In February 1960, the Belfast Telegraph profiled local architect, Henry Lynch Robinson. Announcing him to be a ‘tradition free designer’, the piece was accompanied by a photographic portrait of a debonair figure in suite, tie and overcoat, and described as a ‘bachelor.’

Henry Lynch-Robinson was born Henry Adrian Robinson in 1929, the son of Patricia Dorian and Adrian Robinson, a senior civil servant who was latterly Permanent Secretary at Stormont, the seat of Northern Ireland’s government. Henry’s family were Hiberno-English gentry with roots in Dublin and Galway. Henry’s uncle, Sir Christopher Lynch-Robinson, was an author whose memoir, Last of the Irish R. M.s riffed on similarities between his early life in Ireland and the fiction of Edith Someville and Martin Ross.

Henry was educated at Mourne Grange, a private school for boys near Kilkeel then favoured by the unionist establishment and at Shrewsbury school in England. Given that his family were, by tradition, civil servants, Henry caused some astonishment by deciding on a career in architecture. Studying in Liverpool, he became interested in set design, and was reportedly offered a job at Ealing Studios, but instead chose to return to Belfast, where his establishment connections would have offered good prospects.  In 1949, Henry, along with his immediate relatives, adapted his surname to ‘Lynch-Robinson.’

Henry’s attachment to modernist architecture meant that his schemes were often controversial and stood out in a province known for its conservatism. His creative output in the 1950s was extensive.

In 1950, he was appointed Advisor on Design to the Festival of Britain, 1951, which resulted in the construction of Farm of the Future, a temporary building which radically reimagined the design possibilities of rural life. The same year, a house for a private client on the Malone Road in Belfast was constructed following a well-publicised battle with the Belfast Corporation, whose planners had asserted it was too unconventional for its surroundings.

Henry’s own country bungalow on the shores of Lough Neagh, constructed in 1953, was still considered strikingly modern when it was advertised for sale two decades later. By the turn of the sixties, his attention increasingly turned to large industrial buildings. The Ulster Brewery, completed in 1963, was said to have been constructed on a timescale previously unrivalled in Northern Ireland.

Amid the austere surroundings of Belfast in the 1950s, Henry Lynch-Robinson was something of a local celebrity. Sought after by journalists for his sometimes outspoken opinions on aesthetics and urban planning, he even appeared as a panellist on a BBC radio quiz show.

His interest in the stage did not lie dormant. An enthusiastic participant in the theatrical scene, he designed sets and costumes for various productions including operas and ballets. Henry also tried his hand at writing. He is thought to have penned a memoir and unpublished short stories, although these are now lost. His adaption of The Murder at the Red Barn, a melodrama, was performed to acclaim in 1956, although a pantomime was subsequently less successful.

In 1960, Henry was recruited by James Ellis, then a young director, to design ambitious sets for Sam Thompson’s Over the Bridge, a play which caused controversy in Belfast through its depiction of sectarian conflict in the city’s shipyards. It was performed in spite of opposition, and included sets by Lynch-Robinson which, with ‘dark gantries and the hulk of a ship looming’ were said by a reviewer to ‘vividly evoke the atmosphere of the shipyard.’

Henry Lynch-Robinson was possessed of an ‘artistic’ personal aesthetic which suggested both creativity and sexual nonconformity. When walking the streets of Belfast, he might be seen striding down Royal Avenue sporting a ‘wide hat and flamboyant scarf.’ Robert McKinstry, an architect who had been Henry’s business partner for several years in the fifties, later recalled an office which was furnished like a country house drawing room, including a grand piano, where Henry used a large antique table as a desk.

James Ellis considered that Henry was a ‘remarkable man’ for his candour about his queerness at a time when male homosexual acts were illegal, and gay men persecuted. During the early stages of the production of ‘Over the Bridge’, Lynch-Robinson addressed himself to the playwright, Sam Thompson, ‘a patently heterosexual ex-shipyard worker’, who expressed ‘no problem’ with Henry’s sexuality, after the architect announced that: “Just so you know, I am a homosexual, but it will never interfere, directly or indirectly, with our working relationship.’1

Henry disengaged with Ireland in the early 1960s. It could be that he had been implicated in some unknown scandal, or that he was simply disillusioned with life in Belfast. There were rich prospects for architectural work overseas. In 1964, having entered into a new business partnership, Lynch-Robinson was commissioned to design a factory complex in Tunisa, which led to further involvement in Africa.

He then spent a decade in Ghana, devising ambitious plans for hospitals, airports and harbours, reportedly working with a staff of thirty assistants. But in 1969, productivity in Africa to a crashing halt. Henry contracted polyneuritis, which resulted in paralysis. While he partially recovered, he was confined to a wheelchair. While remaining alert, and stoic in the face of illness, Henry retired to the Maltese island of Gozo.

During the 1960s, Gozo began to attract upper class homosexual men from Britain, who were drawn by its warm climate, low cost of living and the presence of tolerant social attitudes towards same-sex desire. Alfred Arnold, a senior civil servant from Belfast, had also settled on Gozo, where he was visited by controversial travel writer, Robin Bryans. Henry Lynch-Robinson made his home in the village of Gharb, where he renovated a former farmhouse.

He lived in a ‘queer household’ with housekeeper, Salvina, and his younger Ghanian companion, who was tasked with carrying the disabled architect into the sea to bathe. Henry Lynch-Robinson died of cancer in 1984, leaving his house to his housekeeper. Contrary to local custom, he had insisted on his body being embalmed to ‘lie in state’ in his house.

He was mourned by a grandiose funeral featuring rival brass bands, a horse and carriage and a dispute over the grave. It was a suitably dramatic exit.

Sources

James Ellis: Water Over the Bridge, Paul Larmour: Architects of Ulster, newspapers including Belfast Telegraph and Newsletter, Lynch-Robinson family private collection. Charlie Lynch would like to thank Victoria and Dominic Lynch-Robinson for their invaluable help with this research, their sharing of the memories of their uncle and for their permission to reproduce the portrait of Henry Lynch-Robinson by Sidney Smith