Victor Dunkerley

Victor Dunkerley was born in Burnley in 1868, the son of Elias Dunkerley, a boot and shoe dealer. He was articled to George Birkbeck Rawcliffe, the architect of the town’s Empire Theatre and Opera House. By the age of 20, he had set up his own practice as an architect, land and building surveyor at Bank Chambers on Hargreaves Street.

In 1903, he became one of the first architects to work for the First Garden City Company at Letchworth, operating from an office at 8 Frederick’s Place, Old Jewry, London, EC. He also produced several designs for the Letchworth Cheap Cottages Exhibition in 1905, including what became known as the Boat Houses or the Noah’s Ark Houses in the Bird Hill district of the town. They were so named because of their mansard roofs continuing into a tiled upper storey and giving the appearance of upturned boats. In 1906, Dunkerley moved to America with his wife, settling in California. Initially he worked as a draftsman for Frederick Soderberg of Oakland. Some sources say he also worked for Frank Lloyd Wright, but documentary evidence of this has yet to be found. By 1911, he had moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where he became a member of the Memphis Architects’ League.

In 1918, he was listed in a trade directory as a commercial traveller for insulation and roofing material with the H W Johns-Manville Company, and there is no further evidence of him practising as an architect.In the 1920s, he returned to Britain and became a director of C F Anderson & Son Ltd of Islington, a company manufacturing wallboards. After the Second World War, he and his wife retired to Brighton, where he died in 1959. [Richard Fletcher]