in architectural research and education. During his time as Roscoe Professor of Architecture, as a practising architect he was responsible for few well-known buildings, his influence on British architecture came through the work of his pupils as he trained several generations of students, including the Modernist architects George Checkley and Maxwell Fry and the town-planner William Holford. Also among his students were future professors of architecture and heads of architectural colleges in Britain, Canada and Australia; buildings were commissioned from Reilly's pupils throughout the British Empire and beyond. Among his friends he counted Augustus John, Sir Edwin Lutyens, Clough Williams-Ellis, and the industrialist Lord Leverhulme, with whom he set up the UK's first university department of town planning in Liverpool. This was a position he held for 29 years before retiring in 1933.

He had successfully manoeuvred to have his department moved to the Bluecoat Chambers in the centre of Liverpool which had been in danger of demolition, and in working to save it Charles had found an ally in the philanthropic industrialist William Lever. Following a Lever sponsored fact-finding trip to the US in 1909 where he studied the American approach to the practice and teaching of town planning, with Lever's encouragement and generous financial backing, he persuaded the University to establish a Department of Civic Design within the School of Architecture. The importance of the work of the Liverpool School was quickly recognised within the architectural profession. Charles was invited to join the RIBA's Board of Architectural Education in 1906, and he was elected to the Council of the RIBA in 1909. In 1911, Charles and Stanley Adshead led the opposition to a plan to remodel the south front of St George's Hall with a grandiose flight of entrance steps, flanked by equestrian statues in tribute to the recently dead King Edward V111.
Between 1931 and 1933, he was vice-president of the Royal Institute of British Architects. By 1938, in the view of The Times Literary Supplement, the Liverpool School of Architecture was "possibly … the most important centre of architectural education in the world." In 1943 Charles was awarded the Royal gold medal for architecture and was knighted in the following year. He died in London on 2 February 1948 at the age of 73 following an unsuccessful operation and was cremated there, one of the most important figures in the history of twentieth-century architecture in Britain.

171 Chatham Street, Liverpool

Addendum - Richard MacDonald, a Liverpool Tour Guide, has provided some additional information on Charles. On the 9th of February 1949 his surviving children brought his ashes from London to Wavertree to be buried with his wife and child. This was at Holy Trinity Church, Wavertree where he
had built the extension to the church in about 1911 and was apparently friends with the Reverend. His
eldest child and daughter Joanna sadly died in 1914, aged only 9 years old, and was buried there.
Years later, in 1939, his wife Dorothy died and was also buried with her daughter.

Photo kindly provided by Richard MacDonald

see also:- http://www.thefootballvoice.com/2021/05/a-liverpool-exemplar-janet-mccrindell.html