Philip Morton Shand (21 January 1888 – 30 April 1960), known as P. Morton Shand, was a British journalist, architecture critic (an early proponent of modernism), wine and food writer, entrepreneur and pomologist. He was the paternal grandfather of Queen Camilla.
Life
Shand, the son of the writer and barrister Alexander Faulkner Shand and his wife Augusta Mary Coates, was born in Kensington, London. He was educated at Eton College and King's College, Cambridge, as well as studying at the Sorbonne, Paris, and in Heidelberg, Germany.
Shand was married four times. His first marriage was to Edith Marguerite Harrington in April 1916, with whom he had his only son, Bruce, father to Queen Camilla. They divorced in 1920.
Shand's second marriage was to Agatha Alys Fabre-Tonnerre, in 1920, with whom he had a daughter named Sylvia Doris Rosemary. They divorced in 1926.
Shand's third marriage was to Georgette Thérèse Edmée Avril, whom he married in 1926. They divorced in 1931, without having had any children.
Shand's fourth marriage was to Sybil Mary Sissons (previously Mrs. Slee) in 1931, with whom he had one daughter named Elspeth. Elspeth married Geoffrey Howe, later Baron Howe of Aberavon, who was then a lawyer and later a politician. Elspeth became a life peer in her own right as Baroness Howe of Idlicote. Shand's step-daughter, Mary (Sybil's daughter from her first husband naval Commander John Ambrose Slee) married architect Sir James Stirling.
Shand died on 30 April 1960 (age 72) in Lyon, France. The poet John Betjeman and the French wine expert André Simon wrote addenda to Shand's obituary in The Times.
Career
Shand studied history at King's College, Cambridge, gaining his MA in 1914. Shand served in the First World War with the Royal Fusiliers regiment, and immediately afterwards, due to his fluent French and German, he was appointed as superintendent of all German prisoners' camps in France.
Already in 1914, he had translated from German to English Arthur Schnitzler's play Liebelei, under the title Playing with Love. Though his first major publications from that time were on food and wine, he began to also build a reputation as an architecture critic, working in particular for Architectural Review, where he had been influential in steering the journal's then proprietor and sometimes editor Hubert de Cronin Hastings in favour of modernism.
While living in Lyon, France, in the early 1920s, he was invited by the editor of the Architectural Association Journal to review the Exposition Internationale des Artes Décoratifs in Paris of 1925. In reviewing the exposition, he coined the term "Swedish grace" to describe the Scandinavian design of the time, evident in the work of among others Gunnar Asplund, though by that time a new, modernist architecture and design was emerging, as evident at the exposition in the work of its prime mover Le Corbusier.
Shand's first book on architecture, Modern Theatres and Cinemas was published in 1930 and featured many of those buildings he had encountered in Germany during the late 1920s, arguing that there the cinema had emerged as a separate design typology, not an adaptation of traditional theatre design.
Shand was befriended by some of the leading figures in European modernist architecture, including the German architect Peter Behrens, the Swiss-French Le Corbusier, the founder of the Bauhaus school Walter Gropius, Finnish Alvar Aalto and Swiss historian-critic Sigfried Giedion, keeping correspondence with each of them. He also developed close links with architects back in the UK, encouraging their participation in the modernist debate. Shand translated from German to English Gropius's 1925 book Die neue Architektur und das Bauhaus, published in 1930 as The New Architecture and the Bauhaus. Shand with furniture designer and entrepreneur Jack Pritchard helped with Gropius's emigration from Germany to the UK in 1934.