Hub WAUGH

Hubert Locksley (Hub) Waugh was born 1901 in Hawthorn, where he grew up and spent much much of his subsequent life. As a child, he attended the local state school in Manningtree Road; while travelling there one morning in June 1911, the ten-year-old Waugh was severely injured in a carriage accident that resulted in the amputation of his right leg below the knee.

In 1918, Waugh began the four-yeay Diploma of Architecture course at the University of Melbourne; he completed his final examination in December 1922, with the diploma conferred in March 1923. Six months later, when he appliied for registration as an architect in Victoria, he was working in the office of Henderson, Alsop & Martin of 352 Collins Street; his application was refereed by Rodney Alsop himself. By the early 1930s, Waugh was employed with Irwin & Stephenson, where he rose to the senior position of office manager; others working in that office at the time included Ray Berg and Roy Simpson. After the firm won the 1937 RVIA Street Architecture Medal (for the new headquarters of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons in East Melbourne), Waugh acccepted the award on behalf of an absent Leighton Irwin, who was interstate at the time of the ceremony in March 1938.

In the late 1940s, Hub Waugh became a key figure in the newly-formed Faculty of Architecture at the University of Melbourne. In 1947, after Brian Lewis was appointed as Foundation Chair of Architecture, he invited some of Melbourne's leading architects to serve as his teaching staff. Hub Waugh was part of this exclusive group, which included Roy Grounds, Frederick Romberg, Fritz Janeba and Ray Berg. In the early 1950s, university colleagues Berg and Waugh entered into an informal partnership, which saw them design a triangular-planned house at Dandenong (since demolished). In 1955, the two architects were invited by their mutual pre-war employer, Leightin Irwin, to serve as consultants on the design of International House, the new Melbourne University overseas students' hostel on Royal Parade. While Berg subsequently curtailed his teaching role in order to establish a full-time private practice (later entering into partnership with Douglas Alexandra), Waugh remained on the faculty staff for many years. He died in 1969.