This British born architect, originally named William Edward Careless, articled while studying for his degree in Birmingham at the Birmingham School of Art, then worked in Sheffield, London and Dundee, Scotland. He moved to Montreal, Quebec in 1912 at the invitation of architect Percy Nobbs for whom he worked as an assistant and changed his name to Carless; then he and British architect Philip John Turner worked together from 1913 to 1915. He became a professor of architecture at McGill University in 1919, and authored several books, including “Architecture of French Canada.” While Ramsay Traquair was head of McGill’s School of Architecture, Carless, was his chief assistant. Both he and Traquair were associate architects for the Nobbs & Hyde project designing the university’s Pathological Institute. In 1929 he returned to private practice in London.