Obituary: September 2010

Frances Maine Morrell December 1937-January 2010

Charming and steely politician, arts educationalist, teacher, and driving force at Architects in Residence

Frances Morrell was a teacher, Labour politician and arts educationalist. It was this last role that brought her into the orbit of architecture and the RIBA (although it could almost be said, given her powerful personality, that the RIBA came into her orbit) through her pioneering work at Arts Inform. As joint chief executives, she and Linda Payne looked at linking the arts ‘industries’ with the school curriculum – presaging today’s emphasis on work-related learning – and one major strand of this became the Architects in Residence programme, in partnership with the RIBA.

This programme supports partnerships between architects and teachers in schools and sixth form colleges, enabling the RIBA to help its members work in schools and introducing students to the profession of architecture.

Pilot projects, involving around 60 teacher-architect partnerships and over 2,000 students, showed the programme helped raise students’ attainment significantly. For some it proved transformative, influencing what they went on to study. In recognition of this work, Frances was made an RIBA honorary fellow in 2005.

I worked with her over the last 10 years on Architects in Residence. Apart from learning a huge amount from her personally, I observed her exceptional analytic and strategic planning skills that hinted at the formidable political animal she was in the 1970s and 80s, first as a policy advisor to Tony Benn and from 1983 as leader of the Inner London Education Authority. She was passionate about equal opportunity, founding the Labour Party Women’s Action Committee and promoting anti-racism and gender consciousness in schools.

This high-octane past, lit by colourful anecdotes – such as, when leader of ILEA, she escaped from her home across back gardens and through a neighbouring terrace to a waiting taxi to avoid the press camped on her doorstep – came into full focus in her packed and candlelit funeral service in Islington. George Nicholson, a colleague at the GLC, read from letters of condolence from Gordon Brown and Harriet Harman adding to obituaries from Tony Benn among others in national newspapers.

After being ousted as leader of ILEA in 1987, she became secretary of the Speaker’s Commission on Citizenship but in the early 90s turned her back on politics, taking an MA at Goldsmiths and focusing on arts education. In 1994 she was commissioned by the London Arts Board to write the Engines of Prosperity report which led to the founding of Arts Inform.

At the RIBA her motivation was always first and foremost how the projects we developed might directly improve the attainment of students. She could be both charming and steely and did not suffer fools gladly – often ruffling feathers with her sometimes blunt approach at meetings. She was usually right.

She valued the RIBA, seeing it as at heart a membership organisation in contrast to the pack of publicly funded arts organisations and quangos, and she relied on strong support from its democratically-elected presidents.

Frances and Linda Payne together formed an unstoppable machine: strategising, fundraising and delivering benchmark projects. Once they secured promised funding for an architecture project from an about-to-be-wound-up department at Birmingham City Council simply by sitting outside the director’s office and refusing to go away.

Her warm home-life in Islington provided a foil to Frances’ work life: her husband Brian, daughter Daisy and a close-knit set of friends.  She stepped down from Arts Inform after many months of illness last December, in a year that had also seen the death of Brian.

When I last saw her in November, she was full of thoughts for the next stage of Architects in Residence, looking at how its project model can support the maths curriculum: her own idea of course.

Rob Wilson

In memoriam
This month, the RIBA has learned with regret of the following members’ deaths:
Robert Charles William Browning, elected 1948, Thailand
Donald George Fenter, elected 1950, Much Wenlock, Salop
John Henry Heywood, elected 1953, Cirencester
Lloyd Allan Smith, elected 1952, London
John Peter Foster, elected 1948, Huntingdon, Cambs
Denis Mason Jones, elected 1948, Leeds
Sydney Victor Woods McCready, elected 1949, Co Antrim
Ian Crampton Baker, elected 1949, Frome, Somerset
Peter William Standish MacCallum, elected 1950 NSW, Austria

To inform the RIBA of the death of a member, please email (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) with details of next of kin