Elisabeth Whitworth Scott belonged to a dynasty of English architects — George Gilbert Scott was her great-great-uncle — but she entered the profession through the Architectural Association in the first years it admitted women, and she won her one great commission anonymously. In 1928, aged twenty-nine and barely three years qualified, she took first place in the open international competition to replace the burnt Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon, beating seventy-one other entries. It made her the first woman to win a major British public building competition, and the press treated it as a scandal as much as an achievement. She was then working in Maurice Chesterton's Hampstead office, and built the theatre with two fellow Architectural Association students, Alison Sleigh and John Chiene Shepherd; the practice later became Scott, Shepherd and Breakwell. No comparable public commission ever followed.
