SPENCE, Elizabeth Mary (Betty) (Miss)

Architect

(BArch 1941 (Witwatersrand)); ARIBA.

Married as PINFOLD. The Wits Graduation programme for 23 March 1941 lists SPENCE as graduating with a Degree of Bachelor of Architecture. After graduating in 1941, she worked in the office of the Johannesburg architect Duncan SINCLAIR, as well as in the Housing Office in Newlands in Cape Town. During that time she published an article titled 'Native Architecture' — one of the first essays printed in the South African Architectural Record devoted to indigenous South African architecture — as well as other pieces on subjects such as design in the small Afrikaner town of Reddersburg, and European architecture in the Congolese mining town Elizabethville, Congo. In 1948, as recipient of a British Council fellowship, she spent four months studying prefabricated housing in London. On her return, she became a part-time researcher for South Africa’s National Housing Commission and the National Building Research Institute (NBRI). Between 1945 and 1958, she divided her time between a part-time teaching position at University of the Witwatersrand and a variety of different, presumably freelance research and design projects. In 1959 she is recorded as a salaried member of the TPIA of address 16 Windeena Avenue, Pine Park, Johannesburg. In that same year she, along with her husband, the architect Carl PINFOLD and their children, fled to the United Kingdom in 1959 as a political exile.

Following a brief period in London, the family settled in Liverpool, where Carl pursued a doctorate in architectural acoustics at the university, while Betty worked for the Liverpool Council as an architect and continued to write about architecture and spatial planning, often using the Pinfold surname. The couple spent one year at the University of Nairobi in the mid-1970s. They never returned to South Africa.

(Bio-details from Woudstra and Le Roux, 2023 - see Betty Spence's Design-Research)

List of projects

With photographs
With notes

House Pinfold - Spence: 1954. Pine Park, Johannesburg, Gauteng - Architect

References

Chipkin, Clive M. 1993. Johannesburg Style - Architecture & Society 1880s - 1960s. Cape Town: David Phillip. pp 270-271

Chipkin, Clive M. 2008. Johannesburg Transition - Architecture & Society 1950 - 2000. Johannesburg: STE Publishers. pp 237

ISAA. 1959. The Yearbook of the Institute of South African Architects and Chapter of SA Quantity Surveyors 1958-1959 : Die Jaarboek van die Instituut van Suid-Afrikaanse Argitekte en Tak van Suid-Afrikaanse Bourekenaars 1958-1959. Johannesburg: ISAA. pp 97, 197

Books by SPENCE

Spence, Betty . 1952. Build your own house : the owner-builder guide. Pretoria: Government Printer