10 C O N T E X T 1 7 1 : M A R C H 2 0 2 2 two very large purlins per pitch. Their decision to try a king-post truss was probably influenced by copies of Italian roof designs that were circulating in Britain at the time. But he suggests that at one level this is simply case of incompetent builders or poor site management. At another level it is an example of vernacular builders struggling with foreign designs and a lack of supervision. This issue of The Construction Historian highlights another under-regarded historical figure:WJ Alcock (1840–1907), championed as Dover’s Greatest Builder, who had that port’s outer harbour among his credits. There is a very good article by Darren McLean on Scottish plasterwork, stemming from a 2020 collapse of a plaster ceiling in an 1890s Glasgow east end tenement. The exposed layers posed some interesting questions and led to forensic investigations (and some answers about building failures) concerning 19th-century methods and workmanship. Other short papers include one on the role of mortar makers in the middle ages; and one on the complexity of retro-fitting wooden traction beams by Philippi Brunelleschi to Florence Cathedral while he was responsible for directing (managing) construction of the cathedral and, more directly, the dome with which he is universally associated. PMC Notes For those with particularly long memories of the IHBC annual school in Llandudno 2011, and the visit to Gwydir Castle in particular, PMC Notes (No 20) from the Paul Mellon Centre [UK] has an interesting piece by Clare Taylor, a senior lecturer in art history at the Open University and a specialist on historic British interiors, on her research into the decorative furnishings of Gwydir. Taylor introduces the long understudied leather wall hangings, although she does not recount (as the IHBC members who visited were told) how the hangings were bought by William Randolph Hearst in 1921, languished in a warehouse of the Metropolitan Museum in NewYork, and finally returned to the restored dining room wing in the summer of 1998. Bob Kindred MBE From the introduction by J St Loe Strachey to Cottage Building in Cob, Pisé, Chalk and Clay by CloughWilliams-Ellis (1922) For me pisé de terre [rammed earth], ever since I heard of it, has offered special attractions. It, and it alone, provides, or if one must be cautious, appears to provide the way to turn an old dream of mine and of many other people into a reality. My connection with the problem of housing, and especially of rural housing, now nearly a quarter of a century old, has been on the side of cheap material. Rightly or wrongly, I have had the simplicity to believe that if you are to get cheap housing you must get it by the use of cheap material. It has always seemed to me that there is no other way. What more natural than first to ask why building material was so dear, and then what was the cause of its dearness? I found it in the fact that bricks are very expensive things to make, that stones are very expensive things to quarry, that cements are very expensive things to manufacture and, worst of all, that all these things are very heavy and very expensive to drag about the country, and to dump on the site in some lonely situation where cottages or a smallholder’s house and outbuildings are, to use the conventional phrase, ‘urgently demanded’… My deep desire was to find something in the earth out of which walls could be made. My ideal was a man or group of men with spades and pickaxes coming upon the land and creating the walls of a house out of what they found there. I wanted my house, my cottage in Cloud-Cuckoo Land, to rise like the lark from the furrows.
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