John Harris
Self-confessed ‘country house snooper’ who highlighted the plight of abandoned historic mansions
JOHN HARRIS, who has died aged 90, was a distinguished curator and architectural historian whose flamboyant personality and unconventional beginnings took him outside the predictable pathways of academic architectural history; Tim Knox, a companion on country-house explorations, called him “our greatest architectural maverick”.
Harris’s two volumes of memoirs, No Voice From The Hall (1998) and Echoing Voices (2002), describe that background, and his extensive “snooping”, as he termed it, of country houses.
He had explored what he called the “dream-like landscape” of England after 1945 – a time when threatened mansions stood forlornly in neglected parks, many having not recovered from being requisitioned during the war. If the house appeared abandoned, Harris would approach strategically, through estate farms, deer parks or gate lodges, wary of signs of confrontation. At the house itself, he would try a door – or a window. Gervase Jackson-stops, a fellow snooper, said that if Harris were ever ennobled his motto should be: “Up, over and in”.
Harris described the “pressing silence” of an empty house. At Burwell Park in Lincolnshire he found rooms piled with grain and potatoes, while family portraits still hung on the walls and the beautiful rococo interiors were, he said, more-or-less as the builders had left them in 1760. The demolition of the house haunted him.
At the also lost Belvedere, near Erith, rebuilt by James Stuart for Lord Eardley with a dramatic front facing towards the Thames, Harris pretended to be descended from a branch of the family that had emigrated to Canada, before resorting to bribery. He was, he thought, probably the only historian, or “quasi-historian”, that ever got inside.
Harris compared the loss of country houses, continuing long after the post war years, to the Dissolution of the Monasteries. In the autumn of 1974 he curated “The Destruction of the Country House” exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum with Marcus Binney. Visitors were confronted by a collapsing facade, the sound of burning timbers and falling masonry, and a recording of Harris reading aloud the names of houses already destroyed.
The exhibition was the first of a series of polemical statements by which Roy Strong positioned the V&A as a campaigning institution. Its success was a turning point in gaining wide public sympathy for the plight of the country house.
“In retrospect,” Harris wrote, “I believe I sensed an affinity with those houses. I saw myself as their Apostle.”
John Harris was born on August 13 1931, to Frederick and Maud Harris (née Sellwood), parents, he said, “who could not cope with me”.
He attended the Church of England primary school in Cowley, west of London. Echoing Voices records that being unjustly caned turned him against the school and caused him to deliberately fail the Eleven Plus. Harris and his Cowley Gang associates debagged the classmate responsible and threw his clothes in the River Frays.
He went on to Greenway School, Uxbridge, leaving aged 13. His father, an upholsterer, found him a position training at Heal and Sons in the Tottenham Court Road.
He started in July 1945, but did not last long. He stocked a hidden room with books, including by Auden and TS Eliot, and in his lunch break volunteered at the British Museum, sorting flint implements from the rubble of bomb damage sustained in the war. Sacked by Heals, he tore up his clocking-in card and threw the pieces at the gate man.
Harris sought refuge with a bachelor uncle known as Uncle Sid. Bicycling on fishing expeditions with Uncle Sid, an accomplished fisherman who had fished the Somme in 1915, gave Harris what he called a “cartographical education” as they traced the paths of watercourses to discover promising fishing grounds, often in the parks of country houses. At another now lost house, Richings Park, they fished for tench in the canal.
There were brief periods of work, and intervals at technical colleges, but Harris was mostly on the dole. Collecting his thirty shillings and sixpence in Uxbridge every Friday, he hitch-hiked and youth-hostelled for as long as funds allowed, sometimes sleeping outside and once, at Maiden Bradley in Wiltshire, in a church, collecting hassocks together for comfort.
National Service in the Army began in December 1949. He was confined to barracks at Mychett for preferring to explore the country houses of Hampshire, and narrowly avoided a court martial in Malaya when undone by a delayed junk on the return journey from a trip to Pulau Langkawi.
Posted to a casualty clearing station at Sungei Patani, he took a share of illicit proceeds from the sale of kerosene used to oil the water to destroy mosquito larvae, and developed his interest in the decorative arts from a run of Connoisseur magazine in the sergeant’s mess.
Demobbed in December 1951 he lived in Paris on his kerosene proceeds, signing up to the Ecole du Louvre, despite his atrocious French.
It took the authorities six months to realise when he ceased to attend. Instead, he explored the buildings and gardens of northern France, including the landscape garden of Désert de Retz, with its Chinese House then still standing.
On his return to London, he found work on the turnstiles of the Festival of Britain Pleasure Gardens in Battersea Park. “I discovered”, he said, “that I had joined a confraternity of petty criminals”. Overseeing the Schweppes Grotto of the Four Elements, he would pass people through and pocket their entry fee. He was sacked.
When in Paris he had written to the Wallace Collection for advice on what he should see and had received a warm reply from the deputy director, Francis Watson. Watson became a friend and mentor, through whom Harris was recommended to Nikolaus Pevsner, at work on his Buildings of England series. Harris did not make it through the probationary period. He thought Pevsner unimaginative, but nevertheless felt initiated into a new discipline. “The birth pains of an architectural historian had begun,” he said.
He turned down a job at Sotheby’s to work for the antiques dealer Geoffrey Houghton Brown, who needed an assistant for the shop Collin and Winslow on the Fulham Road. An introduction had come through Francis Watson.
Harris was received at Houghton Brown’s sumptuous flat in 20 Thurloe Square and accepted the offer of a room in the basement. Upstairs was James Lees-milne, hovering, Harris wrote later, “like a guardian angel”.
Harris’s circle of friends came – initially through correspondence – to include Howard Colvin and Rupert Gunnis, thereby introducing him to the group of people who in the post-war period professionalised the practice of architectural history.
Lees-milne thought him suited to a similar path and recommended him to James Palmes, librarian of the Royal Institute of British Architects. Palmes found Harris scruffy, but said he would do, and in May 1956 he joined the Library and Drawings Collection.
Harris succeeded Prunella Fraser as curator of the Drawings Collection in 1962. He oversaw an extraordinary expansion of the collection, and a dynamic period of publications and exhibitions. The library became the focus for a community of students and historians, helped by convivial lunches. Every day, one visiting scholar said, was like an architectural conference.
Lees-milne’s diary gives an account of Harris at that time, elegantly suited and occupying a generously appointed office in RIBA’S Portman Square building, having just flown in from advising Paul Mellon in America.
Harris had rejected Pevsner’s advice that he would need a degree, instead making his way on keen connoisseurial judgement and deep scholarship.
He published widely, particularly on the tradition of Palladian classicism in British architecture. His books included two catalogues of the architectural drawings of Inigo Jones, and a landmark study of the architect William Chambers (1970).
He also co-operated with Pevsner on the Buildings of England volume for Lincolnshire (1964). Harris, who never learned to drive a car, toured the county on a Lambretta motorbike. Later in life he continued to travel using the 1954 edition of the Ordnance Survey.
Researching the volume on Lincolnshire, Harris met his future wife, the then Eileen Spiegel, who was writing a doctorate at Columbia University on model farm buildings. They had both applied to examine the V&A’S copy of George Louis Le Rouge’s Jardins Anglo-chinois.
Initially attracted, he claimed, by her efficient handling of a Praktica camera, he introduced her to snooping country houses on a trip – precariously on the back of his Lambretta – to Exton Hall in Rutland, where they surreptitiously photographed the ruins of its wooden temple.
They married in New York in 1960. Life, he said, became “a co-operative adventure”.
For Harris, part of that adventure was collecting. He had been introduced to country house sales by Uncle Sid at Langley Park in April 1946, and when first gainfully employed he would spend £5 a month on acquisitions from an annual £345.
In the mid-1950s it was possible to pick up what would now be astonishing bargains. Snooping one house after a sale, Harris found the floor littered with prints and drawings that would today be the envy of a London dealer. His collection grew to be remarkable.
Harris was appointed OBE in 1986. He and Eileen had a son and a daughter.
John Harris, born August 13 1931, died May 6 2022