Oliver Percy Bernard

Oliver Percy Bernard

Early life

Born in Camberwell, London, Bernard was the son of Charles Bernard, (d.1894), a theatre manager, and his wife, Annie Allen, an actress. Oliver Bernard experienced an unhappy childhood in London and, on the death of his father in 1894, left for Manchester to take a job as a stage hand in a theatre. There, he took on his own education by reading John Locke, John Ruskin and others. He ultimately took a series of menial jobs at sea, before returning to London to take up scene painting with Walter Hann.

In 1905, Bernard went to New York to work as principal scenic artist for

Bernard was consultant artistic director to J. Lyons and Co., defining much of their later house style and designing interiors for their Oxford Street, Coventry Street, and Strand Corner Houses. In 1934 he remodelled the interiors of the Regent Palace Hotel, including the basement bars, restaurants, and the ground-floor coffee room, since named the Titanic Room^[1] and worked on the Cumberland Hotel in 1932.^[3]

Later work

He designed parts of the Strand Palace Hotel's Foyer, and its revolving doors; the doors are now owned by The Victoria and Albert Museum.

Bernard wrote on design and architecture and championed the exploitation of engineering expertise. He worked on furniture design and, from the late 1930s, designed a number of industrial buildings, most notably the Supermarine works in Southampton^[7] and the IMCO building on Dublin's south coast built for a dry-cleaning firm, now since demolished.^[8] He was involved in founding PEL (Practical Equipment Ltd) and designed the S.P.4 chair for them.^[9][10]

In print

Bernard's work and writing feature in a small number of anthology publications on architecture and design including Benton, Charlotte et al. Art Deco 1910–1939, (V&A Publications, 2003) and Le Corbusier and Britain: An Anthology, edited by Irena Murray and Julian Osley (Routledge, 2009). His IMCO building was the subject of a 2012 film by the Irish artist Gavin Murphy, and formed part of a subsequent publication On Seeing Only Totally New Things Archived 5 October 2014 at the Wayback Machine, that also includes the first comprehensive and illustrated account of Bernard's life and work.^[11]

Personality and family

His former secretary described him as "amusing, utterly impossible, kind, and a bully".^[3] He was a cousin to the actor Stanley Holloway^[12] (Bernard's father Charles was a brother to Holloway's maternal grandmother), to Holloway's son, the actor Julian Holloway and Julian's daughter, the author and former model Sophie Dahl.^[13]

Bernard was married twice; first to the singer Muriel Theresa Lightfoot in 1911 (the marriage dissolved in 1924) and then to Edith Dora Hodges (1896–1950), an opera singer whose stage name was Fedora Roselli, in 1924.^[3] From this relationship, the couple had two daughters and three sons including the poet and translator Oliver Bernard who attended the Westminster School and later published a book of memoirs.^[14][15] Bernard's two other sons were Bruce Bernard, a photographer and art critic and Jeffrey Bernard who became a noted journalist.^[3]

Bernard died unexpectedly of