– A book Review by the WLHG
Published in Windlesora 16 (1998)
© WLHG
Who?—One can be forgiven for not responding immediately to the name A.Y. Nutt, since Norman Oxley himself had to find out what AYN stood for when he began cataloguing pictures for the Royal Borough Collection and found many signed with these initials. Subsequently he became fascinated with the man’s life and work, and the result was a highly-successful exhibition at the Guildhall, and this well-written book which accompanied it.
Alfred Young Nutt worked as an architect and surveyor for Queen Victoria and her successors Edward VII and George V at Windsor Castle, from 1867 to his retirement in 1912, becoming Clerk of the Works and Custodian of the Royal Mausoleum. He carried out a number of important projects, notably in St George’s Chapel. There is a fascinating account in Oxley’s book of the improvements made under Nutt’s guidance to the royal vaults, illustrated with his water-colours. One anecdote involves returning bits of the severed neck-bone and so on of Charles I (removed when his coffin was found in 1812) in a casket lowered into the vault on the end of the architect’s handkerchief.
Unfortunately some of Nutt’s most engaging creations were ephemeral. To celebrate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee (a hundred years ago this year) for example, Nutt designed three much-admired decorative arches in Windsor. The one spanning the bridge to Eton, illustrated in the book, was called the Porta Victoriana; built mainly in lath and plaster it was designed to look like a structure from the beginning of her reign, suitably aged. It carried all kinds of figures, flew both the Royal Standard and Borough flag, and at night-time was illuminated by gas-light. For Victoria’s 80th birthday, two years later, Nutt designed an entirely floral arch. Such decorative arches were a feature of all the grander Victorian celebrations: perhaps the custom might be revived in a few years time for our own Queen’s Golden Jubilee.
Nutt was regarded with affection by the royal family, but a rather forbidding figure stares out at the reader from the cover photograph, and his work character seems to have been that of an ambitious, serious-minded workaholic. A welcome chapter at the end of the book discloses a different side of him, revealing a fond family man who wrote delightful illustrated letters to his daughters.
Norman Oxley is to be congratulated on his diligent work in unearthing so much material about an important but forgotten Windsor personality. The book’s illustrations, including a colour insert, add greatly to its attractiveness.
Hester Davenport
OXLEY, NORMAN A.Y. Nutt: In Service to Three Monarchs at Windsor Chappell Gardener Windsor
1996 74pp £7.50
Windsor Local History Group 