Note 262 — CHAPTER 12 NORMAN SHAW AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES

Shaw did not immediately succeed Webb, since the latter stayed on in Street’s office until the middle of 1859. There must have been close contact between them over a period of up to a year, and they remained in touch from then on. Blomfield, Shaw’s biographer, being himself prejudiced against Webb, underestimates the reality and the importance of this relationship. It is only one of the many errors of fact or emphasis in his book.

To quote from a private communication from Brandon-Jones concerning Shaw and Webb: ‘Each must have had a good idea of the work the other was doing. Their two offices, in Gray’s Inn and Bloomsbury Square, were within a stone’s-throw of one another, and Lethaby while working for Shaw was in close touch with Webb and was in his spare time assisting him with the architectural work of Morris & Co. It is quite obvious from the dates of various executed works that Lethaby was carrying over Webb’s ideas and details and trying them out in work he was doing for Shaw. As for the mutual respect and friendship between Webb and Shaw, I [Brandon-Jones] have recently come across a letter written at the time of Shaw’s death in which he [Webb] pays a tribute to his “old friend”, and I have also seen a letter from Sydney Barnsley to Sydney Cockerell in which Barnsley says that he 454had called on Shaw only a few months before his death and that Shaw had been talking of Webb and saying that he still treasured some photographs given him by Webb nearly fifty years earlier.’