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Norman Jewson (12 February 1884 – 28 August 1975) was an English architect-craftsman of the Arts and Crafts movement, who practised in the Cotswolds. He was a distinguished, younger member of the group which had settled in Sapperton, Gloucestershire, a village in rural southwest England, under the influence of Ernest Gimson. Surviving into old age, he brought their ideas and working methods into the second half of the twentieth century. His book of reminiscences has become established as a minor classic of the English Arts and Crafts movement. His repair of the Tudor Owlpen Manor in 1925–26 is often regarded as his most representative and successful work.
He spent all his early life in East Anglia, where he was educated in Lowestoft, before going up to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he rowed in the College eight. He served his articles in the architectural practice of his cousin, Herbert Bertie Ibberson in London, which he 'disliked as a place to live in permanently the longer he stayed there'. Ibberson had worked in the same office as Gimson, Ernest Barnsley and Alfred Hoare Powell under J. D. Sedding, in the 'crafted Gothic' tradition, with a love of handicraft. Like William Morris, Philip Webb and Norman Shaw, Sedding had been a pupil of George Edmund Street.
Jewson describes, in his autobiographical reminiscences, By Chance I did Rove (1951), how, having finished his apprenticeship in 1907, he set out with a donkey and trap on a sketching tour in the Cotswolds, 'a part of the country little known at that time'. He had no idea that he would stay there for the rest of his life.
Ibberson had recommended him to visit the workshops of Ernest Gimson, who soon took him on as an 'improver', or unpaid assistant and put him to work at making sketches from life and studying the crafts of modelled plasterwork, woodcarving and design for metalwork.
For Gimson, architecture and the crafts were vitally interdependent. He describes how, as part of his training under Gimson, he was encouraged to draw a different wild flower every day from nature, noting its essential characteristics and adapting it to a formal pattern suitable for modelled plasterwork, wood-carving or needlework.
Jewson soon became an invaluable member of the group, and a pupil, friend and close companion of Gimson in his later years. In 1911 he married Ernest Barnsley's daughter, Mary (1889–1966), and converted for himself a group of cottages at Bachelor's Court in Sapperton.
He supervised much of Gimson's architectural and repair work. He writes that he admired in Gimson an assured distinction, traditional in the use of the best craftsmanship and materials, where in design grace of form was combined with simplicity; these are the qualities of his own best architectural work. He set up in practice on his own in 1919 and soon gained a reputation for the sympathetic conservation and adaptation of old buildings. His credo was clear:
As John Ruskin had taught in the Lamp of Truth, working by hand was working with joy. And in accordance with Ruskin's advice to Sedding, Jewson always had either pencil or chisel in his hand, acutely involved in the simple craft processes of building, experimenting and practising with delight, familiarizing himself with the qualities of tested materials, tools and techniques, rediscovering, reviving the fabrics, textures and disciplines of traditional construction, from drystone walling in the Cotswolds, and cob, which he used with success on his summer house at Lane End, Kilve, in the Quantock Hills, to twisted gut in a weather-clock set above a row of simple almshouses.
He worked for a time with William Weir, a skilful architect in the repair of old buildings and churches, such as Salle, in Norfolk, on behalf of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, and The Priest's House at Muchelney. He also assisted Ernest Barnsley, supervising the completion of Rodmarton Manor when Barnsley died in 1925, most notably the chapel (1929). Rodmarton was Ernest Barnsley's most important work; 'probably', Jewson wrote, 'the last house of its size to be built in the old leisurely way, with all its timber grown from local woods, sawn on the pit and seasoned before use.'
In 1925, he purchased Owlpen Manor, whose repair is often considered his outstanding work. His other major architectural repair work was at Campden House (formerly Combe House) outside Chipping Campden, where he demolished some untidy Victorian additions and domestic offices, unifying with the skilled use of detail and materials a cluttered design of various dates to form a pleasing and comfortable house, with terraced garden and summerhouse.
He became established as a well-known 'gentleman's architect' in the Cotswolds between the Wars, working on a number of distinguished Cotswold manor houses and farmhouses (listed below), and adapting historic buildings to modern uses.
He executed church repair work (Chalford, near Stroud, was re-ordered by him), and designs for memorials, inscriptions, headstones, and lettering; also for metalwork, as Gimson had done, including sconces, chimney furniture and gates, and architectural leadwork.
He turned his hand to the woodcarving of details such as finials and newels for his houses. A number of furniture designs are strikingly successful, from the fine piano-case with marquetry inlay, made by Waals, which he designed for Mrs Clegg of Wormington Grange, to the sturdy child's chair with back splats showing humorous carvings of village characters which he made and painted himself, as well as a number of toys, for his daughters.
He did little professional work after 1940, and felt increasingly at odds with modernism and the historical-artistic developments of the post-war period. He died suddenly at his house in Sapperton in 1975, aged 91, when the art historian David Gould wrote the following account:
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