The architect for me

In the first of two articles, Clive Aslet explores the relationship between Sir Edwin Lutyens and perhaps his most important private client, the politician and financier Reginald McKenna

- Clive Aslet

OF all the front-line British politicians during the First World War, Reginald McKenna is hardly the best known. Yet the year that he served as Chancellor of the Exchequer, in 1915–16, gave him an awesome responsibility, as conflict on a rapidly increasing scale could not have been pursued without money. If he is remembered at all, it is likely to be for his contribution to architecture. He was one of Sir Edwin Lutyens’s most prolific clients, commissioning a townhouse, two country houses and a house for his son, David, and daughter-in-law, Lady Cecilia Keppel, not To mention that great leviathan of commerce, the Midland Bank head office, together with three branch banks, when he was chairman of the Midland from 1919. Naturally, Lutyens loved McReggie, as he called him; he always did his best work for clients he liked.

Architect and client had been born six years apart—McKenna being the elder—in the 1860s. Their childhoods had both been marked by a parental crisis with money. Lutyens’s father, Charles, had largely failed as an animal painter and family money ran into the sands. The McKennas’ financial boat was overturned by a bank crash, as a result of which the family split to save money, Reginald being one of the younger children economising with their mother in France. It would later be noted that he spoke much better French than cabinet colleagues, including H. H. Asquith. Unlike many of the political grandees among whom he moved, McKenna went to King’s College School, then on the Strand—good enough, academically, to get him into Cambridge on a scholarship to read mathematics, but not of the réclame of such great public schools as Eton and Harrow.

At Cambridge, he excelled as an oarsman: according to