Remembering the ‘difficult’ man behind Scotland’s shrine

If the Scottish National War Memorial at Edinburgh Castle was the only building he had ever designed, his reputation and legacy would have been secure. But Lorimer created and restored many more places of outstanding beauty, and his architecture remains influential to this day.

Robert Stodart Lorimer was born at Hill Street in Edinburgh on November 4, 1868, the youngest son of James Lorimer, Regius Professor of Law at Edinburgh University, and Hannah née Stodart, the daughter of a solicitor, James Riddell Stodart.

His elder brother John Henry Lorimer would go on to be a successful genre and portrait painter.

Robert Lorimer’s upbringing was comfortable. He was educated at Edinburgh Academy and Edinburgh University, and encouraged by his mother, he spent his teenage summers helping his father to restore Kellie Castle in Fife.

It was here that he met numerous craftsmen and they were to prove a lasting influence, while the castle’s Scots Baronial style of architecture attracted him from the outset.

His maternal great-grandfather had been a piano-maker and Lorimer’s first love was music.

It was expected that he would follow his father and maternal grandfather into the law, but in 1884 Lorimer left Edinburgh University without graduating and began his career with the architects Robert Rowand Anderson and Hew Montgomerie Wardrop, though sadly the latter died in 1887.

Moving to London in 1889, Lorimer became part of the Arts and Crafts movement in the city, and after a brief tour of Europe he moved back to Edinburgh and opened his own practice at 49 Queen Street.

Sir Robert Lorimer

Lorimer had already made an impression with his early house designs, and that led to his work on the Arts and Crafts design of the Lorimer cottages in Colinton in Edinburgh in the 1890s. The cottages were constructed using traditional methods and Lorimer designed not only the cottages but their gardens and furniture. His love of Scots Baronial showed through in the numerous restorations and designs of new houses that he undertook at the beginning of the 20th century.

Ardkinglas country house by Cairdown on Loch Fyne, built in 1906, was recognised as his masterpiece, and led to many similar commissions in Scotland and England, with his interiors becoming famous in their own right.

It was an ecclesiastical design that brought him international fame, however.

By now married to Violet Wyld, a distant relative – they would have four children together, one of them the sculptor Hew – Lorimer was making a name for himself for his work on churches of various denominations.

Thanks to a bequest from the Earl of Leven, the Order of the Thistle was able to build a chapel in St Giles Cathedral, and Lorimer was asked to design it in 1909.

It is a quite extraordinary creation, its soaring ceiling more than 40ft high and the work of artists such as Phoebe Anna Traquair featuring all around.

Lorimer always used talented artists and craftspeople to contribute to his works.

As sovereign of the Order – all members are appointed by the monarch at his or her own preference – King George V came to Edinburgh to perform the opening ceremony on July 19, 1911, and was enraptured by Lorimer’s chapel, so much so that the architect was knighted by the king shortly afterwards.

The First World War saw architectural business decline but Lorimer soon found lucrative and sadly all too regular work in designing war memorials and monuments in towns and cemeteries at home and abroad.

IT was this work which led to what many experts consider his greatest design, the Scottish National War Memorial, which he was commissioned to build in 1919. Though his first design was not entirely popular – one member of the nobility called it the “jelly mould” – Lorimer was able to reconfigure the scheme and he stayed with the job right through its construction from 1924 to 1927, supervising all the beautiful installations.

In his excellent book of 2014, Professor Duncan Macmillan calls it “Scotland’s Shrine”, and that is what it became – from its opening, the Scottish people took the Memorial to their hearts.

Lorimer gained further honours, and was president of the Incorporation of Architects in Scotland when it gained its Royal Charter, which is why it is the RIAS.

It has to be said that he could be both a hard and miserly taskmaster and a difficult person for clients to like.

He once told a rich client about his house, “they won’t remember you paid for it but they’ll remember I built it”.

One of his final designs was the Warriston Crematorium, built in Edinburgh in 1928, with Lorimer brilliantly converting the existing East Warriston House into the crematorium which serves the city to this day.

Exhausted by his work on the Memorial in particular, Sir Robert Lorimer was already semi-retired when he died at the age of 64 following an operation for appendicitis on September 13, 1929.

He was cremated, where else but at Warriston, where the main service room, the Lorimer Chapel, is named after him.