Carver in wood and stone, born in Batley, Yorkshire, the eldest surviving child of Edward Armitage, house painter, and his wife, Jane. The family moved to Harrogate and Joseph studied at the local art school. In 1899 he was articled to Penty & Penty, an architectural practice based in York; in the 1901 census he described himself as an architect’s assistant. His greater passion, however, was for wood carving and, already influenced by the Arts and Crafts Movement, he secured work with Sidney Barnsley and Ernest Gimson in the Cotswolds. In 1906 he exhibited for the first time with the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society. (In his five appearances up to 1926, his contributions included an oak lectern, a corner cupboard, a walnut coffer chest and several bowls; he also carved a fireplace designed by Henry Martineau Fletcher.) Following the death of both parents by 1908, Armitage moved to Leicester with his two sisters, Marian and Jane, and his younger brother, Edgar. Pursuing wood carving in his spare time, he earned his living teaching at Leicester School of Art where, by 1911, Edgar, now 15, was a student. In 1910, Armitage was elected a member of the Art Workers’ Guild (of which Barnsley, Gimson and Fletcher were long-term members) and in 1914, with the help of another member, the architect William Richard Lethaby, he established his own craft workshop in Eagle Street, London. Following the outbreak of the First World War, Armitage was rejected for active service on medical grounds and joined the Royal Flying Corps as a rigging officer. In 1916, he married Muriel Vice, a fellow teacher at Leicester School of Art, and in 1919, after his demobilization, began a four-year partnership with his brother Edgar. Also in 1919 he took on his earliest recorded job for the architect Sir Herbert Baker, carving the stone war memorial cross for Meopham, Kent. Armitage’s subsequent work for Baker includes carving the W.G. Grace Memorial Gates at Lord’s Cricket Ground (1923) and the Indian Army Memorial at Neuve Chapelle (unveiled 1927; figure sculpture by Charles Wheeler); carving the coats-of-arms on Chiswick Bridge (opened 1933); overseeing the stone carving, wood carving, plaster- and bronzework at the Bank of England (1925 to 1940) and South Africa House (1930–33); and designing the sculptural scheme for India House in the Aldwych (1928–30). The scope of Armitage’s responsibilities at India House, and the range of skills provided by his workshop (numbering in the late ’20s between 50 and 100 people) is described in detail by his son in the Thirties Society Journal (see ‘Bibliography’, below), who also refers to his mother’s contribution to the decorative scheme, supplying drawings she had made of Indian flowers at Kew for the guidance of the carvers. Baker’s high estimation of Armitage’s skills is evidenced also by the fact that in 1926 he commissioned him to pay a six-month visit to Delhi to advise the local craftsmen who were working on his government buildings there. Major jobs from other architects include the ‘King’s Beasts’ for the exterior pinnacles of St George’s Chapel, Windsor (1923–28, for Sir Harold Breakspear); the carving and plasterwork for the banking hall of Sir John Burnet’s Lloyds Bank head office in Cornhill, City of London (1927–30); carving Gilbert Bayes’s six allegorical relief panels on James Miller’s Commercial Bank of Scotland, Glasgow (1934–35); and designing and carving the winged-wheel decorations for the parapet over Adams, Holden & Pearson’s Uxbridge Underground Station (1937–39). Perhaps his best-known work is the original emblem for the National Trust, the commission for which he won in competition in 1935, the simple effectiveness of which justifies Edward Armitage’s assessment of his father’s achievement: ‘All his life he produced work that showed a masterly ability to formalise and simplify the essence of natural forms into utterly right patterns within a well designed context.’
Ancestry website sources: (i) for Joseph Armitage: England censuses 1881, 1891, 1901, 1911, 1921; England and Wales Civil Registration Marriage Index, 1916; 1939 England and Wales Register; (ii) for Muriel Vice: England Census, 1911; England and Wales Civil Registration Marriage Index, 1916.
Bibliography: AHRnet, via Art UK: ‘Joseph Armitage (1880–1945)’; E. Armitage, ‘Joseph Armitage 1880-1945’, Thirties Society Journal, no. 3, 1983, pp. 25–30; British and Irish Furniture Makers Online (The Furniture History Society): ‘Armitage, Joseph (1880–1945)’; Financial Times: ‘Meet the successors to a very British design dynasty’; Glasgow – City of Sculpture: ‘Joseph Armitage (1880–1945)’; F. Lloyd et al, Public Sculpture of Outer South and West London, Liverpool, 2011, pp. xix, 95–96, 256–57; R. McKenzie, Public Sculpture of Glasgow, Liverpool, 2002, p. 23; Mapping Sculpture; The Times: (i) 22 June 1933, pp. 15–16 (‘South Africa House’), (ii) 19 October 1935, p. 9 (‘An Emblem for the National Trust – Winning Design’), (iii) 19 July 1945, p. 7 (obituary).
Terry Cavanagh, January 2026