Alan Hewett

ALAN HEWETT

The second Partner of BH&M, Alan Hewett, passed away this year (2008) in South Africa after a long illness. He was 77.

When Alan joined John Barnsley in partnership the Practice became Barnsley Hewett, a name which it had for several years. The Practice still concentrated on a large amount of private housing work with alterations, new builds and general refurbishment. Our education expertise was only just beginning and an amble through the job register of the 1960s shows a very wide variety of projects mostly relatively small but all highly complicated.

Alan was the master of the “domestic conversion” and was able to distil onto one or, if he was put under extreme pressure, two drawings, all the information needed for a traditional building contractor to undertake some complicated loft conversion somewhere in south-west London. In the course of just a day, sitting at his drawing board smoking his pipe, he produced most of the information for planning permission, building regulations and working details all on one simple drawing. Perhaps on occasion it was a little minimalist prompting one of our favourite contractors to declaim at one site meeting “Mr Hewett, Sir, just give me a clue!” but he was much loved and well respected by the construction industry and those who worked for him.

Alan provided the administrative base that Jon Barnsley would have admitted he was not very good at. Any form of filing structure or administration (and there was little of it) was almost certainly down to Alan and they had entirely different workloads. It was a successful partnership expanding when Miles Mallinson joined to form Barnsley Hewett & Mallinson as the Practice later became.

A man of infinite courtesy and proper old world manners, he was one of those rare individuals about whom you could never find anybody who had a bad word to say. In many respects this was his forte as he attracted a faithful following of some of the most difficult clients imaginable, one of whom used to ring him up every morning at precisely nine o’clock (we used to time it to the radio) to complain about some appalling misdemeanour when a screw had been found slightly out of line with the others. It is perhaps a testament to Alan’s patience and self-effacing ability that when Roderick Gradditch, the famous architect/historian of the Edwardian era, decided to refurbish his house in Chiswick in entirely Edwardian style, being completely unable to deal with the technical side himself, it was Alan he chose to do all the really hard work.

Towards the end of his career the Practice were successful in gaining one of their first really major projects, that of the Queen’s Sports Centre at Charterhouse, Alan’s Alma Mater. Nothing gave him greater pleasure than the opportunity on the day that this huge new sports centre was opened, still a great success to this day, than presenting the Chairman of Governors with a school cup that had been in his family since he left school.

In later years he spent much of his time in South Africa with his third wife Wendy, who was a constant help and support to him especially after he managed to survive an appalling catastrophe of being struck by lightning in a thunderstorm from which he probably never really recovered.

For all those who knew him, he was one of life’s great gentlemen and will be much missed.

Comments; webmaster@bhmarchitects.com: Last updated February 14, 2008.