Gordon Leith

George Esslemont Gordon Leith (1885–1965) was a South African architect.

At age sixteen he began his career as a draughtsman in Pretoria at the Public Works Department.^[1] In 1905, in London, he enrolled at the Architectural Association School of Architecture and obtained a diploma.^[1] He then became an associate of the Royal Institute of British Architects.^[1] In 1909 he returned to South Africa and set up practice as an architect Pretoria and Johannesburg.^[1] He started working for Herbert Baker in 1910.^[1][2] In 1911, a Herbert Baker Scholarship saw him study Italian Renaissance architecture in the British School at Rome.^[1] He returned in 1912 to assist Baker design government buildings in Dehli.^[1]

Leith served as a captain in the Royal Field Artillery (and was later recovering from a Western Front gas attack).^[3] There he was awarded a Military Medal.^[1]

Leith was assistant architect to the Imperial War Graves Commission in England from 1918 to 1920 design the cemeteries layout and designing war memorials, before going back to South Africa, where he set up his own practice.^[1][2]

Leith's works include the Calais Southern War Cemetery, France (1918–20), Johannesburg Park Station (1927–32), the Town Hall, Bloemfontein (1920–40), the South African Reserve Bank, Johannesburg (1938),^[2] and the Queen Victoria Hospital, Johannesburg (1943).^[4]

In 1946, he was awarded a doctorate in architecture from the University of the Witwatersrand.^[1]

He married Ethel Mary Leith, née Cox (1888–1974). Their daughter Sarah Greenaway Leith (1918-2010), was a British rally driver and novelist, and a Second World War codebreaker at Bletchley Park.