In re-shelving my copy of Owen Hopkins book, I discovered that I had a mint copy of the catalogue of the 1962 Arts Council Hawksmoor exhibition, together with an invitation to the private view on Friday 7th. September 1962 (I was only 8 at the time). It’s a bit of a period piece, listing the sponsors of the Hawksmoor Committee, including T.S. Eliot, who had refused to sign the letter to the Times on the grounds of its illiteracy and including a typed insert regretting the fact that they had failed to include Denys Lasdun, the Bishop of London and the Duke of Marlborough in the list. Ian Nairn was treasurer. I like the description of Hawksmoor in the Introduction, which was by J.H.V. Davies (Vaughan Davies was a civil servant who had published an article on the dating of the Greenwich Hospital), not Kerry Downes, as ‘a man of monumental single-mindedness’.
Interesting about Eliot who was presumably already a fan in 1922 when he:
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.