Jonathan Ball Publishers has shared an excerpt from Sir Herbert Baker: A Biography by John Stewart.

Stewart is an award winning architect, architectural historian and author who, before his retirement, was the leader of one of the UK’s largest multi-disciplinary architectural practices. He is a Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects and the Royal Society of Arts and was twice selected as one of the best 40 Architects under Forty in the UK. He has been writing and lecturing full time since 2015 and has written six books. John was educated at the Mackintosh School of Architecture, the Oxford School of Architecture and Henley Management College and lives in Buckinghamshire outside London.

About the book

Architect Sir Herbert Baker left an indelible mark on South Africa and much of the British empire in the first half of the 20th century. This is the first full biography from childhood and was written with the full cooperation of his family and with access to his archive and private papers.

After a Victorian architectural apprenticeship in London he went on to become the most prolific architect of his age in South Africa where he designed numerous public buildings, churches, schools and private houses including the Union Buildings, St George’s Cathedral and Groote Schuur. Thereafter he worked in India and Kenya and England where, among many other projects, he designed South Africa House.

He was an intimate friend of many of most fascinating men of his age, including Cecil Rhodes, Lawrence of Arabia, John Buchan and Jan Smuts. Lavishly illustrated, this biography offers a compelling picture of an architect whose buildings contribute so much to South Africa’s rich history.

Read an excerpt:

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Arrival in the Cape 

The discovery of diamonds in Griqualand in 1867 and the Witwatersrand gold rush of 1886 had led to a flood of emigrants to distant South Africa. In 1890, as Herbert Baker was setting up shop in Gravesend in England, his younger brother Lionel, then 20, had set off to seek his fortune in what was then the British Cape Colony on the very southern tip of the continent. 

The Cape had been of strategic importance as a staging post on the long sea journey from Europe to India for many centuries and indeed it was the Dutch East India Company who had established the first settlement which eventually became Cape Town in 1652. With the British dominance of India effectively established after the battle of Plassey in 1757, the British East India Company set their sights on the Cape as a key point on their trade route to England and thus Cape Town was taken by the British in 1795. 

After a couple of switches of sovereignty in the interim, it was finally ceded to Britain with the Anglo-Dutch treaty of 1814, becoming the new capital of an expanding Cape Colony at which point most of the Dutch settlers undertook the ‘Great Trek’ further north into Africa, where they formed their own republics. 

Rudyard Kipling visited Cape Town in 1891 and described it as ‘a sleepy, unkempt little place, where the stoeps of some of the older Dutch houses still jutted over the pavement. Occasionally cows strolled up the main streets which were full of coloured people.’ 

By then the 18th-century Dutch town had largely fallen into decay and the few recent buildings such as the post office and brick Parliament house towered above the rest of the settlement from which tracks meandering off into the bush. The domestic accommodation ranged from brick or rendered one- or two-storey houses, to larger apartments, complete with the verandas, fretwork, corrugated iron, bow and bay windows that were typical of almost any other minor colonial settlement of the British Empire at that time. 

What soon attracted Lionel, the son of a Kent yeoman farmer, was not the gold (which was already transforming Johannesburg in the north into a settlement to rival Cape Town) but the potential for fruit farming. In the 1880s almost all the western Cape wine estates had been devastated by a phylloxera epidemic which had destroyed their vines. New vines, grafted onto disease-free American rootstock, were soon planted but while they were getting established many of the farmers switched to growing fruit in the interim. 

Tales of how lucrative the Californian fruit industry had become, combined with the prospect of shipping fruit back to Europe in refrigerated vessels for the first time, created great excitement within the colony and Lionel was soon writing back to his father enthusiastically, as Baker himself later recounted—‘The price of oranges was so much, we were told; a tree grows so many; a few thousand will make your fortune!’ continuing, ‘My generous father, having already mortgaged his estate to the limit in order to send his nine sons to school, had nothing to spare. But squeeze out some money he did, though that last straw, added to the weight of losses in some bad farming years, compelled him to sell his estate with the exception of 25 acres of the homestead. It was an anxious decision for my parents to take. At their suggestion I agreed to go out to the Cape to report, and advise my brother about his plantation venture.’ 

Herbert could hardly have refused—his parents were betting everything that they had on Lionel’s success and all Herbert had to lose was a struggling Gravesend architectural practice. He and Lionel were booked to sail in March 1892 and in February, just a few weeks before they departed, the first refrigerated shipment of peaches from South Africa arrived in perfect condition in London via the Union Castle Shipping Line. They sold for the extraordinary price of two shillings and thruppence each at Covent Garden market (at a time when a bank clerk’s wages were 20 shillings a week). 

Such news would have reassured the family that young Lionel was onto something and so the two brothers embarked on the Norham Castle at Southampton, bound for the Cape of Good Hope. Baker was well prepared for their adventure, he would soon be ‘30 years old and had reached some degree of maturity. His appearance was impressive and inspired confidence as he was exceptionally tall. Strongly built and athletic-looking; a rather small head made his figure seem larger than it was. His most striking feature was a pair of dark, deep-set eyes under imposing, bushy brows which, on occasion, revealed the penetrating mind which lay behind an honest and candid gaze.’