Woodward, Benjamin 1815 - 1861

Benjamin Woodward was born in Tullamore, Kerry, Ireland on 16 November 1815. By the early 1830s he had moved to Dublin.  He was articled to the engineer and surveyor William Stokes in Dublin from 1833 to c.1839 and remained with him as his assistant until c.1841.  By the mid-1840s Woodward had begun working as an architect and in 1851 he joined the Cork architects Thomas Deane (1792-1871) and his son, Thomas Newenham Deane (1828-1899) in partnership. The practice was formally known as Sir Thomas Deane Knt., Son and Woodward, but more commonly as Deane & Woodward.   In  1853 they opened an office in Dublin at 3 Upper Merrion Street, and an office in London in 1855. They closed closed the office in Cork in c.1857.

From 1853, Deane & Woodward was effectively run by Woodward and T. N. Deane. It would appear that T. N. Deane ran the Dublin office while Woodward was more involved in the London office, and in managing projects in England. These included the the Oxford University Museum; the Oxford Union (1856-57) and the Crown Life Office (1856-57) in London.

As a result of his work in Oxford, Woodward became associated with members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones whom he persuaded to decorate the interior of the Union with murals.  

Woodward had suffered with tuberculosis for a number of years and in December 1860 he travelled to the South of France for reasons of his health. While returning to Dublin he collapsed and subsequently died at a hotel in Lyon on 15 May 1861.