(b London, 1868; d Virginia Water, Surrey, 22 January 1948). English architect. Son of Edward Thomas, a district surveyor working in Southwark, he grew up in the world of building. While he was an articled clerk, he studied at Westminster Art School and the Architectural Association, where he may have heard J. M. Brydon lecturing on the ideology of the Baroque style of Christopher Wren and Nicholas Hawksmoor as being still appropriate for the heart of the great British Empire. Thomas started his own practice c. 1894, inventing a middle name Brumwell to distinguish him from others called Alfred Thomas. His early work includes the Huddersfield Sanitorium (1894-7), Mill Hill, and the West of England Eye Infirmary (1895-7), Magdalen Street, Exeter.

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Viscount (rŏn'də) , 1856–1918, British industrialist and public official. He entered his father's coal business in S Wales and eventually developed one of the largest coal combines in Britain. He sat in Parliament, as a Liberal, from 1888 to 1910. During World War I he served the government in facilitating the munitions output and arranging war contracts in the United States and Canada. In 1917 he was made food minister, instituted a compulsory rationing system of vital foodstuffs, and successfully curbed food profiteering. He was created baron in 1916 and viscount shortly before his death.

His daughter, Margaret Haig, 2d Viscountess Rhondda, 1883–1958, by special provision inherited his title. She was active from 1906 to 1914 in the militant woman-suffrage movement and was founder (1920) and editor of Time and Tide, a liberal and feminist weekly. She and her father were both on the Lusitania when it was sunk by the Germans in 1915.

Bibliography

See biography of him by his daughter (1921).