a brilliant draughtsman who had joined the London office in 1907, had come second in the unofficial 'Builder' competition for the completion of the rebuilding of the Regent Street Quadrant in conformity with Shaw's Piccadilly Hotel. Burnet was not best pleased: his consent to enter had not been sought and more seriously the bay design was based on Burnet's Civil Service and Professional Supply and Forsyth department stores. But they survived and after Whitelaw was drowned at Bournemouth in July 1913 the matter was allowed to drop. But early in 1914 there was a much more serious disagreement when Burnet discovered that Tait had been helping Trehearne & Norman with their new buildings on Kingsway to augment his income as he had married Constance Hardy, the daughter of a London stationmaster, in 1910 and his son Gordon had been born in 1912. Tait abruptly left for New York to work as an assistant with Donn Barber, leaving his wife and son Gordon at home. Burnet quickly regretted their disagreement and appealed to him to return",,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
home as junior partner but he declined. When he did return it was as chief draughtsman to Trehearne & Norman on the Kingsway buildings, an appointment which ended in 1915 when he joined the drawing office in the arsenal at Woolwich. After Whitelaw's death Theodore Fyfe moved into Burnet's office on a full-time basis to complete such work at the Museum as was still outstanding and later to help design the Institute of Chemistry in Russell Square. Fyfe's family believe that a partnership with Burnet was then in prospect and it may well have been, but that possibility died with the First World War. Neither the London nor the Glasgow offices had much work after 1915 and by that year the quarrel with Tait had been made up, Tait assisting Burnet on an evening and weekend basis from that year. But throughout the war the Burnets suffered increasing financial hardship and by 1918 some of their most loved possessions had had to be sold, the departure of their tapestries being found particularly distressing and regretted for the rest of their lives.After the war the London office recovered rather more quickly than the Glasgow one, thanks to Harry Gordon Selfridge who had entrusted Burnet with the completion of his Oxford Street store, the first section of which had been designed by Francis Swales and built by Robert Atkinson. The work was carried out in association with Albert D Miller of the Chicago firm of Graham, Anderson, Probst & White, and although the bay design had been predetermined, some Burnetian features were introduced. The Imperial War Graves Commission allocated him the cemeteries in Gallipoli, Palestine and Suez in January 1919, the last not without an unfortunate disagreement with Lorimer: a further offer of cemeteries in France had to be declined because of commitments at home. For these cemeteries Burnet made a tour of the sites in March 1919, followed by a further visit in April 1922 and a third in April 1925 to inspect the final stages of the work.To carry out these works, the large Forsyth building, Vigo House, on London's Regent Street in 1920-25, and the First Church of Christ Scientist for which he had made the original designs during the war, Burnet needed to rebuild his office staff. The pre-war arrangement with Fyfe, who had become architect to Chester Cathedral, was not pursued further. Tait returned full-time and was taken into partnership; David Raeside, his office manager who had survived war service in the Middle East, also became a partner, the London practice now becoming Sir John Burnet & Partners although still not completely separate from the Glasgow one. There the situation was more complicated. There were several major commissions due to go ahead: the implementation of the 1913-14 scheme for Glasgow University Chapel as a war memorial, the enlargement of the Wallace Scott factory and additions to the Sick Children's Hospital. Although Burnet was initially glad to get Dick back, having had difficulty in securing his release, the previously good relationship between them did not last. Burnet's niece Edith had hoped for a place in the London office, and her husband Thomas Harold Hughes, whom she had married in 1918, had hoped for a partnership there; but Tait and Raeside demurred at Hughes joining the London office and there was no separate female lavatory at Montague Place. The problem was briefly resolved by giving Hughes a partnership in Glasgow but Dick disliked him as much as Tait, openly referring to his refined wash drawings and their brown ink script as the 'pansy productions of that wishy-washy College of Art b****r'. As a result Hughes worked entirely alone in a small first-floor room with the door closed, almost exclusively on war memorials. The catalyst for the end of this unhappy state of affairs was the firm's trusted chief clerk, Duncan, who withdrew the moneys held on behalf of contractors and disappeared. Burnet and Dick had to make good the loss, the latter by repurchasing his partnership, and for the good name of the firm Duncan was not reported to the police. The Glasgow practice then became Burnet Son & Dick. Hughes withdrew to teach at the Glasgow School of Art, succeeding Fulton as head of school in 1922. After the departure of Hughes, James Wallace, a big man who had been a pupil of Neil Campbell Duff and an assistant with Thomson & Sandilands, joined the office. The Glasgow Cenotaph and the fine Zoology building and chapel at the University were all successfully completed: these were designed by Burnet himself with the aid of James Taylor Thomson, originally an assistant of Lorimer's, who had returned from Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue's practice in the USA, and the accomplished draughtsmen Walter J Knight and James Napier, but the enlargement of Forsyth's in Edinburgh and the extension of the Sick Children's Hospital were largely the work of Dick and Wallace on their own. Apart from the University Chapel, the most important Glasgow commission was the North British and Mercantile Building on St Vincent Street of 1924-26, which Burnet had planned to be his final masterpiece. It was a brilliant design, in some degree influenced by the classical work of Charles Holden at its arcaded ground floor, but the building of it was beset with problems, at least partly because Burnet was over-committed in London, his health was failing and he was not in the Glasgow office often enough. Knight, the draughtsman initially engaged on it, incorrectly interpreted Burnet's jointing of the plinth as channelling and Burnet insisted on the granite work being recut; and because of an error in the design of the steelwork in relation to the staircase window, the steel frame had to be partly dismantled and modified. To correct these defects the Glasgow partnership had to pay the contractors something like £10,000. Dick had already been at loggerheads with Burnet on a number of other issues and this final disaster brought about the effective dissolution of the Glasgow partnership in the late 1920s, although the practice title was retained. In London Burnet's design role had gradually diminished. He had still been very much in charge on the War Graves and at the French classical-modern Vigo House, which is a reflection of his visit to Paris to see Pascal, Nénot and recent French work en route to the Middle East in March 1919. He also had a considerable influence on Adelaide House, the mullioned grid of which was a post-war development of McGeoch's even if the details were both more classical and more Egyptic: Burnet had sent Tait out to Port Tewfik to take a look at Egyptian architecture, sensing that it was about to become fashionable. But although Burnet received the Royal Gold Medal in 1923 and was elected RA in 1925, he was now much more limited in what he could do and his role became much more supervision of the office and the contribution of ideas to work in hand. Financial anxiety during the war and after it as a result of the disasters in the Glasgow office aggravated his eczema, forcing him to wear skullcap and gloves, and limiting his ability to draw. Tait took over the design work completely at the Daily Telegraph Building and at Lloyds Bank on Cornhill, even although these still had marked Burnetian elements: only in the partial redesign of Lomax Simpson's Unilever House did Burnet have a direct hand, having been asked to deal with the commission himself.From the early 1900s Burnet had frequently been asked to act as assessor rather than as architect, and from the time of his knighthood in 1914 his official roles steadily increased, culminating in his appointment to the international jury for the League of Nations Building at Geneva in April-May 1927. He sat in distinguished company with Victor Horta, H P Berlage, Koloman Moser, Josef Hoffman and Ivar Tengbom. But they could not agree and when they all had to nominate their own preferences Burnet placed Giuseppe Vago first. In the event the effective architect in the compromise team was his old friend Nénot who consulted him on the final design.A serious illness ultimately made it necessary for Burnet to retire completely, but he could not afford to. His secretary Helen Lorne solved the problem by persuading her brother Francis Lorne to return from the United States and buy a partnership, his position at Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue Associates in New York having been badly affected by the financial crash in 1929. Burnet then became a consultant, retaining a significant financial interest in the practice, and appearing only about twice a year in a chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce for purely business meetings. Until 1935 he retained Killermont, a large Arts and Crafts house in extensive grounds at Rowledge, near Farnham, Surrey. But in the mid-thirties he bought the much smaller Colinton Cottage so that he could be nearer his nephew and niece and Lady Burnet's Marwick relatives in Edinburgh. His niece Edith altered it to suit their needs and there the Burnets received visits from the greater Burnet family of assistants from their Glasgow days and kept in touch with developments in the Burnet Tait & Lorne office. One of his visitors recalled that in his retirement at Colinton 'he had no profession and no recreation - nothing of interest for him to turn to, no hobbies of any kind. He passed through life with one all-absorbing interest which burned him dry'. He died on 2 July 1938, leaving moveable estate of £13,725 11s 1d. His remains were cremated and buried with the Marwicks in the fine classical enclosure he had designed for them at Warriston Cemetery.Dick was admitted FRIBA in 1929. He was not nominated by Burnet but by the RIBA Council, perhaps on an allied society basis as President of the Glasgow Institute and a Governor of Glasgow School of Art. He practised successfully enough in the early to mid-1930s, notably at the Tennent Institute for Glasgow University and at the Nurses' Home at Gartnavel; during those years he lived in considerable style at Boghall, Baldernock. But with Burnet's retirement the old agreement that the London practice would not compete with the Glasgow one ended. With his Paisley connections Tait began to receive commissions Dick might have expected and Dick was not among those invited to participate in the Glasgow Empire Exhibition in 1938. The loss of Glasgow University's business to Hughes was particularly hard to take and aggravated a tendency to drink too much. He closed the Glasgow office in 1940 and put the firm's archive into store with Morrison McChlery; when he failed to pay their charges despite reminders, that firm sent the entire collection for salvage. By that time Dick was living in London: it is not yet known what he did there," but he was expelled from the RIBA in 1942 and on one occasion John Watson found him slumped on a stair in the London Underground. He died in London in February 1948.""