George Washington Browne was born in Glasgow on 21 September 1853, the son of an employee of Glasgow Corporation Gas Company. He was articled to Salmon Son & Ritchie c.1869, where found himself in the company of James Marjoribanks MacLaren and William Flockhart. In 1873 on completion of his articles he joined the office of Campbell Douglas & Sellars, from which he won John James Stevenson's measured drawing prize; and in 1875 he and MacLaren moved to London where they shared lodgings at 60 Brompton Square, Browne having obtained a place in Stevenson's office, then Stevenson & Robson. They then joined the Architectural Association, Browne being admitted in December of that year. After two years with Stevenson, Browne moved to the office of the church architect Arthur William Blomfield, and during his time there he won the Pugin Studentship in 1877, enabling him to travel in France and Belgium. He then moved to the office of William Eden Nesfield, by whom he was profoundly influenced. In 1879 Browne returned to Scotland, having obtained the post of principal assistant to Robert Rowand Anderson, then engaged on the Edinburgh Medical Schools and Glasgow Central Station, and in 1881 he became Anderson's partner, enabling him to marry Jessie Brownlie, daughter of Robert Brownlie, Glasgow, in that year. His London Architectural Association experience quickly brought him a prominent role in classes run by the Edinburgh Architectural. Association of which he became President in 1883, holding this post until 1886.
In 1883 Anderson & Browne merged their practice with that of Hew M Wardrop as Wardrop, Anderson & Browne. Perhaps unintentionally that was to lead to Browne leaving the partnership to open his own office at 5 Queen Street in 1885; probably because in the recession of the mid-1880s there was not quite enough business for three partners. But Browne's 1887 competition win at Edinburgh Public Library where the assessor was Alfred Waterhouse, followed by the Redfern building on Princes Street in 1891 and the huge Sick Children's Hospital in 1892, soon established him in independent practice and brought him election as ARSA in that year, enabling him to move to a smarter office at 1 Albyn Place.
By this time Browne had formed a loose relationship with Kinnear & Peddie, some of the details of their Caledonian Station, 1890, suggesting his hand. This arrangement was formalised in 1895 or 1896 when John More Dick Peddie took him into partnership, Kinnear having died in 1894. The immediate catalyst seems to have been a surge in branch bank building, particularly for the British Linen Bank. As Kinnear & Peddie's South Charlotte Street office had belonged to Kinnear, the new partnership moved to much larger premises at 8 Albyn Place late in 1896 or early in 1897.
The Peddie & Washington Browne partnership was initially hugely successful, enabling Browne to build a very sophisticated neo-Jacobean house, The Limes, in Blackford Road, and even accommodate Peddie's brother Walter Lockhart Dick Peddie as third partner in 1898. But soon thereafter Walter became ill and emigrated to British Columbia in the hope of recovery. He died there in 1902 and was not replaced. From about 1905 the partnership began to drift apart, probably because of a sharp decline in bank business, although Peddie and Browne were to remain in formal partnership until 1907 and share the same office at 8 Albyn Place until 1908.
Through the early 1900s Peddie had been taking his side of the practice in a more London Baroque direction which then became French Beaux-Arts and ultimately neo-Georgian direction. He hired some very accomplished assistants to help him do it. Of these the most important were John Wilson and James Forbes Smith, both former students of Professor Frank Worthington Simon at Anderson's School of Applied Art. Born in 1877, Wilson had been articled to the school architect Robert Wilson and had worked under Wilson's brilliant assistant and successor, John Alexander Carfrae. Whilst in Peddie & Washington Browne's employ he published a major folio on the Petit Trianon in 1907. Smith was a year older than Wilson, born 1876 and articled to George Beattie & Son in 1891. He had obtained a place in Rowand Anderson's office at the end of his articles and had spent three years with him. The date at which he joined Peddie's office is not precisely known, but was probably 1897, just slightly ahead of Wilson, and while in the office he distinguished himself by winning the Pugin Silver Medal in 1900, enabling him to travel.
Browne's contribution to the Peddie & Browne practice soon became hard to differentiate from that of Wilson and Forbes Smith since from about 1904 he too had begun moving in a more Edwardian Renaissance direction which can be seen in mature form in his competition designs for London County Hall (1907-08) which reached the final stage and attracted considerable interest. But the bank business remained with Peddie and after he moved out of Albyn Place to his own office in Charlotte Square he had few private clients and was largely dependent on success in competitions. He was not placed for the Usher Hall competition but he did win that for the Edward VII Memorial Gates at Holyrood, which were built in a reduced form in 1912-22; and in 1914 he achieved UK fame by winning the competition for St Paul's Bridge in London, a project abandoned at the outbreak of the First World War.
Although he had one significant commission which was actually built in the YMCA Building in Edinburgh's St Andrew Street, Browne drastically retrenched in 1913-14. Both The Limes and his Charlotte Square office were given up, house and office thereafter being in a ground floor flat at 1 Randolph Cliff. In 1914 he was appointed Head of the Architecture Section at Edinburgh College of Art, a post which provided him with a regular source of income until 1922 when he was succeeded by John Begg. He did not retire completely, however, continuing to visit the architecture studios as a governor. He prepared prototype designs for council houses in 1919 but as some of these were under the aegis of the Royal Scottish Academy it is doubtful if they brought in any fees. On the completion of the Holyrood gates and a number of war memorials his last assistant, Frank Wood, was virtually offered the practice but was not in a position to accept and left for AK Robertson's office. Brown did, however, still have a significant role as a competition assessor and was belatedly admitted FRIBA on 19 March 1926 on the recommendation of the RIBA Council: an event probably not unconnected with his election in 1924 as President of the RSA, of which he had been Treasurer since 1917. His election also brought honorary membership of the Royal Academy, the Royal Hibernian Academy and the Royal College of Art. He was knighted in 1926, the year of the RSA's centenary exhibition, and received King George V and Queen Mary at the Academy on 16 July 1927.
Browne retired from the Presidency of the Academy in 1933, but he continued to exert a significant influence as a founder member of the Royal Fine Art Commission for Scotland, which had been set up in 1927. In 1933 he substantially redesigned the massing of the Office of Works proposals for St Andrew's House, his scheme significantly influencing the final design by Thomas Smith Tait; and he also had a role at Edinburgh Sheriff Court, where he redesigned AJ Pitcher's Lawnmarket façade in bolder form.
In 1938 failing health and diminishing means compelled Browne to leave his flat at 1 Randolph Cliff to live with his daughter Jessie (or Jenny) Agnew Preston (Mrs Norman S Preston) at The Lodge, Sambrook, Wellington, Shropshire. He died there on 15 June 1939. The RSA took charge of his funeral, the service being conducted by the Very Rev Dr Charles L Warr in its library.
Browne was a big man in every way, tall, red-haired and for most of his life bearded: although normally dignified and very courteous, he had a fiery temper and was, according to Frank Wood, prone to use his boot if provoked by incompetence. His personal life was clouded by tragedy. His first wife Jessie Brownlie died on 26 February 1900. They had three sons and two daughters, but all three sons were either killed in the First World War or died from the effects of it. In 1905 Browne married a second time to Louise (or Louisa) Emma, daughter of Dr David Laird Adams, Professor of Hebrew and Oriental Languages at Edinburgh University, but she too predeceased him on 14 October 1931.
Among his closest friends were the architect John Kinross and the painter Martin Hardie. In later years he spent much of his time at the Scottish Arts Club where he excelled at billiards. Browne's will, drawn up in March 1933, indicates that he had an estate of at least £3,000 and provided for a monument at Grange Cemetery which was to be carried out by his friend and former colleague, Burnet Napier Henderson Orphoot; but he revoked most of it 'because I have lived overlong without an income.' He left moveable estate of £1,930 17s 3d, much of which consisted of insurance policies, and nearly all of which was bequeathed to his daughter Jenny.
Publications:
'General indifference to modern architecture', Scottish Art Review 1889 volume I, p57-59
'Planning of Public Libraries', published version of paper given to the Philosophical Society of Glasgow, n.d. c.1890