Why Rubens should go

The Blow family has had its disasters. There has been madness, murder and suicides. But before those mishaps there was a good man, my grandfather Detmar Blow. In the 1900s he was at his height as a young architect. His practice was large. Larger, I was told by Sir Edwin Lutyens’s daughter, Mary, than that of her father. Blow designed for the aristocracy and the newly enriched tycoon.

But early on he was a travelling architect doing repair work for the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings — vide his repairs to the ancient manor house in Tintagel, Cornwall, known as The Old Post Office. His mentors had been John Ruskin and William Morris. He had driven and decorated with vine leaves the funeral cart that took Morris to his last resting place at Kelmscott. Bernard Shaw remarked that ‘the funeral cart was driven by the young architect Detmar Blow, dressed in waggoner’s smock’.