My friend Fred Luther, who has died aged 82, was a thorough Victorian in his tastes, particularly in his love and knowledge of ecclesiastical architecture and his devotion to the (High) Anglican church (as a committed Christian, as well as an aesthete). For many years, he worked as a draughtsman for the York practice of the church architect George Pace and then for his successor, Ronald Sims. His drawings, both professional and private, were executed with love and (where appropriate) exuberance.
He was born in Leeds, only child of Florence (nee Luther) and Frederick Challenger. Fred’s father died when Fred was a boy, before the second world war, during which his much loved mother worked as a nurse. Fred spent his formative years in Skipton, seven of them at Ermysted’s grammar school, and all his life he remembered and revered his schooldays and schoolfriends.
In later life he sought out family members, changed his name to Luther after his mother’s family, and held regular events for friends and family (extended as far as third cousins thrice removed). He kept diaries and memorabilia, out of which he composed an annual Christmas “encyclical” (usually sent out after Christmas), with passages of architectural detail from his observations or travels.
He also “published” (from the Dormer Press or Petergate Prods, named after the flat and street in York where he moved after his mother’s death in 1984) booklets about friends and family, childhood and adolescence, that he painstakingly typed on a manual typewriter with photographs inserted, all photocopied and bound. Another occasional publication (of sorts) was T’Daily Soashy (with lively illustrations), a play on the Socialist Worker.
Fred was kind, loving, talented and eccentric. Tall and good-looking all his life, and often bearded, in his last year he resembled in appearance an Old Testament prophet and was endowed with the same combination of humanity and gravitas. My husband Ken and I met him soon after we first arrived in Leeds in 1972, when we were involved in the setting up of the West Yorkshire Group of the Victorian Society.
During Vic Soc events of the 1970s and 80s Fred took films with a very old cine camera. On those happy films we are a lively, young, long-haired bunch, and there is just one, I think, which includes Fred himself, raising a pint of beer to the camera as we sat outside a pub at Malham on one of our Vic Soc outings. Fred’s enthusiasm for life abated only after he was told he would not survive the fall which, compounded by heart and kidney failure, led to his death.
He is survived by his second cousin, Diana Luther Powell.
