Biographical Background
Anscombe was born on 8 February 1874 in Lindfield, Sussex, England. His parents Edmund and Eliza Anscombe (née Mason) emigrated on 27 June 1874 to New Zealand on the Christian McAusland in the assisted immigration scheme. They arrived in Dunedin with seven month old Edmund and his two year old sister Eliza. His father is described as a carpenter aged 25 years old from Sussex. His mother was 28. They arrived in Otago, New Zealand on 30 September 1874. His sister Edith Violet was born in Dunedin on 1 April 1885.
Edmund attended Caversham School (from 1879–1885) and in 1888, as a 14 year old boy, he left New Zealand on what, in most accounts, is seen to be a prophetic visit to the 1888 Melbourne exhibition. In his own words:
"From then onwards anything pertaining to Exhibitions held for me its own decided and never ending interest." (Anscombe Inside Story)
This lifelong interest in the design of exhibition buildings was furthered by: his attendance at the 1889-90 New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition in Dunedin, involvement in the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St Louis (1904), his appointment as architect to the New Zealand and South Seas International Exhibition Company (1924–25), attendance at the Chicago World's Fair (1933) and the New York World's Fair (1939), and his appointment as the architect of the New Zealand Centennial Exhibition (1940). Whether the exhibition was the primary reason for his visit to Melbourne cannot be known for certain, but on his return Anscombe became an apprentice carpenter in Waiwera South, Otago, and worked for his father as a builder. This experience perhaps influenced his later architectural work which he approached with an entrepreneurial pragmatism. He married Douglas Watt in 1898 after which they lived with Edmund's parents. His first child, Ruby, was born 1899. In 1911 his second daughter, Margery, was born.
In 1901 Anscombe travelled to America. This 1901-1906 trip is the most written about of his travels. He visited St Louis Purchase Exposition where he "received ... practical training in exhibitions in 1904" and it is during this time that he is said to have studied architecture, an idea first asserted in an obituary but something Anscombe himself does not refer to.
Read more about this topic: Edmund Anscombe
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