Francis Frederick Johnson, C.B.E., F.R.I.B.A., J.P.

Francis Johnson was born in Bridlington, Yorkshire, on 18 April 1911, the son of a Hull corn merchant, and was educated at Bridlington School and the Leeds School of Architecture. Encouraged in his architectural studies by his father, Johnson spent his entire life in Yorkshire, much of it in Bridlington, the birthplace of one of his spiritual mentors, the eighteenth-century architect and designer, William Kent. In the late 1920s the `modern' movement in architecture was in the ascendancy, and Johnson, with a natural affinity with the Georgians, often clashed with his teachers and fellow students and went on to become the foremost architect in the north of England working in the classical tradition. Despite his unfashionable views, Johnson was awarded the Leeds Travelling Scholarship in 1931 which enabled him to spend nine weeks on a miniature grand tour of the great cities of Europe, recording his reactions in a meticulously detailed diary-cum-sketchbook. On graduation in 1933 Johnson joined a Hull firm of architects but soon set up an independent practice in an historic house in Bridlington High Street. He served briefly in the Royal Engineers during the war but, tranferring after an accident to the War Department's Lands Branch, he gained valuable experience in the derequisitioning and reconstruction of historic properties. The practice flourished and Johnson served as a town councillor for fourteen years and a J.P. for twenty-nine years. He also became Father of the Lords Feoffees of the ancient Manor of Bridlington. Johnson's published contributions to his subject were largely contained in the publications of the Georgian Society for East Yorkshire, founded in 1937 by his friend and client, the late Colonel Rupert Alec-Smith, F.S.A., in an attempt to halt the reckless destruction of Georgian buildings in the East Riding. In 1975, United Kingdom Architectural Heritage Year, Johnson won one of the major awards for his restoration of the magnificent Long Gallery at Burton Agnes; and in 1981 he received the first Henley Award given jointly by the Council for the Preservation of Rural England and the Country Landowners' Association for his barn conversion at Bishop Burton, both in Yorkshire. He carried out notable work at York and Howden Minsters, King's College, Cambridge, the Merchant Adventurers' Hall in York and Somersby Rectory, where Tennyson was born. Heath Hall in Wakefield and Fairfax House in York, created by another of Johnson's eighteenth-century masters, John Carr of York, received his especial attention and through them, and his almost complete rebuilding of Garrowby in the eighteenth-century style for Lord Halifax, he will be remembered. He died on 29 September 1995.