CHAPTER ONE - EARLY YEARS

Abstract

This chapter describes the early years of William Richard Lethaby. Lethaby's mother died when he was 13. His formal education began at an institution run by a Plymouth Brother, from which he went on to the local grammar school in Paternoster Road that dated from the 16th century. Housed in a rather dilapidated 14th-century building and formally a charnel house, it had suffered the fate of most of the endowed grammar schools. It was much run down, had few pupils, and was conducted by one aged teacher, the Reverend Johnston, who was also chaplain to the workhouse, the gaol and the infirmary. Reverend Johnston taught little beyond the three Rs, a smattering of the Classics and some drawing, all this by what Lethaby called book rote. Fortunately, Lethaby's education was not to remain solely in the hands of the Reverend Johnston. In 1868 Lethaby, newly elected a free member of the Barnstaple Literary and Scientific Institute, attended the first night drawing class for artisans and children over the age of 12, and entered upon the mechanical and arduous curriculum that he would pursue for many years.