Thomas Canfield Pomphrey

Thomas Canfield Pomphrey (29 November 1881 – 8 March 1966 ) was a Scottish architect.

Family Thomas Canfield Pomphrey was born in Wishaw, Scotland, to parents Marion and William Pomphrey. His father worked as a printer and stationer.

Education and career Pomphrey was a pupil at Hamilton Academy, and later a student of architecture at The Glasgow School of Art in 1903 & 1904, after which he trained under Alexander Cullen, the Glaswegian architect. He left Scotland in 1906, emigrating to Toronto, Canada. He worked for a number of firms, including the architects John Lyle, and Darling & Pearson.

He moved to New York in 1909, where he was employed by Clinton & Russell, and took evening classes at Henry Hornbostel's workshop. Pomphrey returned to Toronto in 1912.”

Following his military service during the first world war, he worked as a staff architect for Gore, Naismith and Storrie. In 1924, in collaboration with William Ferguson, the pair won the competition for the Great War Cenotaph in Toronto. Over this project Pomphrey had considerable influence. The brainchild of Toronto's Commissioner of Works, Ronald Caldwell Harris, the Toronto Water Works Extension Project (TWWE) was Harris's grand vision of a Toronto water supply system "set within beautiful public parks and linked to a grand system of boulevards and bridges encircling the city." When detailed work began in 1927 R. C. Harris insisted on overseeing every stage of the process. It was his review of the preliminary drawings for the filtration plant at Victoria Park that provoked a strong letter criticising the quality of architectural expression. "The buildings as shown on the perspective sketch appear to me to be plain and unattractive". It was this letter that led the engineering firm Gore, Naismith & Storrie to work with their staff architect, Thomas Canfield Pomphrey, for a substantial time on a large ink-and-wash rendering of the building. It was this drawing that helped to set the vision of the project, and gave Pomphrey a position of power and influence with the Commissioner R. C. Harris.

In 1931, Pomphrey became a member of the Ontario Association of Architects.

Prior to enlisting, he was earning $1500 yearly as an architect, being self-employed and working for Darling and Pearson.