Dorothy Nancy Stroud, M.B.E., Hon.F.R.I.B.A.

Dorothy Stroud was born in London, in the suburb of Brondesbury Park, on 11 January 1910. Her father left home when she was two and, an only child, she was brought up by her mother, first in London and then in Birmingham, where she attended Edgbaston High School. When Dorothy left school, aged eighteen, the pair returned to London and Dorothy took a secretarial course. A succession of jobs followed: at Kew Gardens, Brompton Hospital, an interior decorator's and, finally, in 1930, in the book department of Country Life. After two years she transferred to the editorial department, where she worked as Christopher Hussey's secretary and was encouraged by him to write book reviews and articles and to research the life and work of Capability Brown at a time when garden history was largely unchartered territory. Dorothy and her mother, now in her sixties, were constantly on the move in London; life was a struggle and Dorothy was the breadwinner, albeit in a job she thoroughly enjoyed, until Mrs Stroud died in 1947. Dorothy's work brought her into contact with a number of distinguished architectural and art historians one of whom, John Summerson, recruited her as his assistant when he was appointed deputy director, under Walter Godfrey, F.S.A., of the newly established National Buildings Record in 1941. Part of their brief was to photograph historic buildings under threat from German air raids and, though Summerson's province was inner London and Stroud's outer London, they often bicycled together to complete each others' records before more bombs fell. Stroud's listing of historic buildings in the outer suburbs formed the basis of the statutory list established by the Town and Country Planning Act of 1944. At the end of the war, Stroud received two key invitations which she accepted with alacrity: to take a room in the Husseys' Cadogan Square house, and to join John Summerson as assistant curator at Sir John Soane's Museum, of which he was director. In the Hussey household, where she occupied the first-floor drawing room, she made congenial friendships in an atmosphere conducive to research and at the museum she found constant satisfaction in helping to transform a little-known private charity into a museum of international repute. Re-opening the museum involved reassembling the collection which had been evacuated for safety and thereafter, as the only member of staff (a general assistant was not appointed until 1971) Stroud was responsible for the day-to-day administration: supervision of the library, cleaning of objects, typing letters, making tea and feeding the cat, and so releasing Summerson, or JS as she always called him, for his research and writing. Her own scholarly pursuits were confined to evenings and holidays, making her achievements all the more notable. She and Summerson retired within a month of each other in 1984; they owed each other a great deal and his death in 1992 affected her deeply. The years 1945-75 were Stroud's most productive: Country Life published Capability Brown in 1950 (reprinted in 1957 and rewritten for the Faber edition of 1975, augmented by much new material); The Architecture of Sir John Soane appeared in 1961 and earned her the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallian of the Society of Architectural Historians in 1963. There followed Humphrey Repton in l962, Henry Holland in 1966 and George Dance in 1971. Her final book, Sir John Soane, Architect was a revised edition of her earlier Soane volume, and was in turn revised by the museum in 1996. In 1951 she was invited by the Arts Council to organize a seminal exhibition, `English Landscape Gardening of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries'. She served on the Historic Buildings Council 1974-82 and was vice-president of the Garden History Society from 1982 until her death. She was made an honorary member of the Georgian Group in 1971 after serving on both its Council and Executive Committee from 1949; she was a trustee of the Soane Monuments Trust and received the Esher Award of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings in 1989. Stroud was as fiercely protective of the archives and objects in her care at the museum as she was of Summerson's privacy and to many, particularly students, she will be remembered as something of a dragon. To her multitude of friends, household names among them, she was a warm and charming guest and hostess at her Onslow Square tea parties. It is a great loss that, in 1994, she destroyed the diaries begun in 1948, after making a short summary containing only very brief, one-line entries. Her observations on the likes of John Betjeman, Ivy Compton Burnett, James Lees-Milne and Lennox Berkeley, to name but a few, would have made riveting reading. Stroud lived simply, always travelling by public transport when it was too far to walk and shopping at Marks & Spencer, so that the size of her estate came as a surprise, though not its distribution. She left the copyright in her published works to the S.P.A.B. and shares in her estate to it and to the Soane Monuments Trust, the Soane Museum, the Society of Architectural Historians, the Landmark Trust, and to several music charities (her mother was, among other occupations, a piano teacher and taught Stroud to appreciate music). She died on 27 December 1997 after a fall.