R.W. Symonds

Robert Wemyss Symonds FRIBA (31 December 1889 – 5 September 1958) was a British architect, and "the pre-eminent 20th century scholar and authority on English furniture". His complicated love life, before he married respectably, included affairs with two women, the first of which produced children he never acknowledged, and the second with a woman who he discovered was already married and who was subsequently jailed for perjury in her divorce case.

Robert Symonds was born on 31 December 1889, the son of the artists William Robert Symonds and Margaret Hogg Swan Symonds. He was educated at St Paul's School, London.

Symonds married Daphne Loveland in 1921. They had two daughters before her death in 1948. Symonds married secondly Monica Sheila Harrington in 1948, the daughter of Sir H. M. Grayson, Bt.

In his youth, Symonds had an affair with Lily Sapzells, a woman of Lithuanian Jewish origin, that produced two children, John (1914–2006), an author and the literary executor of Aleister Crowley, and a daughter. Symonds did not acknowledge either child and they were brought up by their mother in Margate where she ran a boarding house.

Symonds also had an affair with Thelma Dorothy Bamberger who, according to his account, he met on the London Underground in 1914. He did not serve in the military during the First World War due to ill health, instead working as a designer and decorator. Symonds and Bamberger became engaged and lived together for four years despite Symonds discovering not long after they met that she was married. Symonds requested that Bamberger obtain a divorce from her husband who was serving in the military, resulting in a complicated divorce case heard in 1920 that soon after resulted in Bamberger's prosecution for perjury in respect of her testimony.

Bamberger claimed that Symonds had threatened her with acid and tried to kill her, but Symonds said that he had never been violent towards her, but that she had cut his head open and on another occasion thrust a pair of curling tongs in his ear; he also claimed that she had poured acid over him at a hotel where they were staying. Bamberger was found guilty of eight counts of perjury relating to her testimony in the divorce court and sentenced to nine months' imprisonment in a case that was regarded as unusual at the time due to the rareness of prosecutions for perjury arising from testimony in divorce proceedings.

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