Alfred Herbert Tory

Born 22 November 1881
Died 14 June 1971

Active: 1903 - 1959

Country of birth and death: England

Architectural sculptor and modeller, carver in stone and wood

Born in Sheffield. He was the son of Frank Tory (1848-1938), an architectural sculptor and modeller. Alfred Tory and his identical twin brother, William Frank (known as Frank), attended the Weston Academy for the Sons of Gentlemen and the Broomhill Council School in Sheffield. They both sat the examination for a free scholarship at the Sheffield School of Art and Alfred came top of the list of successful candidates. He and his brother attended evening classes from 1895 to 1903 whilst being apprenticed to their father. In 1903 Alfred Tory won a bronze medal in the National Competition, modelling a figure from the antique. During the time that the brothers were finishing their studies at the Sheffield School of Art Frank Tory snr was having a family home and workshop built on Ecclesall Road where he set up the firm of Frank Tory & Sons.

There are difficulties in making specific attributions of work on individual buildings to Alfred or Frank because they often worked together on a commission, and their carvings were usually reported in the local press under the generic name of 'Frank Tory & Sons'. However it is known that one of the first figures which Alfred Tory created independently was a statue of the Virgin Mary (1904) over the entrance doorway to the presbytery of St Marie’s Church (now St Marie’s Cathedral). The canopy is similar to the one enclosing his father’s statue of the 1st Earl Cairns on the Cairns building in Sheffield’s High Street.

With his brother, Frank, Alfred Tory produced pieces for the White Building in Fitzallan Square. The building, finished in 1908 for E.M. Gibbs of Sheffield architects, Flockton and Gibbs, is faced with faience, the first time this material had been used in Sheffield. Alfred and his brother were required to provide 10 reliefs depicting ten Sheffield trades and they each completed five models – a steel crucible teemer, a buffer, a handforger, a grinder, a cutler, a steel roller, a file cutter, an etcher, a chaser and a silversmith. They got their ideas by going into various Sheffield works and then made the models which were sent to Leeds for casting.

Sheffield’s City Architect in the interwar period, W.G. Davies, gave the firm several commissions for new public buildings. The Tory brothers provided the external decorative work on Sheffield’s old fire station (1928) with its Art Deco detail on Division Street. Alfred and Frank also led the team who completed the internal and external decoration of the City Hall (1932) in Barkers Pool, designed by E. Vincent Harris in a Classical Revival style. They were responsible for the figure of Knowledge on Sheffield’s Central Library (1934) at the corner of Tudor Square and Surrey street. Seated on the world, this figure holds in his hands the ankh (the Egyptian symbol of life) representing good and the asp representing evil and is attended on either side by spirit messengers holding aloft flaming torches. The 12 cartouches around the main entrance which represent Literature, Music, Drama, Architecture, Sculpture, Painting, Mathematics, Chemistry and Astronomy were also carved by them. In 1937 Davies’s extension (1937) to the Mappin Art Gallery was opened and the Tory brothers carved the frieze above the entrance which depicts the Shrine of Knowledge with crustaceans, fishes, reptiles, mammals and birds while another frieze on the east side represents men working in the Sheffield trades (repeating imagery used in 1908 on the White Building in Fitzallan Square).

Like their father, the twins worked for several local churches, including the relief profiles of John and Charles Wesley for the Victoria Methodist Hall (1906-1908) on Norfolk Street and a carved oak screen war memorial (1920) for St Augustine’s on Brocco Bank. One the later pieces that Alfred is known to have carved personally was the Hanging Rood for St Matthew's Church on Carver Street depicting the crucified Christ with Mary and St John on either side at the foot of the cross. Work started in 1939 but the completed piece was not installed and dedicated until 1946. A more intimate carving is the bust of the Wesleyan Methodist Minister, Samuel Chadwick, which was for Cliff College in Calver, Derbyshire.

For the University of Sheffield the Tory brothers’ work included carved heads over the arched arcading of the octagonal former library in the Firth Building (1903-05) which now provides offices for the University’s senior officers. The heads are of Mark Firth, Sir Henry Stephenson, W.M. Hicks, Charles Harding Firth, George Franklin, H.K. Stephenson, Edgar Allan and architect, E.M. Gibbs. They are also known to have provided the carving for the Mappin Hall in the Sir Frederick Mappin Building and for the War Memorial (1926), designed by H. St. John Harrison, which is located in the corridor beside the Firth Hall. This is a canopied shrine whose pillars support an internally-illuminated alabaster bowl which casts light on the inscribed names of those members of the University who fell in the First and, added later, Second World Wars.

Alfred and Frank followed their father’s example by accepting commissions to work outside Sheffield. In Chesterfield they were responsible for the decorative carving on the Town Hall (1937), the carving on the Tudor arch into the bar of the Golden Fleece Public House and on Knifesmithgate they provided carved heads for the ends of the oak beams projecting over the shop fronts. Some subjects are grotesques, some whimsical, some represent well-known nursery rhymes. Others are humorous, such as the gnome playing a mouth organ, a distracted face surmounted by hair standing on end entitled ‘The Listener’ and a face representing a jester with cap and bells with his nose extended about four times the normal length in the shape of a clarinet which is entitled ‘Blowing his own Trumpet’.

The firm of Frank Tory & Son were commissioned to provide ornate carved keystones, displaying armorial symbols below, and foliage and masks above, for alternate bays of the first floor of the Leeds Civic Hall (1933). Other places where they worked on churches, libraries, hotels, hospitals and public buildings include: Barnsley, Rotherham, Salford, Bradford, Belper, Birmingham, Hull and Scunthorpe.

During the First World War Alfred’s skills as a plaster moulder were employed by the agricultural engineers, Clayton Shuttleworths of Lincoln, who were engaged in designing and producing the first tanks for use on the battlefields of Northern France.


This record was researched and written by Sylvia Dunkley. It includes information she obtained from Gina Hodges, grand-daughter of Alfred Tory, and her husband, Bob Hodges, and from Chesterfield historian, Janet Murphy.

Other sources used in the preparation of this text include:

Notes for a Talk by Alfred Herbert Tory when in his Eighties to a Group at Endcliffe Methodist Church, Sheffield

Sheffield Trade Directories, 1883 - 1940

Frank Tory & Sons, Business records, sketch and note books, photographs, glass negatives, Sheffield Archives MD7773

Ruth Harman and John Minnis, Pevsner Architectural Guide, Sheffield
(2004), pp 28, 69, 81, 87, 101, 110, 120, 150, 151, 263, 286

Susan Wrathmell, Pevsner Architectural Guide, Leeds
(2005)

Darcy White and Elizabeth Norman, Public Sculpture of Sheffield and South Yorkshire, (Public Sculpture of Britain Series) (Volume 18, 2015), pp v, 111, 122, 147, 176, 179, 210, 234-35,

J Himsworth, ‘Sculptors, Gold and Silversmiths, Designers, Modellers and Art Craftsmen’ in Sheffield Assay office papers relating to works by Sheffield sculptors and designers
(Sheffield City Archives: SAO 2008/80, boxes 58, 175-176)
Daily Independent (Sheffield)
17 Apr 1937

Sheffield Daily Telegraph
19 Oct 1904, 7 Oct 1911, 25 Mar 1939

Sheffield Independent
1 July 1926

Sheffield Star
28 Mar 2012

Wealth at death: £9,485 0s. 0d.
Probate date: 6 July 1971

Citing this record

'Alfred Herbert Tory', Mapping the Practice and Profession of Sculpture in Britain and Ireland 1851-1951, University of Glasgow History of Art and HATII, online database 2011 [https://sculpture.gla.ac.uk/mapping/public/view/person.php?id=ann_1491976779, accessed 24 Oct 2026]

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