Drawings of George M. Sutherland, Architect, Galashiels

The drawings are of various sizes ranging from approximately A0 size down to 26cm x 35 cm and show the following:

• - some pieces showing architectural features/mouldings generally
• - George Heriot's Hospital Edinburgh - Details of Council Chambers - 1/2" scale
• - George Heriots Hospital, Edinburgh. 1/2" detail of North Entrance Doorway
• - Oak Cabinet 'French' dated 1540 in Royal Scottish Museum
• - Details of Oak Bench (French 1500) in Museum, Edinburgh
• - Melrose Abbey - Detail of centre panel in wall of Cloisters
• - a piece showing 'Pro Christo Et Patria Dulce Periculum Be Traist ...'
• - Wrought-iron gates, Oxford - Clarendon Press, and Old Schools Quadrangle
• - St. John's College, Oxford. Wrought-iron Gate to Dining Hall
• - Caroline Park Gates [Granton]
• - a piece showing 'Sundial', WR 1907
• - a piece showing 'Urns'

Some of the paper used in the collection show drawings on both sides.

George McDonald Sutherland was born in 1886, the son of a master-mason George P. Sutherland. This elder Sutherland, educated at George Heriot's School in Edinburgh, had served as an apprentice sculptor in Edinburgh, London and New York, and in 1881 had founded the firm of George Sutherland and Sons (Galashiels), Sculptors and Monumental Masons. The firm operated throughout the Borders over the next 100 years, with war memorials and grave stones comprising a large part of the business, and ran additional businesses in Hawick and in Tweedmouth. The carvings on the local Galashiels Post Office building were created by Sutherland in 1886.

The younger George McDonald Sutherland had been apprenticed as a young architect to the firm of Sir Robert Lorimer in 1903, at the age of 17. He subsequently went to Toronto, Canada, to start an architectural business and bought land there too. On the outbreak of the Great War however, he came back to Scotland to enlist and joined the 4th King's Own Scottish Borderers (KOSB). Sadly he was killed at Arras on 9 April 1917 and was buried there.

Open to bona fide researchers, but please contact repository for details in advance of visit.

Accession no: E2011.34

Compiled by Graeme D. Eddie, Edinburgh University Library, Special Collections.

Within Special Collections, Edinburgh University Library, can be found a collection of 'Papers of Sir Robert Lorimer', to whose firm George McDonald Sutherland had been apprenticed as a young architect in 1903.