FRANK KENDON

 
WRAPPED IN SLOW MUSING:
FRANK KENDON – A QUIET EXPLOSION IN POETRY
BY
BARRY VAN-ASTEN
 

(Drawing of Frank Kendon, by
H M G Wilson, see note 15.)

‘Art thou the weaver
Whose fingers shall tie
Quiet into fever
Comfortably –
That knot for whose secret
Many men die?’ (1)

 

 

To many enthusiasts of poetry the name Frank Kendon is perhaps an unfamiliar one, a minor poet who has achieved some literary immortality through his autobiographical volume ‘The Small Years’ which has been praised by poet and scholar alike and loved by the reading public for its timeless echo of childhood since its publication in 1930; but Kendon is a modern poet, he himself would hate the term for he was a quiet singer of sonnets and songs who wrote with a sense of the importance of nature and is perhaps more akin to the Georgian poets such as Edward Thomas (1878-1917), Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) and Edmund Blunden (1896-1974) who all found their muse in the English countryside or nature disrupted by war in the fields of France; but Frank Kendon was certainly a modernist poet, perhaps not in the sense that Eliot was ‘modern’ but Kendon was a poetic innovator for he developed his own form of rhyme, ‘analysed rhyme’ and he was an inventive lyricist drawing inspiration from the metaphysical universe for he was not simply concerned by the human form, he attained his spiritual illumination from his fascination, and even child-like wonder, of nature, the countryside that he loved where the intrusion of the human in the wilderness attained a divine aspect and mirrored that wonder around him. His themes were those we know today, the emotions and perplexities felt by the grandeur of the natural world and our small, seemingly insignificant part upon this ‘deaf earth’ which ‘hears thee in her dreams, and sighing / turns from her sleep, although her dreams remain – / lies listening to thee, pleased beyond replying’, but the most intrinsic theme of Frank Kendon is ultimately, Love, the love that nestles within the human heart which goes far beyond the mortal flesh that cannot contain such desire for there is an immortal endurance of Love beyond any boundary, a Love that humbles the soul and rejoices in the heart for Love can have no end.

 

‘Thou art my mistress for no cause: I love because I need;
But praise, to still my questing mind, thy looks, thy grace, thy voice.’ (2)

 

 

Frank Kendon’s father, Mr. Samuel Kendon, the son of the Baptist Minister and founder of the Bethany Boys School, Goudhurst in Kent (est. 1866), Reverend Joseph James Kendon (1830-1903), was born on 26^th December 1864 (he died on 30^th May 1945); Samuel became a schoolmaster and taught at Bethany House, a boarding school for boys, becoming its Principle. Samuel, who also became Moderator of the Kent and Sussex Baptist Church Association as well as Secretary to the ‘Hop Pickers’ Mission’, fell in love with and married Ellen Susan Todman, who was born in London in 1867 (she died on Thursday 27^th March 1930); they were married in 1889. They would have a large family of eleven children and the first-born child was a girl named Clarice Ellen Mildred Kendon, known as ‘Clarrie’, who was born in 1890 (3); Clarrie was educated at the Ladie’s College in Goudhurst and like the boys’ school it was founded by the Kendon family and opened in 1882, the Headmistress being Clarrie’s Aunt Rebecca Kendon (1862-1957) who was Headmistress from 1883-1950; the school was evacuated during the war and in 1946 moved from Goudhurst to Doddington Hall, Nantwich, Cheshire. The next child born to Samuel and Ellen was another girl named Ella Winifred Kendon, born 13^th December 1891 (4) and then the Kendon’s had their first boy: Frank Samuel Herbert Kendon who was born at Bethany House in the village of Goudhurst, Kent on 12^th September 1893. Other children born in the Kendon household in Goudhurst were: Donald Henry Kendon, simply known as ‘Don’, born 9^th August 1895 (5), Olive Miriam Kendon, born 5^th March 1897 (6), Freda Constance Kendon, born 1898 (7), Norman Lynn Kendon, born 23^rd May 1900 (8), Dora Kathleen Kendon, known as ‘Kay’, born in 1902 (9), Harold Joseph Kendon, known as ‘Plum’, born 25^th December 1903 (10), Mavis Eileen Kendon, born 1905 (11) and Aubrey Keith Kendon, known as ‘Keith’, born 14^th September 1907 (12).

Frank was educated at Bethany School from 1899-1911; it is described in ‘Paton’s List of Schools and Tutors’ of 1911 [London. Paton] as having an ‘ideal situation in the open country on one of the picaresque hills of the Weald’ and it says that its ‘school grounds are 42 acres in extant’ with’ large and convenient buildings. The religious and moral training is considered of the highest importance.’ The fees are 30 guineas a year and it adds that ‘boys who have sisters at the Ladies’ College, Goudhurst (two miles away) have an opportunity of seeing them weekly.’ (p. 365, also p. 839 for the Ladies’ College, Goudhurst). In that year, 1911, Frank became a pupil teacher before becoming assistant master until June 1915; the following month of that year, on 13^th July, Frank, aged 21, joined the Royal Engineer Signal Service as a sapper and after training, Frank, whose regimental number was: 108323, went overseas to fight in Egypt. Frank’s Uncle, David Gildersleve Kendon (1879-1934) who also lived at The Firs, Curtisden Green, Goudhurst, with Frank’s parents, enlisted in the Artist’s Rifles, R.G.A. on 10^th December 1915, becoming a 2^nd Lt. in 1917 and later suffering from trench fever during that year and again in 1918 (13).

After the war, Frank entered St. John’s College, Cambridge on 30^th September 1919, not long after his 26^th birthday, where he studied English; the ‘English Tripos had only recently been established and Frank Kendon in company with J. B. Priestley, Gerald Bullett, Edward Davison, and other eager young writers were quick to seize the opportunity of reading for an honours degree in something less rigid than classics or history’ (14). One of his tutors was the historian, Ernest Alfred Benians (1880-1952) who was also born in Goudhurst, Kent and whose father, Percy Stephen Benians (1884-1959), was Headmaster at Bethany School. There are some good descriptions of life at St. John’s College following the first world war by the Reverend John Sandwich Boys Smith (1901-1991) who was up at St’ John’s the same time as Kendon; in his ‘Memories of St. John’s College, Cambridge 1919-1969’ [part I: Recollections of Life in St. John’s College 1919-1954. University Press, Oxford. 1983] he says that there were ‘no bathrooms in college’ during his time there from 1919 and that the bath house behind New Court was not opened until 1922; he also has some fine things to say about E. A. Benians, mentioning on page 26 that after his death in 1952, he wrote of Benians in the college magazine, ‘the Eagle (vol. lv, pp. 4-7), the same number that F S H Kendon wrote charmingly of his home and early years (ibid., pp. 7-9)’ and there are some interesting remarks on G. G. Coulton, who was a ‘tall, lank figure, carrying a rucksack full of books, or riding his tall bicycle through the Backs to the New Court cloister on his way to his rooms, A11, New Court.’ (pp. 62-23) While Kendon was an undergraduate at St. John’s College, his friend and fellow poet, Edward Lewis Davison (1898-1970) who had served in the navy during the war before entering St. John’s, edited an anthology of Cambridge student poetry and included five of Kendon’s poems amongst its 47 contributors; the volume, ‘Cambridge Poets 1914-1920’ was published in 1920 by W. Heffer & Sons Ltd. of Cambridge, the same year as Davison’s first volume of ‘Poems’ was published by G. Bell & Sons of London, prior to ‘Cambridge Poets’. Although some of the poems show elements of naivety there is a growing confidence in Kendon’s poetry and familiar later themes begin to take root; as with all young poets the romantic aspect of love has an overwhelming desire to express itself in waves of lyrical beauty but with Kendon ‘his ultimate concern, every time, is with man’s spirit – its yearnings, its aspirations, its finest efforts to fight a way into expression through a paradoxically entrammelling flesh. All the beauties of earth and heaven are not enough if love is not in the human heart to inform them.’ (15) Kendon’s five poems in ‘Cambridge Poets’ are: ‘Boys Bathing’ (p. 115), Distant Trumpet Song’ (pp. 116-117), a poem of three stanzas with its refrain: ‘Give you good dreams, love, / as little children dream’; ‘Palestine’ (p. 117), a short, simple piece in which Kendon reflects upon his time in the ‘strange lands we have seen’ when he was stationed there during the war; ‘a land of gaudy flowers’ where a single English daisy was ‘the sweetest thing we knew’; ‘Beauty for Ashes’ (pp. 117-118) which has some rather lovely lines – ‘Pale no more from grief, her cheek soft blushes, / kissed again, dear heart, by the spirit she loved so.’ and ‘Timid lips, that tremble over their smiling, / fearing lest they wake the surge of her grieving’, and the final poem, ‘He that walketh through the twilight’ (pp. 118-119) a four stanza poem which begins: ‘He that walketh through the twilight / sings a melody of peace; / great he is, and strong and comely, / bearing on his star-swept forehead / cool night-patience, and release / from the dusty day and torrid; / at his footstep, labour, cease.’ All the poems, except ‘Beauty for Ashes’ would find themselves in the poet’s first volume of verse, Poems and Sonnets (1924).

Edward Davison appeared alongside Frank Kendon in ‘Poems by Four Authors’ published in 1923 by Bowes & Bowes of Cambridge; the other two poets being: J. R. Ackerley (1896-1967) of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and another St. John’s College man, Archibald Young Campbell (1885-1958); all four authors had appeared in ‘Cambridge Poets 1914-1920’. Kendon has 11 poems in the volume: ‘The Excuse’ (p. 93), ‘The Silent Gardener’ (p. 94), ‘Ophelia’ (p. 96), ‘Passover’ (p. 97), ‘What lack, I?’ (p. 98), ‘I spend my days vainly’ (p. 100), ‘Monochrome’ (p. 101), ‘Broken Tryst’ (p. 102), ‘Dry Drayton this April’ (p. 103), ‘The Orange’ (p. 105) and ‘Now to the world’ (p. 106); there is also an unpublished sequence of 12 sonnets (pp. 108-119): I. ‘Since time and youth’, II. ‘O thou that givest darkness’, III. ‘How near’, IV. ‘A vision came to me’, V. ‘To that great day’, VI. ‘Take all the stars’, VII. ‘Pale from the hands of night’, VIII. ‘O Earth, I am thy son’, IX. ’Weary of play’, X. ‘Behind the living hours’, XI. ‘At last the call’, and XII. ‘Love is triumphant’. The poems ‘The Excuse’, ‘Ophelia’, ‘I spend my days vainly’, ‘Now to the world’ and all the sonnets except XII, ‘Love is triumphant’, were to be published later in Kendon’s Poems and Sonnets. The poet conjures a feeling of unease and dread in the poem ‘The Silent Gardener’ where the ‘village is agog with news: / the gardener is sick, they say!’ and his cottage has become forlorn, and ‘the door is shut; a blind half-drawn’ and the garden has fallen into disarray – ‘disorders his geraniums’; where ‘the yews / are dark and secret, night and day’; a garden ‘deep with leaves’ and ‘sick with sympathy’ where ‘no one goes, and no one comes’…the poem captures the intimacy of village life where everyone knows everyone and nothing goes unnoticed and the garden becomes a mirror of the gardener and his fate, whom had he died it ‘would bloom a week or so, until / some dame by stumbling roses drawn / should wonder at the uncut lawn, / and whisper in her neighbour’s ear: / “the gardener is ill, I fear.”’ The poem, ‘I spend my days vainly’ is an excellent example of Kendon’s own invented poetic form which he termed ‘analysed rhyme’, an innovative rhyming technique which substitutes the vowel and consonant of the pure or ‘perfect’ rhyme ending for another word which combines elements of both to split the endings; ‘instead of seeking for something essentially different from true rhyme he [Kendon] has utilised all the elements it contains and yet achieved a completely new grouping of words on a basis of their common sound’ (16), for example, a perfect rhyme in the ABAB form may be: ‘seed, mile, feed, style’, Kendon interchanges the endings ‘separating the vowel from the consonantal sounds’ to give, for instance: ‘seed, mile, heal (taking the ‘ee’ sound of ‘seed’ and the letter ‘l’ of ‘mile’), ride (taking the ‘i’ of ‘mile’ and ‘d’ of ‘seed’) which has a fluidity in sound and near rhyme, an ‘absolute sound relationship’; this revelation of  ‘rhyme in an alternate form’ opens up endless possibilities for the poet to express new rhyme schemes and it can be seen as a poetic technique similar to assonance which has two syllables resembling each other in sound. Analysed rhyme can be shown clearly in the final stanza to ‘I spend my days vainly’ where Kendon uses the end rhymes: ‘sweet, wake, seek, late’: 

I spend my days vainly,
Not in delight;
Though the world is elate
And tastes her joys finely.
 
Here wrapped in slow musing
Lies my dark mind,
To no music attuned
Save its own, and despising
 
The lark for remoteness,
The thrush for bold lying,
The soft wind for blowing,
And the round sun for brightness.
 
O tarry for me, sweet,
I shall stir, I shall wake!
And the melody you seek
Shall be lovely, though late!

Kendon explains the poem thus, saying that ‘vainly and elate have rhyming vowels and different consonants, so have delight and finely; while vainly and finely have rhyming consonantal endings and different vowels, and so have delight and elate. This, though it rather increases the bondage, which is no real disadvantage, provides an entirely new set of pairs.’ (17)

The poem ‘Dry Drayton this April’ evokes a rural idyll which overwhelms and intoxicates the poet’s senses where he feels as if he is intruding upon some wondrous scene of nature that drowns his ‘eyes in colour, my ears in music, / bear but one sense at a time, forgetting in vision / the multitudinous calls of linnet and cuckoo; / listening, see not the wonderful chords of colour; / watching, forget the songs and scents of Spring.’ Kendon must have visited or passed through the village of Dry Drayton in Cambridgeshire, yet he does not recall in the poem its people or its houses, only the scenes of natural beauty that unfolds before him, the parsley, ‘hip-deep’ and the grass that ‘lies greening’; cows gazing over meadows and cowslips, the hyacinths that ‘muster their mist of azure’… Kendon uses repetition of words and imagery, such as the parsley, cowslips, grasses and the cuckoo, and at night he summons them all to him in sleep – ‘I draw to my dreaming ears the cry of the cuckoo / with woven songs of linnet and thrush and blackbird, / I draw to myself the indescribable sweetness - / the rank perfume of grass and trampled parsley, / the scent balsamic of bursting elm and chestnut, / the winy cowslip flowers, the breath of the bluebells, / blended yet distinct, like the tones of a song.’ Another fine poem in the collection is ‘Now to the World’ [which also appeared in The Mercury Book of Verse. London. Macmillan & Co. 1931. pp. 158-159] which is perhaps one of Kendon’s better poems from his early period which is full of hope and despondency and the yearnings of a young and sensitive man wishing to sail forth upon the world, with fear and trepidation, to make his mark; reflecting upon fancies of the past bound to a sense of place, the ‘hearth’ and the ‘room’; it is worth showing as an example of his development:

 

Now to the world we’ll go, my body and I,
Leaving the comfortable nights and days,
The books where wise old men in wise old ways
Wrote down their thoughts of life in years gone by.

Snap up the switch, and let the darkness down;
Shut the two doors; deliver up the key.
These things pass on to others; but for me
They have grown lifeless – I must seek my own.
 
Picture and book, most taciturn, most dear;
Hearth where I burned my more ambitious rhymes;
Room where I dreamed of life a thousand times;
Scene of so many a joy and fancied fear,
 
There is no break in this farewell. I go,
Eager as sailors to the uncharted sea –
To wreck or Eldorado – steadfastly;
Whither, save hence, I do not care nor know.
 
Here I have laid my little-practiced hand
To many a task, as children play, for learning;
Here I have told my closest secrets, burning
With strong affection for some intimate friend.
 
Here we have laughed, or argued, man with man,
Till the quick double pulse of midnight sounded;
Have mocked at Time and Death, and been confounded;
Have spoken glibly of the race we ran.
 
And here, in silence, as the impatient morning
Hovered behind the elms, I spoke with Sorrow;
Clung to wild prophecies of hope to-morrow;
Prayed to I know not Whom, and met day scorning.
 
Here it was hard to lose, if only dreams;
And here, where empty walls return my stare,
A strong imagination, passionate, clear,
Opened a window upon love, it seems:
 
Better than art, by trembling fingers made,
The portrait of a queen without her crown,
A thing alive, with magic looks cast down,
And moving lips, by cunning truth portrayed….
 
Close the two doors. Deliver up the sky.
There is no break in this farewell to peace –
No frown or smile to signify release –
Snap up the switch; and let the darkness see!

The interpretation of his ‘being’ as ‘dual’: ‘my body and I’ is something Kendon returns to in other poems and sonnets treating his body and brain (mind) as separate entities. He also proves himself to be more than capable when writing sonnets for he has a mature technique and precision that produces some fine lyrical verse with their usual theme of melancholy love and loss as this example, sonnet IV, ‘A vision came to me’ (p. 111) written in the Shakespearean sonnet form of three quatrains and a rhyming couplet – ABABCDCDEFEFGG, shows:

 

A vision came to me of my old age;
Nothing seemed left to hope for; only rest,
Rest from a restless longing; a blank page,
And no desirous word to be expressed:
Blind future, short and valueless; with fear
Stripped of his wolf’s disguise, and impotent;
Lost vivid visions of the past; my ear
Weary of song’s deceptions – deaf content.
And this, this present agony, no more
Than the slow whimper of a foolish boy,
Illusioned for an hour, and crying for
A faded thing of false delight, a toy.
Visions of lies! O turn, turn thou and prove
Never came such an age from such a love!

And as further examples: Sonnet VI, ‘Take all the stars’, (p. 113):

 
Take all the stars of heaven in thy two hands!
Sing; and the earth shall make thy voice as spring,
To wake and blossom at thy song’s commands –
Thou, if thou wilt, canst winter set on wings;
Canst call forth beauty, manifest again
The fragile grace which sorrow dared to slay;
It is for thee to tune thy lute, for fain,
Fain is the frozen world to hear thee play.
I am the world I live in; of my seeing
These skies are born, and I create with eyes:
Wherein I see the earth it is my being,
And as I grieve the earth grieves. Then arise!
Waiting thy sure return this white throne stands.
Take all the stars of heaven in thy two hands.

And Sonnet IX, ‘Weary of play’ (p. 116):

 
Weary of play, some summer eve, may chance
You will come running in from dewless lawns,
The long day’s laughter in your countenance;
(O laughing eyes, where brighter beauty dawns!)
And taking up this book, as one might take
A leaf or flower or blade of grass while speaking,
Read lightly on, a word or two, and make
No meaning of them; little meaning seeking.
There standing, bending head and straying hair,
As leaf by leaf you idly turn these over,
Love, love – the words will meet you everywhere,
And you will laugh, remembering your lover;
And take the book, perhaps, being tired of play,
To wonder and read till daylight dies away. (18)

 

Frank Kendon had several poems published in The London Mercury which was edited by J. C. Squire: Boys Bathing (volume III, number 15, January 1921. p. 258), Now to the World (volume VI, number 36, October 1922. pp. 568-569), Child to whom all words (volume VIII, number 45, July 1923, pp. 236-237) which is dedicated ‘to Barbara’ and has some rich and tender lines – ‘strange miracle, that love, / whose shape and substance out of nothing sprang, / should thus take form, thus move, / thus lie staring upon and listening to / a world not new, save as it seems to you – / a careless world that through five senses shall / fashion a soul to seem perpetual.’ [the poem also appeared in The Best Poems of 1923. Thomas Moult. London. Jonathan Cape Ltd. 1924. pp. 81-82] Seven Sonnets from a Sequence (volume VIII, number 47, September 1923, pp. 463-465); the first lines to the sonnets are: I. ‘No foot has crossed this loneliness before’ (p. 463), II. ‘Weary with tears, I watched the heedless sun’ (p. 464), III. ‘What is my sorrow to these, or theirs to me?’ (p. 464), IV. ‘Day follows and day follows: I am still’ (p. 464), V. ‘Because I praise your beauty, ignorance’ (p. 465), VI. ‘Stop thy ears, turn the page; for in these lines’ (p. 465), VII. ‘It was the hour when neither night nor day’ (p. 465); all the sonnets, excepting I. ‘No foot has crossed this loneliness before’ and III. ‘What is my sorrow to these, or theirs to me?’ appeared in Poems and Sonnets. Kendon is a versatile sonneteer and does some interesting things with the sonnet forms in this sequence such as in the first sonnet he uses an envelope sonnet form (two envelope quatrains and a sestet) beginning with the Italian sonnet rhyme scheme ABBA and continuing CDDCEFEFEF, and in the next sonnet he uses a composite form of the Italian and the English sonnet – ABBACDCDEFEFGG. Haunted (volume XI, number 63, January 1925, pp. 231-232) which has 10, five-line stanzas – ‘I can touch the patient books, can feel and hear / the fire as I stir it out of its broken sleep’ and ends: ‘the fine false hopes are fallen, the best dawns darken. / Farewell, O good youth Yesterday, Farewell.’ Orpheus (volume XI, number 66, April 1925, pp. 571-578) which is constructed of 41, seven-line stanzas in which the poet takes great delight in retelling the myth – ‘so at last he stood / in Pluto’s presence – stood and saw the shades / whispering together in the long arcades, / dead heroes and fair women, all subdued / by the same enemy as thieved Eurydice, / and they, too, pale and sad, though laurel wreathed their heads.’ (p. 573)… ‘”O adamant king Pluto, leave thy sceptre, / leave throne and Tartarus empty”’ (p. 576) (19); The Ends of Eden (volume XV, number 86, December 1926, pp. 120-125) formed of 23, nine-line stanzas in which yet again Kendon delights in the classical mythology – ‘they found him weeping by the riverside. / “a curse on God and Life!” he bitterly cried. / “is all this nothing that you said was fair?” / Eve tried to comfort him, and Adam tried. / “living is sweet my son.” “too sweet!” he swore, / “ a mockery of sweetness! I’ll defy it. / strong death shall serve my hand!” / Abel was dying at his altar’s side, / and Cain an outcast in a haunted land.’ (p. 125).

In 1923 Kendon published his volume, Mural Painting in English Churches during the Middle Ages, an Introductory Essay on the Folk Influence in Religious Art (London. John Lane The Bodley Head Ltd.) He dedicates the book to the medieval historian, George Gordon Coulton (1858-1947) (20), ‘to whom I owe much for the book’s sake and much more for my own’ and says that the ‘work began, on a foundation of statistics, in an attempt to draw some general conclusions concerning matters of common faith and common knowledge in the Middle Ages – conclusions much more likely to be provided by mural paintings than by literature’ (preface. pp. vii-viii). Using C. E. Keyser’s list of buildings having mural decorations of 1883, Kendon, in this remarkable volume, looks in depth at religious subjects and symbolism and narrative art through the ‘worship of saints, the character of the lives of the saints, and the worship of the Virgin, the growth and importance of vivid ritual, the decoration of churches, the religious drama – in all of these I trace folk influence.’ (p. 207) Kendon was certainly making his mark in literary circles and his poems and articles appeared from time to time in various periodicals, such as the charming little poem ‘Blackberries’ in The Literary Digest of March 1923 (originally published in The Challenge, a London magazine) with its five verses in ABCB rhyming scheme which delights in the glory of youth and the simple sensations of living in the present moment and denying death which is perhaps a reaction to the senseless waste of young lives at the Front during the war and the vigorous hedonistic pleasures enjoyed by the Bright Young Things of the twenties’:

 
The plough-boy takes his holiday,
And makes the laughing valleys ring;
His tangled hair is wet with mist;
His heart is like a winged thing.
 
His faith, unfelt, wild pulses stirs:
He asks no argument for mirth;
But sings because the Earth is full,
And laughs, and digs his heels in earth.
 
For him the ripening chestnuts fall;
And moisture-beaded blackberries
Upon their nodding sprays prepare
Dark wine to spurt on lips like his,
 
He reads no prophecy of death
Or sorrow in the dropping leaves;
But takes the golden glory in
With ready senses, and believes…
 
For all the wisdom in the world
There is no remedy but youth –
Death is a barefaced lie to boys,
And taste of blackberries is truth! (21)

Blackberries is a rather delightful interpretation of the glory of youth, but there is also something secret, something hidden I feel in this poem which Kendon almost tantalisingly reveals; I believe the poet was not the simple nature-loving dreamer immersed in the wondrous splendours about him but a man consumed by fear, a fear of darkness and death which runs through his poems – it is there in ‘Now to the world’ with its ‘snap up the switch; and let the darkness see!’ and here in Blackberries with ‘there is no remedy but youth’ for youth symbolises the journey from spring to summer, the bright sun of day and the spirit of youth’s laughter and song while the night, with its deadly silence and stillness holds fear. Perhaps the poet’s approaching deafness was the great fear, the consuming darkness that haunted him and maybe, as we later see, Spender’s uncle was correct to assume that Kendon was ‘eating his heart out in the country’ and longed for the bright lights of London to be with his ‘Freemans and Squires and other fry’; it seems quite a contrast to the quiet poet of the mournful and melancholy sonnets, but that desire for the light that vanquishes the darkness is there in seemingly minor poems such as ‘Night Fear’ in which ‘this walled-in cube of candlelight / is all my world – the rest is night’ and ‘Lullaby’ in which the poet asks: ‘have I not made the pillow soft, / the darkness friendly’ and ends as if the eyes are gently closing where ‘under the stars the town lies dreaming; / no sighs, no whisper rises now; / the moon is sleeping… Sleepest thou?’ and in the poem ‘Bright was the morning’, there is a sense of joy and strength because ‘bright was the morning and the day fair; / high were the clouds that sailed the clean air, / the land was rich and the herbage fine / under heaven – and the world was mine.’ The same menace appears again in ‘Bright Autumn’ where ‘my old shadow skimmed the road, / happy without a heart’ and tells us ‘look, to-day is bright with sun. / Hold back that fear; the darkest nights / see dawn, and soon are done.’ In the sonnet, ‘Now splendidly the earth awakes to vigour’, life returns to the disfiguring ‘fields of naked soil’ that winter kept in darkness and once again ‘the cuckoo has begun to count his days’ as the landscape alters and the ‘cold despair of death is flown’ as the final couplet rings – ‘courage, impatient heart; in thy despair / there shall be wrought a miracle as fair.’ (22)

Frank’s first volume of verse, Poems and Sonnets, published in 1924 by John Lane. The Bodley Head. London, created quite a stir in literary and poetry circles and J. C. Squire reviewing it for The London Mercury says that his themes are ‘that of the meditative religious poets: there is a touch of Herbert about him, and he has much in common with Mr. John Freeman’. He goes on to say that he is a ‘sensitive, gentle and manly spirit responding in solitude to the impressions made by Nature and human life, and reflecting on the nature of the response’ (23) which is high praise indeed. The poems in the volume are: A Portrait (p. 2), Child to whom all words (pp. 2-3), The Mother-in-Law (pp. 4-7), Ophelia (p. 8), The Promise (p. 9), A Town Lover (pp. 10-11), A Country Lover (p. 12), The Immigrant (p. 13), Now to the world (pp. 14-15), For Death (p. 16), Optimism (p. 17), The Commercial Traveller (p. 18), Foolish Wisdom (pp. 19-20), Old to Young (p. 21), Once (pp. 22-23), Never (p. 24), The Kernal (p. 25), To a Hopeful Blackbird in ‘Park Drive’ (pp. 26-27), The Twisted Lane (p. 28), First-Love (p. 29), The Backwater (pp. 30-32), Adam and Eve (p. 33), To Indifference (p. 34), A Late Spring (p. 35), The Early Thrush (pp. 36-37), Boys Bathing (p. 38), From this Fair Night (p. 39), A Secret Fire (pp. 40-41), The Emigrant (p. 42), Vanity (pp. 43-44), Keep Pace (p. 45), Palestine (p. 46), Distant Trumpet Song (p. 47), The Lilac Trees (p. 48), Rise Now (p. 49), Pygmalion (p. 50), The Open Secret (pp. 51-52), Absence Ironic (p. 53), A First Crop (p. 54), The Excuse (p. 55), I Spend My Days Vainly (p. 56), The Little Town (p. 57) and He That Walketh Through The Night (pp. 58-59); there then follows A Poem In Sonnets (pp. 61-94) which consists of thirty-two sonnets in four sections: part I. – I. ‘Since Time, and Youth, and Life, and Love, decay’ (p. 63), II. ‘O Thou that givest darkness, when for light’ (p. 64), III. ‘In one that has so fairly prophesied’ (p. 65), IV. ‘My kinship with this soil beneath my feet’ (p. 66), V. ‘A vision came to me of my old age’ (p. 67), VI. ‘How near into my ears night’s silence breathes!’ (p. 68), VII. ‘Pale from the hands of night the grey day slips’ (p. 69), VIII. ‘Weary with tears, I watched the heedless sun’ (p. 70), IX. ‘Waken no more these useless, lapsed things’ (p. 71), X. ‘I will be solemn then, and very wise’ (p. 72), XI. ‘The white snow, falling all about the house’ (p. 73), XII. ‘Now splendidly the earth awakes to vigour’ (p. 74), XIII. ‘In any hour of any day to come’ (p. 75), XIV. ‘Dear spirit in thee, that thy eyes have cheated’ (p. 76), XV. ‘Take all the stars of heaven in thy two hands!’ (p. 77), XVI. ‘To that great day how slowly, oh how slowly’ (p. 78), XVII. ‘I think, if I had alchemy enough’ (p. 79); part II. – I. ‘Lest I by so much asking weary thee’ (p. 80), II. ‘Because I praise your beauty, ignorance’ (p. 81), III. ‘Stop thy ears; turn the page; for in these lines’ (p. 82), IV. ‘I have begun what never shall be ended’ (p. 83); part III. – I. ‘Day follows, and day follows; I am still’ (p. 84), II. ‘Body be slave to me, that am her slave’ (p. 85); part IV. – I. ‘O Earth, I am thy son, bone of thy bone’ (p. 86), II. ‘The twilight-taken blackbird calls his mate’ (p. 87), III. ‘Into the night, the quiet air, there rises’ (p. 88), IV. ‘I cannot tread between the flowers that grow’ (p. 89), V. ‘It was the hour when neither night nor day’ (p. 90), VI. ‘At last the call of earth rings clear again’ (p. 91), VII. ‘Behind the living hours of urgent spring’ (p. 92), VIII. ‘Past hope of resurrection? Yet, at times’ (p. 93), IX. ‘Weary of play, some summer eve, may chance’ (p. 94).

In such poems as The Backwater, which Kendon dedicates to ‘E L D’ which is obviously his Cambridge undergraduate friend, Edward Lewis Davison (1898-1930), the poet and his companion, Davison, are in a punt on the river where we find that quiet sense of solitude in nature, that escape from reality and the ‘fierce pulsation of / the noonday meadows, or the noisy streets’ into a watery vision where ‘like Ophelia, garlanded with flowers’ floats the poet – ‘unconscious of the world and its long questions, / unconscious of the steady lapse of summer, / unconscious of our breathing even; of life / thinking no bitterness; and dead to death.’ The poem recalls that deep and intimate friendship that existed between Kendon and Davison, where the poet asks: ‘I do not know what restless questioning / ran through your mind in that uneasy ease, / only you seemed no happier than you dared, / as though the very trees might enviously / come crashing down if you should quite usurp / their sole prerogative, and be content.’ Kendon then goes on to say ‘Nor you, my foster-brother, guessed what lay / hidden behind my summer-languid eyes; / but seemed at times to envy me my mood.’ There is a sense of ambivalence in the two poets, the suggestion of an intimacy yet a holding back in their relationship; something unrequited, something not said or done about the poem which ends: ‘You, with a heart so haunted, read in me / the symbolism of the summer time / that breathed about us; envied me indeed / a quiet that both lacked, that both desired / the unwilling hour to teach us, but in vain.’ This thread of mysterious ambiguity seems to weave through several of the sonnets as if some inner turmoil has torn the poet from a sense of unfettered pagan abandonment and Christian self-denial – ‘I will be solemn then, and very wise, / as though I had not loved, nor ever met you; / I will forget your words, your laugh, your eyes; / I will forget – Oh, how can I forget you!’ (Poems and Sonnets. p. 72) and if some friend ‘or less than friend’ should question the poet and ask ‘why I am dumb’, then ‘out of long silence I shall make reply / that all my constellated thoughts still go / about the cynosure of love gone by: / the rest of life is life’s impermanence, / love is the very hub of soul and sense.’ (Poems and Sonnets. p. 75) and again in the first poem of part two, the poet declares that he will ‘pour out my words for ears of strangers; / Old Time, save he be deaf, shall listen to me; / and men unborn, when I am past life’s dangers, / shall read, and smile, and half-believe they knew me.’ (p. 80).

THE KERNAL
 
Now that the flush of summer is gone,
And in the lane no flower is seen,
No hedge in leaf,
No tree in gold or green;
 
Now that the golden fruit is started,
And in the wood no song is heard,
No merry stir
Of song from any bird;
 
Now that the uncompanioned wind
Blows cold across the naked land
And, hung in black,
Bare trees like mourners stand;
 
Winter reveals through falling rain,
A strength which summer has left unseen,
Beauty and peace
Which, but for tears, had been in vain,
Which, but for loss, had never been.
 
BOYS BATHING
 
They laugh! They leap! They clear
Cool lapping water parts:
One after one, each starts
From his place on the grass, and shear
Leaps from the bank without fear.
 
Their lithe arms slip like blades,
Their glowing bodies skim
Up from the clear and dim
Caverns of quivering shades,
And the sedges’ secret beds.
 
One stands, aglow with the sun,
His white shape gleamingly wet,
Like alabaster set
Against dark grass, and one
Splashes him, wild with fun.
 
And now like statues glowing,
Slim and lithe and free,
They race exultingly,
Their proud heads backwards throwing –
Happy, untrammelled, unknowing.
 
The loud lark’s sunny voice
Shivers out of the sky;
The lush grass meadows lie
Lulled in his lovely noise.
O day that art passing by,
Hold fast in memory
The wonderful vivid poise
Of naked bathing boys!

This poem, Boys Bathing, has caused Kendon to be associated with the uranian school of poetry, a group of elect authors from the 1880’s who stumbled into the early 20^th century singing of the beauty of young adolescent boys, poets such as E. E. Bradford (1860-1944), John Gambril Nicholson (1866-1931) and Stanley Addleshaw (1871-1951) who wrote under the pseudonym Alan Stanley. Kendon has obviously been inspired by his observation of the innocent and secretive scene of the boys bathing, probably unseen as not to disturb the pagan enchantment of boyhood delighting in their riverside play and he admires their ivory forms, their ‘glowing bodies’ and there is clearly an erotic element to the poem which praises the naked splendour of lithe and joyous limbs unrobed and wet; we cannot deny that the poem has all the hallmarks of uranian verse, the themes and glorification of the subject into unearthly pleasures beyond mere sordid lust and the bathing place where so many uranians have tenderly trod, that ‘pond of pure delight’… ‘where boys undress in open sight’ and ‘youth may flaunt its naked pride’ (A Garland of Ladslove. J. G. Nicholson. London. 1911. p. 87); ‘prepared to dive, he flings aside his vest,’… ‘though face and hands are browner than the rest, / save two brown nipples on his boyish breast,’ (The Bathers in the Blue Grotto at Capri. E. E. Bradford. The New Chivalry and Other Poems. London. 1918. p. 83) and ‘glad waves grow and yearn / to clasp you circling in their might, / to kiss with lips that burn.’ (The Dawn Nocturne (August Blue). Love Lyrics. Alan Stanley. London. 1894. p. 15), (24) Kendon is certainly struck by the beauty of the scene and is determined to ‘hold fast in memory / the vivid wonderful poise’ of those ‘naked bathing boys’ which suggests there is a permanent need for satisfaction to tramp the wayside lanes and find oneself beside the ‘quivering shades, / and the sedge’s secret beds’ once more in his mind. A similar eroticism can be seen in his poem ‘Blackberries’ in which the plough-boy with his ‘tangled hair’, ‘wet with mist’ picks the ‘moisture-beaded’ blackberry which spurts upon his lips. It is my opinion that Kendon wrestled with his conscience concerning his admiration of the boyish form and its beauty, something he hints at in his poems and sonnets and associates with a secret darkness, the dark of winter and old age, while the spring with its new-born joy for life is the beauty of youth; in poems such as ‘A Secret Fire’, he refers to beauty as ‘more than eye’s delight; / she lives on in death’s despite. / Beauty is more than sensual pleasure; / that was only the youngster’s measure. / Early from flower and grass and tree / the first flame shot to burn in me, / and kindled, as my love has been, / from sparks without a warmth within.’ (Poems and Sonnets. p. 41) and at the end of ‘The Open Secret’ he says: ‘and sense leans forward at a sign / of coming pleasure – can divine / some heaven foretold in common clay / therefore, though winter is not gone, / whatever sign we go upon / we guess. We know, but cannot say.’ (Poems and Sonnets. p. 52) For Kendon, love is ‘a natural stirring in the blood, no more’ and in his Poem in Sonnets, he sees Love with ‘coloured wings like flames behind his face, / his hair like halo-gold’ yet when it comes, Kendon simply stands ‘dumb as a stone’ (Poems and Sonnets. p. 70) and so he resolves to ‘let Love lie lost in sleep, and be forgot’ for Love is ‘a hapless boy, in thy safe keeping; / waken him not, weep not, but watch his sleeping.’ (p. 71) In the next sonnet, ‘I will be solemn’, he wished to forget Love, to ‘forget your words, your laugh, your eyes; / I will forget – Oh, how can I forget you!’ The sonnet ends: ‘and there, where winter sets next spring, I set you; / it were eternal winter to forget you’ (p. 72) so here we see the association of winter and darkness and the act of forgetting some solemn and magical love of the heart. In the final sonnet, ‘Weary of play’, the poet suggests these sonnets are a secret message for his lover, ‘and you will laugh, remembering your lover’ (p. 94), whatever that remembrance is Kendon is determined to stay dumb, even ‘in the last year of my span, / when all the transient things are overpast, / and Death the spirit looks on me as a man, / and my next step may likely prove my last’ … for ‘the rest of life is life’s impermanence, / Love is the very hub of soul and sense.’ (p. 75). If it is the case that Kendon had uranian tendencies and I believe that he did, he repressed such desires which ran contrary to his religious beliefs but any man who could write the sublime and tender poem, ‘Boys Bathing’ was surely basking, and perhaps yearning, in the celestial grove of uranian romantic affections. The same uncertain meanings can be drawn from earlier poems, such as ‘What Lack I?’ in Poems by Four Authors (1923) where he writes: ‘less deep than our twin nature’s laws – / what lacked I, that I thought to find / in you, ye sweetest meads in mind? / and how did all your beauty fail, / and all those flowers so ill avail?’ (p. 99) or ‘Broken Tryst’ from the same collection where ‘a late wind calls through the trees your name’ and in the night, ‘nothing worthy of tears in promises broken; / fool indeed to hope, when hoping avails not, / fool to weep when night dews about me are weeping, / and fold upon fold of darkness hides my sorrow and shame.’ (p. 102). There is a telling little poem in Cage and Wing (1947) which is almost a confession of sorts – ‘they have barred us out of the green ranks of the favoured, / passing laws, and enforcing them; / but wherever there is the gift of affection / they laugh: they like to see us. / Nothing’s amiss with our natures. / Left to ourselves we have our place.’ (p. 2)

 
Behind the living hours of urgent Spring,
And the high noons of May, and leaf-built June;
Buried with winter’s bones, where, whispering,
The tasselled grass stands high beneath the moon;
Behind the better mind of love where loss
No meaning holds that is worth weeping over;
Where stranger envy does not dare to cross,
Where covetousness no longer proves the lover.
Behind contentment; buried like a thief;
Dead of a groan too many, and forgotten,
Lies the unholy body of my grief,
Past hope of resurrection, deep and rotten,
No stone to mark his final infamy;
Lost to the world, as I am lost to thee.

[Sonnet: ‘Behind the living hours’ (Poems and Sonnets. p. 92)]

 

Kendon also had several poems published in The Atlantic monthly magazine: ‘Transplanted’ (May 1925. p. 610) in which the poet sings of the solitary ‘poor dusty unhappy restless city tree’ that was ‘remembering forests of elm trees’; a tree taken from the wilderness, ‘exiled here till brain and branch be rotten, / that men may outgrow their solemn belief in graves;’ ‘The Crane in Bloomsbury’ (September 1925. p. 333) in which Kendon imposes a similar stature to the crane, ‘dark against the clouds’ with its ‘colossal arms’ that ‘moved with slow decision ‘ half over heaven.’ Where ‘men hurried as though death were at their heels, / and would not leave their thoughts alone, lest he / should gain upon them.’ (25) ‘Night Fear’ (April 1930. p. 536) in which the poet is alone at night in his candle-lit room and recalls earlier seeing the ‘gigantic tree-shapes’ through the window and ‘saw them fade when, shade by shade, / the night grew thicker in their land, / till at a match my candle burned, / and windows into mirrors turned.’ ‘Now you are in your country’ (December 1930. p. 775) and ‘The Swan’ (January 1931. p. 87):

 
She seemed a larger lily, free;
Her snowy down, her bending wings,
Her graceful self-sufficiency,
Outdazzled other shining things:
Except the lily cups, that shone
Like little images of her –
Stars set about a silver moon,
Who sails them by, and does not stir
Their slender moorings, but contrives
To lend them light she cannot miss…
A man might live a score of lives,
But not surpass such sights as this.

Arguments and Emblems was Kendon’s second volume of poetry published in 1925 by John Lane, The Bodley Head, London, and although it is a fine selection of his verse it did not match the expectations delivered by Poems and Sonnets; fellow poet, John Freeman (1880-1929) reviewed it for The London Mercury [volume XIII, number 78, April 1926, pp. 654-655] saying it had ‘the same refinement of spirit and the same technical distinction’, calling it ‘metaphysical yet simple’ and goes on to quote from the poem ‘Babylon’ with its ‘bright citadel of flushing stone, / towers, gardens, waterfalls …. / hot desert hard upon the walls! / Oh, Babylon!’; equally, Humbert Wolfe seemed somewhat perplexed by the volume, reviewing it in The Spectator (20^th March 1926. p. 22) he says that ‘Mr. Kendon’s first book of verse was dangerously accomplished, but it hinted at a possibility that the poet would lay aside his gentleness, and his quiet self-control for something with the tiger-snarl of angry beauty in it. But in Arguments and Emblems, I cannot hear the battle-cry of poetry.’ Nevertheless, Arguments and Emblems is still a fine collection of verse and there are still those instances of magnificent lyrical beauty – ‘O Love, not deaf as Earth, it is thy day; / hark to the lark that slept on earth so long, / he’s mounted with the mists and gone away, / and now he calls the sun up with a song’ (p. 87) and still there are those moments of dark intimacy within the poet’s brooding breast – ‘therefore be thou, and not the stars, my faith, / for in thy absence heaven and earth are void. / Let not my wonder waste itself on death / while thou, alive, can keep my heart employed. / This age, thy tender youth, thy groans, thy mirth, / thy winged and daring love, / these are the true creators of the earth, / and heaven was a waste of stars till, looking forth, / thou didst discover beauty in the way they move.’ (p. 9)

In 1926 Kendon’s ‘The Life and Death of Judas Iscariot’ was published by John Lane. The Bodley Head; Kendon was inspired by his time in Palestine and produced a volume which imagines and interprets the life of Judas before his encounter with Jesus and expanding on what is known in the Bible. J. C. Squire, reviewing it in The London Mercury of January 1927 [volume XV, number 87. pp. 319-320] says that although the volume begins weak, ‘towards the close there are passages not lately equalled for noble eloquence and spiritual insight.’ He goes on to say that Kendon ‘constructs a credible character of Judas, built up of scores of little touches and amplified with convincing meditations ascribed to Judas’ calling it ‘dramatic and full of psychological interest’.

It was in the late summer of 1926 when John Alfred Spender (1862-1942), one-time editor of The Westminster Gazette (1896-1922), invited thirty year old Frank Kendon to tea at his home in the village of Marden, Kent and present was John’s seventeen year old nephew, Stephen Spender (1909-1995) who would become the celebrated poet of the Auden and MacNiece generation. In his autobiography, ‘World Within World’ (1951), Spender tells us of his anticipation and disappointment in meeting Kendon, the first poet he ever met and paints a not too flattering picture of him; having only read Kendon’s ‘Judas Iscariot’, delighting in the first part depicting his boyhood and bored by the rest, he had high expectations from the meeting, being a young aspiring poet, despite his uncle saying that he was ‘poor and neglected’. The young Spender could only stare in awe of Kendon, who came for morning tea – ‘he had (I think), sandy hair over an unassuming face, and he was dressed in tweeds. He sat quietly in a chair, did not look at me, and ate cake. He was silent and my uncle had to question him for him to talk at all. When he did talk, it was to discuss literary life in London.’ Kendon and his uncle talked of the everyday mundane comings and goings of J. C. Squire, Walter de la Mare and John Freeman, bards who should be resting upon the sunlit glades of Parnassus, like common people enduring the banal shared struggle of existence which deflated Spender’s ideal of what a poet should be. Perhaps more interestingly, young Spender, after Kendon had left, heard his uncle sigh and say ‘“how I pity that young man.” Spender asks why and is told ‘”because he is eating his heart out here in the country. He longs to be in town with his Freemans and Squires and other fry.”’ Spender was disappointed that Kendon had not looked at him even once, not even when his uncle brought the subject up in conversation that his nephew was an aspiring poet and we get a sense that Spender views Mr. Kendon as arrogant, but I believe that Kendon was simply shy and probably felt awkward around a seventeen year old boy who continually stared at him, and let us not forget, that it was only eight years after Kendon had witnessed the horrors of war. That afternoon, uncle and nephew drove in a hired car at ‘enormous expense’ and ‘just outside Marden, we passed Kendon on the road. When we had driven by, I saw him standing alone there in the cloud of dust we had raised, stick in hand, absorbed in his thoughts, and I felt as though his imagination possessed the whole landscape. The trees and oaks and the hopfields leaned against his skull and entered into his brain through his eye sockets, changing there into a branch of coral which he, the poet, created, a branch of coral and an interior world, where he was able to remain indifferent to the conventions and creeds and needs of the external world.’ They do not stop to give him a lift – ‘”he doesn’t want to be disturbed by us.”’ said his uncle, ‘”he has his thoughts.”…’I realised at that moment that he, who had denied his own dreams, could enter the dreams of others.’ (26) If his uncle had purposely invited Kendon to tea to dissuade young Spender from a poet’s life with all the hardship it entailed then he had certainly failed.

‘After applying unsuccessfully for a post at the Victoria and Albert Museum’ Frank entered the world of journalism and joined the staff of John O’ London’s Weekly’ in 1928 and learnt valuable experience in copy-writing and editing. He contributed well-written and critical articles such as: ‘Look Homeward, Angel’ (15^th March 1930), ‘Mr. Epstein Speaks’ (28^th November 1931, volume xxvi, number659, p. 352), ‘The Magazine Age’ (22^nd June 1935, volume xxxiii, number 845, p. 417), ‘A Service of Critics’ (Friday 3^rd November 1939, volume xlii, number 1,073, pp. 121-122, continued p. 126) and reviewed such works as: The Poacher by H. E. Bates, (26^th January 1935, p. 667), and the same author’s work ‘Flowers and Fancies’, (10^th August 1935, p. 656); also articles on the short stories of Gerald Bullett (1^st October 1932, volume xxvii, p. 969), Willa Cather (3^rd December 1932, volume xxviii, p. 403), W. W. Jacob (19^th November 1932, volume xxviii, p. 299), Naomi Royde-Smith (28^th May 1932, volume xxvii, p. 305) and G. Bernard Shaw (10^th December 1932, volume xxviii, p. 453) along with reviews of Virginia Woolf’s ‘The Waves’ in 1931, Neil M. Gunn’s ‘Sun Circle’, 3^rd June 1933 and ‘The English Galaxy’ [of Short Poems, by Gerald Bullett] in 1934. He remained with ‘John O’ London’s Weekly’ until 1935 when he became assistant secretary at the Cambridge University Press.

Kendon’s friend, poet and author, Clarence Henry Warren (1895-1966) became Assistant Editor of the Radio Times and accepted work from Frank for publication in its pages; in 1929 Frank’s article ‘Traveller’s Joy’ appeared in the Radio Times in which he called for a greater respect of wild flowers and for their preservation – ‘Flowers call to the spirit of man, if only for an instant as he passes. They do not shut up in horror of his horrible sins; no man thinks, as he passes the irises in St James’s Park: How much money I could make by selling those things!’ he goes on to name some of the flowers, such as woodsage, tansy, loosestrife, honeysuckle and ‘enchanter’s nightshade’ and ponders their names and origins before imploring restraint in picking them, saying ‘leave the rare flowers to grow; they are the prizes that you must not win – or at least not more than once. Never pick all the flowers of any group; and do not bring roots home…’; he ends the piece by informing the reader to ‘look out for traveller’s joy; there is no need to pick that flower – if you know its name it is everlasting.’ (27) A few months later, another article featured in the Radio Times: ‘Do you like being read aloud to?’ in which Kendon writes somewhat tiresomely on the ‘possibility of reviving by wireless a simple pleasure of our fathers’, advocating classic literature, such as Dickens for the listeners to hear read aloud. (28) Warren also had the idea to publish a new carol in the Christmas edition of the Radio Times for 1929 and immediately thought of his friend, Kendon, to write the poem and have it set to music; Frank accepted and sent ‘The Rich Cavalcade’ which was then sent to the composer Peter Warlock [Philip Heseltine] (1894-1930) who did not like the poem, ‘however, he did subsequently set it, but told Warren that he would prefer that another carol of his, to words by Bruce Blunt [1899-1957] should be issued in its stead’ (29) and so it was in the 20^th December edition of that year; Kendon’s ‘The Rich Cavalcade’, a carol for four voices which begins ‘Christ for kindness have you in hope!’ was later published and Kendon also wrote two more carols: The Band of Children, which begins ‘the stars shall light your journey; / your mother holds you close and warm; / the donkey’s pace shall rock you: / sleep, baby; dream no harm’ and The Merchant’s Carol which begins: ‘as we rode down the steep hillside, / twelve merchants with our fairing, / a shout across the hollow land / came loud upon our hearing’ published in the Oxford Book of Carols by Oxford University Press, (1928) as numbers 140 (music p. 282, words p. 283) and 146 (music p. 294, words p. 295) respectively.

Frank’s journalistic experience also gave him a perceptive and acute sense of critical analysis when it came to reviewing books which sometimes appear harsh, as in his review of three poets in The Bookman where he discusses Gordon Bottomley’s ‘Scenes and Plays’ calling them ‘clear, cold and colourless – a combination of eurythmics and meditative recitation, boudoir plays.’ Of the young poet and author, Rupert Croft-Cooke’s ‘Some Poems’ he says that there is ‘something a little disturbing in the poetical exclamation of a young man about his youth’ and on Beatrice Eve’s collection, ‘Moths in Candlelight’ he terms them ‘light, coloured, fanciful impressions, owing all their charm to a dainty delight in flowers and trees. Without their adjectives the poems would vanish, for there is nothing in them but prettiness – but prettiness is a delightful thing.’ (30)

In 1930, the year Frank’s mother, Ellen died, Kendon’s autobiographical The Small Years was published to much acclaim; his friend and fellow author Clarence Henry Warren simply gushes over it, praising the work and the poet in The Bookman (August 1930. p. 278) saying that ‘”The Small Years” is the fruit of a poet’s longing to keep that brief innocency safe from the spoiling clutch of mortality – not for himself only, but for us all.’ Warren continues, quoting from the Introduction by Walter de la Mare, in which Kendon says that ‘”they (these memories) have not been much, but they are something the world may have by my labour, and could not have without me. If I was luckier in my earth than thousands, I am to try to leave them the shadowy forms of my joy, to wrestle with the angel of childhood till he tells me his secret, and then I am to put that down, truthfully, for a particular addition to the joy of the world.”’ He gives a rather lovely example from the book concerning a woodland which was near to Kendon’s childhood home which they called “Our Wood” – ‘it is in the nature of woods, however, to be cut down once in every twelve years. “I knew nothing of death then”, writes the author, “but I remember the feeling of dismay, and now I knew it was the same: that what has been will never be again, that the wood, which was a symbol, almost a person to us, was going out of existence.”’ He then explains that he did not feel any ‘” sentimental sorrow for the trees that were down or crashing; the hurt was not made in the world, but in us….It was nothing really; in a week we had, like sensible children, accepted the new wood, with its tree-stumps, its piles of bats and faggots; and we soon played happily over the very ruins of the wood we had lost.”’ (31)

In the summer of 1930 Frank Kendon married the schoolteacher, Elizabeth Cecilia Phyllis Horne (1907-2001) in Cranbrook, Kent. Elizabeth, born 26^th February 1907 was the daughter of Yorkshire-born Arthur Chadwick Horne (1867-1921) and his wife, Edith Maria Fagg (1871-1964) who were married in Thanet, Kent in 1900. If we look at the family in 1911, young Elizabeth, aged four, was living with her 40 year old mother Edith, who was born in Kent on 6^th January 1871, in Broadstairs with her 66 year old widowed grandmother, Jane Sophia Fagg (1845-1923), her 27 year old salesman Uncle, Lionel Henry Fagg, born 1884 and her brothers and sisters – George Edward Lancelot Horne, who is 18 years old, born in London on 12^th January 1903; sister, Louie Dorothy Joyce Horne, born in London on 4^th November 1905 and new-born baby sister, Jane Sophia Chadwick Horne. Elizabeth’s father, Arthur Chadwick Horne is working as a ‘wine merchant’s buyer, in stores’ at Bendall House, St. Marylebone, London.

Frank and Elizabeth, or ‘Celia’ as she was known, had four children: Alice Kendon born in 1932 in Hampstead, London, the same year as Frank’s volume on the techniques of poetry, ‘The Adventure of Poetry’ was published; Adam Kendon born 4^th April 1934 in London (32); sometime after Adam’s birth Frank joined the staff of the Cambridge University Press and the Kendon’s moved from Hampstead, London, to Cambridgeshire, to the village of Harston where they lived at Beechcroft House, 117 High Street which Celia began to run as a nursery school; the two other Kendon children born to Frank and Celia in Cambridge were: Andrew Kendon, born in 1941 and Thomas Adrian Kendon, known as ‘Adrian’, born in 1943. 

Celia soon made herself quite indispensable in Harston and its community, opening their house, Beechcroft as a nursery and Celia, after having been asked by Miss Powell who was Chair of the Nursing Association to assist with setting up an Infant Welfare Centre in Harston, did just that and the Harston & District Welfare Centre opened on 10^th September 1936 and for 24 years until 1960, Celia was its Secretary and Treasurer. She also became a familiar sight on the stage, performing with the Harston Players which was established in 1949; she appeared in several plays, many of which her cousin, Barbara Kendon (born 1918) produced, such as: ‘A Wedding at Pemberley’, a 1949 one-act play written by Anne and Arthur Russell based on Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice, and a one-act plat called ‘A Matter of Fact’, both performed at the National Festival of Community Drama at Fulbourn in Cambridgeshire in March 1952 [Saffron Walden Weekly News. Friday 28^th March 1952. p. 5]; two plays, the first, ‘Mr. Sampson’, a one-act play written by Charles James Lee and performed at the Village Hall in Harston in November of that year in which Celia played one of the maiden sisters and Kathleen Heath the other, both were ‘distinguished in characters’ and the second play was an all woman cast, ‘Hullabaloo’ by Philip Johnson [Saffron Walden Weekly News. Friday 14^th November 1952. p. 5]; in April 1953 ‘A Quiet Wedding’, a three-act comedy written by Esther McCracken in 1938 [Saffron Walden Weekly News. Friday 17^th April 1953. p. 20] and Agatha Christie’s 1951 play, ‘The Hollow’ in December 1953 in which Celia Kendon played the ‘scattered-brained’ Lady Lucy Angkatell [Saffron Walden Weekly News. Friday 18^th December 1953. p. 8] The Players also performed Esther McCracken’s sequel to ‘The Quiet Wedding’, the 1945 play, ‘The Quiet Weekend’ in April 1954 which Celia may have also been involved with. She certainly took part in the December performance when the Harston Players performed three, one-act plays at the Village Hall on Saturday 4^th December 1954; the plays were: ‘Villa for Sale’ by Sacha Guitry; ‘The Old Bull’ by Bernard Gilbert, and an all woman cast of ‘Six Wives of Calais’ by L. Du Garde Peach in which Celia gave an admirable performance [Saffron Walden Weekly News. Friday 10^th December 1954. p. 4]

The poet, Richard Church paints a vivid picture of Frank Kendon in his third volume of autobiography ‘The Voyage Home’ (1964), saying that he ‘first met Priestley at a housewarming given by the poet Frank Kendon, then newly married’ (p. 217) which would have been in 1930; Church then goes on to say that ‘Frank Kendon also had a professional knowledge and experience. After being a literary editor in Fleet Street, he went to the Cambridge University Press as Second Secretary. This post was but sparsely involved in commercial problems, and it admirably suited this strange, otherworldly poet. He had been up at Cambridge after the first world war, with Priestley, Gerald Bullett, and other ex-combatants. He came from a remote hamlet in the hinterland of Kent, and upland valley in the ridge that runs through the centre of the Weald from Folkestone to Lewes. Kipling’s Pook’s Hill is to be found along that ridge, and there is a Pook’s Wood adjoining the hamlet where Kendon was born in 1893. Such recurrence of the name is proof that this countryside has been the resort of the Little People. Their benevolent if mischievous influence survives.

Into this scene Kendon’s grandfather, a sick missionary, retired in 1866, and set up a school for boys. There Kendon was born, the eldest son in a large family. While he was in Fleet Street, he wrote a little book about his infancy in that school. It is a masterpiece because of its insighted recollection of a child’s view of life.’ (p. 219) The book of course was The Small Years, published in 1930. Church also says that he was ‘introduced to him [Kendon] by C. Henry Warren, who served with him in the campaign in Palestine, though they did not meet until they were on a homeward-bound troopship. Kendon’s experiences in the Holy Land resulted in a long narrative poem called The Life and Death of Judas Iscariot, which was published by the distinguished Bodley Head press, who also put out several collections of his lyrical poems. All his verse is marked by simplicity, a controlled passion and tenderness sometimes almost too intense to be borne, although always held back by the discipline of traditional verse forms.

He was a countryman as well as a scholar, and this was apparent in his woodcuts as well as his writing. He had no dramatic sense, and his one attempt at a novel [Martin Makesure (1950)] was therefore a failure: as I knew to my cost, because I commissioned it for Dents. His life at the Cambridge Press enabled him to withdraw more and more from the modern world of violence, advertisement, and sensation. He became a quietist, and joined the Society of Friends. A certain rigidity of character rooted in his puritan inheritance and upbringing became more obsessive and his health deteriorated. He was made a Fellow of St. John’s College, but he took no part in University life, preferring to confine himself to his work at the Press, and his garden in the Cambridge suburbs, where he loved to sit in unfathomable contemplation under a gigantic copper beech tree.

He was revered at the Press, as he was by his few friends, Priestley among them. Four years after his death in 1959, the Cambridge Press put out a handsome memorial volume. It consists of new versions, made in free verse by Kendon, of thirty-six of the Psalms. He had been commissioned to set the Book of Psalms for the New English Bible, but his death prevented the fulfilment of the task. The whole job had to be started afresh, because it would have been false to finish with a pastiche of Kendon’s style.

I have lived for a quarter of a century in a block of oast-houses converted by my craftswoman wife into a home. It stands at the end of a large cherry orchard, on the same hilltop as the school where Kendon was born. It figures in the map drawn by him [Kendon] as endpaper to The Small Years. His quiet, unregarded genius haunts these orchards, hop gardens, copses, and meadows. I cannot forget him. I do not want to, though I am saddened that poetry of such quality as his should have appeared during a period when literary fashion has been set against traditional form, locality of theme, and a humble worship of nature and the God who conjured it, through the weather and the works of man, into the English scene dear to our forefathers. At the time of Kendon’s death, The Times printed a long and benign obituary. On the day it appeared, I overheard a young literary man say to another, at luncheon in The Savile Club, “who is that person Kendon? How absurd to give him nearly a whole column!”’ (pp. 219-221) Richard Church included several of Kendon’s poems in ‘Poems of our Time, 1900-1942’, chosen by Richard Church and Mildred Bozman and published by Dent in 1945; the poems are: ‘I spend my days vainly’ (p. 130), ‘The Immigrant’ (p. 145), ‘The Looker-On’ [from The Cherry Minder] (p. 217), ‘Now you are in your country’ [from The Cherry Minder] (p. 242), ‘A Son in December’ [by permission of the author] (pp. 228-229) and ‘Country Life’ [by permission of the author and the Editor of Country Life] (p. 301). The poem, A Son in December is a modern interpretation of Christ’s conception and birth which begins: ‘Last March, an angel of the night, / Love entered with the man I love, / woke me from sleep for his delight, / and strongly with my virtue strove;’ and in the next verse we find Mary ‘feeling his strength of God’ and letting ‘him dissolve me with his fire,’ and after the divine union she is content, ‘pillowing his forspent desire’. Verse eight reminds us that she is mortal with a woman’s body ‘whose timidity / Love honoured then, be iron now; / burst through this dark that threatens me; / O life, be born, I know not how!’ and Christ is born upon the ‘homely-scented straw’ as she contemplates his fate: ‘do not take him; / this is the last sleep we shall get! / He is himself. The world will wake him.’

Kendon gave a talk on ‘Spontaneity in Poetry’ on Thursday 25^th February 1932 (7.30 p.m.) at the Station Hotel in Perth for the final lecture of the Scottish Association for the Speaking of Verse (S.A.S.V.) who was by all accounts an ‘excellent speaker’ with illustrative readings from his ‘Life and Death of Judas Iscariot’ [Perthshire Advertiser. Wednesday 24^th February 1932. p. 3]

In 1932 Kendon published The Adventure of Poetry (London. A & C Black Ltd.) which was number 11 in the How & Why series, ed. by Kendon’s friend Gerald William Bullett (1893-1958) who was an ardent admirer of Walt Whitman; the volume has four chapters: The World of Poetry, Imagination, Poetry on the Page and The Growth of Poetry which is a rather dull meander through the subject focusing on the works of Chaucer, Wordsworth, Browning and Blake with sprinklings of Herbert, Keats, Tennyson and Shakespeare. Gerald Bullett dedicated his volume of poetry, ‘Poems in Pencil’ (London. J M Dent & Sons Ltd. 1937) to Frank Kendon and edited an anthology of verse, ‘The Testament of Light’ in two volumes for Dent in 1932 and 1934 respectively [revised reissue in one volume, Boston. The Beacon Press. 1954] and included two poems, the first a ‘part of a poem from an unpublished MS.: All’s in the Flower’ by Kendon which begins – ‘Alls in this flower… / Times, seasons, losses, all the fruits of woe’ [Beacon. 1954. p. 36] and also from an unpublished MS. ‘I spoke of the world / and the world replied: / softly, softly! Till you have died…’ which is quite a dark poem, concluding: ‘When I am dead – / Limbless, lifeless, feather-sped – / goes not forth some spirit of sense / to watch and await the arising fire? / to add my still unspent desire, / to burn the excess of joy like oil, / to wave in flower, and grow in toil? / the Vision unnamed but not unseen / promised such life…’ [Beacon. 1954. p. 119]

The following year, Frank’s poem, ‘I Thought the Trees’ appeared in the Fortnightly (volume 135, 1933. pp. 228-229) which begins: ‘I thought the trees were passionate trees, / because the wind that rocked them, / that tossed and swayed them as it crossed them,’ and continues in similar rhythmic motion – ‘they stood in lines and waved their arms, / their whole bodies northward yearning; / they tossed their heads at love; / then, to peace returning,’; Kendon’s poem ‘The White Fawn’ had appeared in the Fortnightly previously in 1930 (volume 129, pp. 808-809) which has some delightful passages – ‘you spread your hands upon the grass, / and in their span Gentian bells and blue self-heal / and thyme among your fingers ran.’ And again in lines full of drama: ‘we started forth at forests, old, / dark of gate at broadest noon, / that with their roots had taken hold / on slopes that should have cast them down’ and the repetition of the image of hands once more – ‘you spread your hands above the grass / again, and in their little span / Lotus and potentilla flowered, / and thyme among your fingers ran’ until the majestic white fawn, that ‘one live creature lost in all / the hollow of wind and empty light’ appears, and ‘suddenly my wrist was caught / we looked – and wonder made us dumb: / up the valley, alone and afraid, / we saw the white fawn come!’

In 1934 Frank’s volume Tristram, a narrative poem telling the story of Tristram and Iseult was published by J. M. Dent & Sons of London (reviewed by Arthur Ball in The Fortnightly, volume 136. 1934. pp. 381-382).

Sir Sydney Castle Roberts (1887-1966) who was Secretary of the Cambridge University Press from 1922-1948, explains in his delightful volume, Adventures with Authors, published by the C.U.P. in 1966, how Kendon became involved with the University Press, mentioning how in 1929, he first read Kendon’s volume in manuscript of The Small Years and was so charmed by it, he passed it for publication and asked Walter de la Mare to write the Introduction, which he gladly did; he then says that ‘some years later [1935], we had a vacancy on the secretarial staff and in the circumstances we needed a man with experience of publishing rather than a young man straight from his degree. Kingsford [Reginald John Lethbridge Kingsford, 1900-1978], who had moved to our London house and for whose judgement I had a high regard, strongly recommended Kendon, who was then on the staff of John O’ London’s Weekly. The prospect of exchanging Fleet Street for work in an academic publishing house was to him an attractive one; not that he had any deep interest in university affairs as such, but he welcomed the chance of designing and editing substantial books instead of preparing “copy” for a weekly journal against the clock.’ (pp. 139-140) Roberts also tells us that Kendon was ‘a poet and a quietist. To and from his house at Harston he bicycled at an incredibly slow pace, observing the trees and the meadows and the birds as he went.’ (p. 140). Kendon proved to be an invaluable Assistant Secretary at the Press and his enthusiasm impressed Roberts, particularly his attention to detail when it came to designing book jackets and for his choice of illustrations and photographs, such as the book jacket for ‘A Cardinal of the Medici: The Memoirs of the Nameless Mother of the Cardinal Ippolito de Medici’ (1937) by Susan Hicks-Beach and later, ‘Science and Civilisation in China’ (volume I, 1954) by Joseph Needham (33). S. C. Roberts, who was an intimate friend of Kendon’s and corresponded with him from 1926 until his death, is himself a fascinating individual and in his volume, Adventures with Authors, we find the delicate thread that links him to uranian circles; he says that ‘outside the college I gradually got to know other people in the University, among them Charles Sayle and A. T. Bartholomew of the University Library. Theo Bartholomew and I were both frequenters of the Union.’ (p. 32) Roberts had met and corresponded with A. E. Housman and Siegfried Sassoon before befriending Kendon and his friendship with Sayle and Bartholomew, two prominent members of the uranian coterie at Cambridge is most interesting. Charles Edward Sayle (1864-1924), poet and librarian of St. John’s College, Cambridge began work at the University Library in 1893 and became Assistant Under-Librarian in 1910; he hosted social and literary gatherings at his home, 8 Trumpington Street, Cambridge, entertaining the likes of George Mallory, Rupert Brooke and Geoffrey Keynes. Some of Sayle’s poetic works include: Bertha – a Story of Love (1885), Erotidia (1889), Musa Consolatrix (1893), Private Music (1911) and Cambridge Fragments (1913). In 1900, aged 17, Augustus Theodore (‘Theo’) Bartholomew (1882-1933) became second class Assistant Librarian at the University Library, Cambridge and Under-Librarian in 1913; he was an undergraduate of Peterhouse College, Cambridge from 1901-04 (B.A. 1904, M.A. 1908), and an intimate friend of Charles Sayle. Theo, had befriended many other literary men of uranian persuasion, including Horatio Brown (1854-1926) whom he met in 1907, novelist Forrest Reid (1875-1947) whom he met in 1906 and other eminent meetings included, Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) in 1911, Ralph Chubb (1892-1960) and Siegfried Sassoon in 1915; in 1909, Henry James came to visit Cambridge at the instigation of Charles Sayle, the latter famously dropping a punting pole on the great man’s head (34). Bartholomew assisted with the editing of Crabbe’s poems in three volumes (1905-07) by Adolphus William Ward (1837-1924), the Master of Peterhouse since 1900, and published a Bibliography of Richard Bentley (1662-1742)  in 1908, but perhaps more well-known are the twenty volume edition of the works of the novelist, Samuel Butler (1835-1902) of St. John’s College, from 1923-26 with Butler’s long-time friend and assistant, Henry Festing Jones (1851-1928), also of St. John’s College, with whom Theo corresponded and befriended; Theo had also began researching the author Frederick Rolfe (1860-1913) with a plan to publishing a biography which did not come to fruition and at University, he was a member, along with Sayle of St. John’s College, of the Baskerville Club, the latter having founded the club which dealt in bibliographical studies and book printing in October 1903 (35). It is natural to presume that Kendon was aware of Sayle and Theo at St. John’s and may have become acquainted with them, perhaps through S. C. Roberts and their shared love of books and printing; it is hardly worth stating that Sayle would have known of Kendon, a fellow Johnian who published an exquisite little poem called Boys Bathing, in Cambridge Poets, 1914-1920.

Throughout his time at the Press, Kendon provided Introductions and Forewords and even his own illustrations in the form of woodcuts to published works, such as: ‘The Village Carpenter: the classic Memoir of the Life of a Victorian Craftsman’ by Walter Rose (C.U.P. 1937) with an Introduction by Kendon and a short poem beginning: ‘No gaslight over lit his shop; / he had no wheels to start and stop;’; ‘A Cambridge Sky’, a volume of poems by Noel Holmes (C.U.P. 1937) in which Kendon writes the Foreword; ‘A Boy in Kent’ by C. H. Warren (London. Hollis & Carter. 1937) in which Kendon provides the endpaper drawing; ‘Education by Drawing: The Theory and Practice of Children Drawing’ by D. D. Sawyer (C.U.P. 1943), Introduction by Kendon; ‘Forty Drawings’ by the artist Ronald Searle (C.U.P. 1946), Introduction by Kendon; ‘The Good Life’ by C. H. Warren (London. Eyre & Spottiswode. 1946) with Kendon’s Introduction and a poem that begins ‘O blessed care / that keeps the pen idle!’; ‘The Farmer’s Friend or Wise Saws and Modern Instances: being a collection of Country Sayings’ by W. S. Mansfield (C.U.P. 1947) with an Introduction by Kendon and four illustrations by John Hookham (36); ‘A Bunch of Blue Ribbons: a collection of writings on Tresses’ by M. M. Johnson (London. Skeffington & Son Ltd. 1951) with Kendon’s Introduction. For Kendon’s woodcuts, some fine examples are his illustrations for ‘In a Green Shade: being a sequence of Garden Thoughts in Poetry & Prose, arranged by C. H. W. (Talbot Press [Richard Wood]. Saffron Waldon. Essex. 1926).

In the poem The Wind and the Corn, Kendon evokes an elegiac, even Housman-like sense of rhythm in this ballad of love and loss:

 
THE WIND AND THE CORN
 
The wind across the standing corn,
Upon an August day –
When you were green, that now are ripe,
I kissed the Maid of May.
She had hawthorn petal shells
On her cap and gown:
But I came over Grasstop hill,
And blew the petals down!
 
In thirty days, or thirty-one,
About the first of June,
When you were ankle-deep and dark
Beneath the glowing moon,
I stole softly here and there,
Softly far and near;
In river, meadow or Grasstop hill
I could not find my dear.
 
When you are reaped, that now be ripe,
You will not feel the rain;
But I shall wake with new-year Spring
To find the Maid again.
Cherry petal shells she’ll wear
In her morning gown,
And I’ll come over the Grasstop hill
And shake the petals down –
 
Down, down, down again:
And shake the petals down. (37)

This hauntingly beautiful poem captures, as the poet did with Dry Drayton, the sweet intoxication of the spirit, overwhelmed by nature and the cycle of the seasons; for Kendon, Spring is the purest manifestation in creation, the re-birth or the awakening; in fact, ‘the prevailing imagery’ in Kendon’s Poems and Sonnets (1924) and his Arguments and Emblems (1925) ‘is of spring; but beneath all the while, the singing is of Life’s own Spring of Love.’ (38) In another poem, The Delectable Sutton (dedicated to Jane), Kendon takes his inspiration from the Sutton seed catalogue and writes a lengthy yet whimsical poem in praise of Mr. Sutton and his invaluable and informative lists of seeds which was ‘cheap’ and ‘fair’ and ‘fairly prompt by post’; the poem begins in the sonnet form, ABABCCDDEFEFGG: ‘My garden is in all dull eyes / a dreary muddy half-acre; / its leafless beds, its rockeries, / its ragged lawns, its chilly air, / its walks where no one ever walks, / its draggled bird that never talks, / its fruitless, leafless apple trees, / its grainless barns and granaries, / its liquid echo of men’s tread, / make those resolve, who visit me, / when they get home to go to bed, / and never to go out to tea / in future – I don’t care a button; / give me the catalogues of Sutton!’, which perhaps was the initial intention of Kendon, yet after this the poem wanders off into various lengths as if the poet had a change of heart but decided to keep the introductory stanza in the sonnet form. The poet, as if talking to an imagined ‘son and heir’, hastens against the dangers of card playing, wine drinking and ‘midnight revels’ for such ‘poor devils, / may be excused a flirt or two’ and ‘Satan will find them work to do; / but Sutton shall suffice for you!’ Kendon is obviously having fun with the poem and takes great joy in the use of various vegetables and flowers from green peas ‘fat enough to feast the gods’ and ‘leeks like clubs of Hercules’ and ‘early aconites, that grow / like ballet dancers, on tip-toe’ before reaching the final verses which asks ‘and is this all a dream? / Alas, it is, as yet. / Things are not what they seem. / The lawn is very wet. / The trees have shed their leaves / in an untidy muddle, / and dripping from the outhouse eaves, / the rain has made a dismal puddle.’ But the poem must end on some uplifting advice, of course: ‘Winter is winter, so you say, / cold mutton’s but cold mutton, / but unrelated uncles send / this sound advice (here I should end): / “gather ye rosebuds while ye may, / and while ye mayn’t, read Sutton!”’ (39)

Kendon’s volume of poetry, The Cherry Minder was published in 1935 by J. M. Dent & Sons, London. There are some really well-written poems in the volume such as The Looker-On which begins ‘…And ladders, leaning against damson trees, / and idle spades beside old garden walls, / and broken sickles covered up in leaves,’ before meandering through elegiac lines on moons and acorns, ‘hard apples fallen and forgotten’, and ‘bonfire incense’ and ‘mossy silence, and the scent of leisure’ before returning beautifully again to ‘broken sickles buried under leaves, / and idle spades beside old garden walls, / and ladders leaning against damson trees…’ Two other poems in the collection are:

 
SO DEEP IS DEATH
 
So deep is death in silence lapped,
So deep in sleep their spirits are
Who, out of tempest earth escaped,
Lie down untroubled. Like a star
On the rich beds of evening skies
Before the night has peopled heaven,
So deeply shut from love she lies,
And her quick going is forgiven.
 
Come little Spring, come, give us heart;
Come noisy Summer, sing and drowse
If sense must now play double part,
Come life again! She will not rouse;
She will not hear, nor laugh to hear,
Whatever challenge wildness make;
Music is silence in her ear.
Only her lovers lie awake.
 
NOW YOU ARE IN YOUR COUNTRY
 
Now you are in your country,
And I, locked fast in mine,
Walk the white roads in silence,
And see my sun decline.
 
I see the whole west breaking
In flame again, to-night;
And earth to peace receding
Through valleys of delight.
 
Sleep in your pleasant country,
Lie down at last, content,
The hills of constant heaven
Your dream’s bright battlement;
 
Know that the stars you talk with
Have eyes on fields at home,
Or buds on banks you dream of
Now break in scented foam;
 
For death has hung no silence,
Nor spring withheld one sign,
Since you turned to your country
And left me locked in mine.

Louis Untermeyer (1885-1977) included Frank Kendon in his 1930 third edition of ‘Modern British Poetry, a Critical Anthology’. [New York. Harcourt, Brace & Co. 1920]; the poems are: I spend my days vainly’, ‘The Kernal’ and ‘The Immigrant’ (pp. 691-693); later editions, the fourth of 1936 also included ‘So Deep is Death’ (1936. pp. 456-457).

In 1942 Cambridge University Press published Kendon’s 1942 Seatonian Prize poem, The Flawless Stone which was based upon the theme of ‘Nature is the Art of God’; his previous employer, John O’ London’s Weekly had nothing but praise for it, saying in their 18^th December 1942 issue that Kendon is a ‘poet of the quiet and secret values in the human spirit, and of the riches which it finds in kind amongst the passing moments of night and day out in the fields. His handling of words is as clean-cut, and as shapely, as the things of nature which he delights in. In this he is comparable to Andrew Young and to John Clare, but he is more troubled and agonised than the former, and more coherent and purposeful than the latter’ (p. 110).

Another author to come under the spell of Frank Kendon was fellow Kent-born poet, James Turner (1909-1975) (40) who was educated at Lancing College before reading English at Queens College, Oxford in 1927. Turner, a poet I have long admired, and who was deeply in Kendon’s debt for his ‘letters of encouragement and poetic exegesis’, writes of his encounter with Kendon in the first volume of his autobiography, ‘Seven Gardens for Catherine’ (London. Cassell. 1968), which began on 26^th May 1942, when Turner, who was ‘planting a row of runner beans in the lot in front of the glasshouse’ when his wife, Cathy, ‘rode into the nursery on her bicycle’ and gave him the letter from Frank Kendon of the Cambridge University Press saying that ‘the Syndics would like to publish my long poem Pastoral, the script of which I had sent them three weeks ago.’ (p. 190). Turner’s second volume of verse, The Alien Wood, was published in 1945 and Turner says that he ‘had been to Cambridge to meet Frank Kendon, who was, himself, a considerable poet’ and he goes on to say that Kendon ‘was a gentle man with sandy hair, one of the assistant secretaries to the Cambridge Press. He was very deaf and it was not easy to make him hear what I was saying as he sat on the other side of the large table in his book-lined room in the university press building. I wrote to him about his poem “The Time Piece”, which came out at the same time as The Alien Wood. He wrote back:

Dear Turner,

I hasten to thank you for your frank and valuable letter. I am pleased by your mention of Crabbe – indeed I aught to say flattered but that I think you are the first person to name him, I certainly had no thought of him myself but a something in me gave a nod of truth as I read his name in your letter.’ Kendon admits to reading Crabbe occasionally and respecting his ‘restraint’ and ‘great knowledge of the common man’s life and mind, his human nature, is far beyond my equipment.’ He then goes on to say a little about his poem, The Time Piece, that it is a ‘meditation, and that it closely connected The Flawless Stone. As it is also with other meditative pieces that have been coming from my pen these last six years. The root thought of which perhaps can be expressed in the second paragraph of The Flawless Stone – carried, tentatively, a little further in ’52 in The Time Piece. With all life’s agonies and “injustice”, our only possible response to the universe, from the ant’s shadow to the remotest stars, is love, and that with the knowledge too – or the appearance – that the universe may not receive, or, receiving, may not know our love.’ (pp. 218-219).

Turner’s third and final volume of poetry with the C.U.P. ‘The Hollow Vale’, was published in 1947 and on 28^th April the previous year Kendon wrote to Turner to say it would be published and the reader’s report he enclosed in the letter said that ‘something has happened to this poet since we met him last, and The Hollow Vale is his account of it – a profound and dramatic spiritual experience…’ (p. 222); of the poem, Kendon confesses that he ‘doesn’t understand it’ adding, ‘I hardly suppose you expected me to – or any reader.’ (p. 223)

Kendon’s next volume of poetry, The Time Piece (Cambridge University Press) appeared in 1945, the same year that Frank’s father, Samuel died. It is a long poem which gives ‘short direct descriptions of earthly, rural English things’; a meditation upon the brilliance of nature and man’s place in it – ‘Find the first wren’s nest, built of leaves and moss, / by excess of fire, and now a prodigal loss, / his first unfinisht place, his practice home, / a fallen cherry-flower upon its dome… / One day each spring, a precipice of Time, / crowds thus this tale and tells it at a breath, / one hour, when sense and spirit, met to bless / the mortal mouth, undo the kiss of death. / We’ll get no wiser with our sceptic care: / God’s life, man’s would-be good, the Spring, is here; / burns in his void, a told phenomenon.’ (p. 18) Kendon has that old haunting fear of winter and darkness: ‘there comes with August inescapably / some outward change to match an inward mood: / the summer flowers of their abundance falter;’ (p. 43) and ‘now in profound of winter I render / my heart-born love of the sun. / There is no logic but the green earth, my dwelling,’ (p. 71)

In 1946 Frank Kendon was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the same year Kendon’s winning poem for the Seatonian Prize poem of 1945 ‘Each Silver Fly’ based on the subject of ‘A Just balance and scales are the Lord’s’ [Proverbs XVI. 11] was published by the Cambridge University Press. A year later in 1947 Kendon’s Seatonian Prize poem upon the theme of ‘Freedom to Worship’, Cage and Wing was published by Cambridge University Press and there are flashes of Kendon’s metaphysical lyric beauty: ‘The Rose is beckoning, to thee: / “Oh mark the joy that stirs in me!” / But how can I behold the joy / that stirs in rose leaves and the rose? / am I not beckoning to her?’ And Kendon manifests the inter-relationship between man and rose: ‘Deep in daylight soon to be gone, / deep in twilight sorrowfully come, / a rose on fire, a man alone; / a rose at prayer, a man in bloom.’ (p. 17)

In 1948 he was made a Fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge and two years later, Kendon’s first and only novel Martin Makesure was published in 1950 by J. M. Dent & Sons of London and it tells the somewhat ponderous tale of a man, Martin Rose who lives in Earls Court and works as a journalist for a magazine publication in London who suddenly decides to walk away from his life and his wife, Jane, one autumn day, ‘without coin or hat or key’ and wonder off to the country away from the trappings of city life; along the way he has various encounters such as with two poaching tramps named Jim and Jem. When his wife, Jane, returns from shopping to find Martin not home and a note by him, she begins her own journey of discovery also and wanders off in an opposite direction and runs away too, eventually, after many experiences, they each acquire a greater understanding of each other; told over fifty chapters it is a slow yet rather amusing tale with many thoughtful passages evoking the beauty of the countryside and nature but it was not as well received as Kendon would have hoped, and probably why he never ventured into novel writing again. Gerald Bullett said of it that it was a ‘book full of spiritual nourishment, as well as of country sights and sounds – wide landscapes and majestic skies, - queer, intimate, attractive, and memorable book’ (41) The same year, 1950, Cambridge University Press published Frank Kendon’s ‘Jacob & Thomas: Darkness’, a dialogue in darkness in an Eastern house between two old men, met again after forty years, of whom one is the man who once, when young and rich, asked Christ the question: ‘what shall I do to inherit eternal life?’.

Frank Kendon had achieved many great things during his lifetime and there was the promise of many more to come, but unfortunately Frank Kendon died in North West Surrey at the age of 66 on 28^th December 1959. At the time, Frank Kendon was working upon the English version of the Thirty-Six Psalms which he did not complete (Thirty-Six Psalms: An English Version was published in 1963 by Cambridge University Press). Following news of his death, the Bookseller published his obituary (London. Saturday 9^th January 1960. p. 66) saying that he had ‘retired two years ago because of ill-health’ and that in ‘the design of book jackets particularly he showed himself a master.’ It went on to say that Richard Church and Christopher Fry ‘contributed notes to The Times’ and the latter, ‘speaks of his letters, “more often than not written in fine pencil, letters which would break off to become a poem, and return with no very noticeable change of gear to some other matter in hand; as though his poems were intensified moments in his general craft of being alive”.’ The Times called him ‘gentle in manner and hampered by increasing deafness, he could take a very firm line in argument when he felt strongly on a subject, whether literary or ethical or political; his insistence on ultimate values, coupled with a keen and quiet humour, made him a most lovable companion.’ (42) But probably the most kind-hearted tribute was paid by The Scotsman (Saturday 2^nd January 1960. p. 10) which said that ‘as a poet Kendon was a traditionalist and in danger of neglect because he was not “in the swim”. He is represented in few recent anthologies, though the beauty of his verse is such that collections of the future are not likely to exclude him. He had the power to capture the essence of a mood or a scene, and his best poems have a freshness which did not desert him when he wrote blank verse narrative. He was, however, essentially a lyric poet, and that he felt the truth of this is perhaps implied by his choice of the lyric form for his recreation of the Tristram legend.’

Frank’s wife, Celia Kendon died on 11^th May 2001 and is buried in Goudhurst, Kent. She was his constant companion during those years when he worked for the Cambridge University Press and through his later ill-health and deafness. Let us remember the poet not just for his earthly devotions and kindnesses but also for his beautiful lyrical gift which for too long has been neglected!

 
‘Oh, our works survive us;
Our tentative faiths outlive us;
Order’s a tribute we can partly pay;
In beauty’s order at least we can, be sure,
See more than common mortality among us
Could otherwise see or say.
 
So made these men who have mouldered in death away –
Faithful fellows, centuries dead –
Their question and their guessed reply.
This is as near, Dearself, as we can come
To eternity, piecemeal crumbling down,
In the dreadful pittance of lifeless rain
Falling through centuries.’ (43)

 

NOTES:

 

1. ‘Shall we still wrangle?’ New English Poems. Lascelles Abercrombie. London. Victor Gollancz Ltd. 1931. p. 225, also in An Anthology of Modern Verse, 1920-1940. ed. C. D. Lewis. Methuen. 1941. pp. 101-102.
2. ‘The Excuse’ [Frank Kendon]. Poems by Four Authors. Cambridge. Bowes & Bowes. 1923. p. 243.
3. Clarice Ellen Mildred Kendon (1890-1968), Clarice trained at the Ladie’s College, in Goudhurst and taught music at Bethany School; she married Donald Alexander Fairman (1899-1974), son of Reverend Walter Trotter Fairman (1874-1941), of Cairo, Egypt, on Thursday 27^th December 1928. She died aged 78 in Tonbridge in 1968.
4. Ella Winifred Kendon (1891-1984), Ella trained at the Ladie’s College, in Goudhurst and at University (B.A. Wales and London). She died in Tonbridge in August 1984.
5. Donald Henry Kendon, C.B.E. (1895-1985), Donald served with the Royal Flying Corps (reg. number: 318615) as a corporal during the First World War, enlisting on 11^th June 1918. In 1923 he married Katherine Grace Honess (1896-1978) and they had the following children: John S. Kendon born 1924; Richard D. Kendon born 1926; Martin Honess Kendon born 1929; James T. Kendon born 1934 and David A. Kendon born 1936 in Truro, Cornwall. Donald was an electrical engineer (BSc. Engineering, King’s College, London) and in 1936 he became General Manager of Cornwall Electrical Power Co.; 1939 General Manager of Shropshire, Worcester, & Staffordshire Power Co. (S.W.& S.); 1947 Deputy Chairman of Midlands Electricity Board (M.E.B.); 1954 Chairman of the Merseyside and North Wales Electricity Board (MANWEB); 1961 Vice Chairman of British Electricity Development Association; the same year he was awarded the C.B.E. for his services.
6. Olive Miriam Kendon (1897-1977) taught at Bethany School in 1914 when she was 17 years old and went on to become a great educator and a prominent advocate of the teaching profession and its methods and she was founder of the Children’s House Society. See her autobiographical ‘Because they asked’. London. Children’s House Society. 1979.
7. Freda Constance Kendon (1898-1966), in 1928 Freda married Wilfred Henry Piper (1901-1986) in Cranbrook, Kent and they had a child named Christopher P. Piper in 1930 and Janet M. Piper in 1935. Freda died aged 67 in Totnes in 1966.
8. Norman Lynn Kendon (1900-1995), during the First World War Norman enlisted in the Royal Flying Corps (reg. number: 158286) and he married Lydia Amy Sutton in 1927 in Bromley, Kent; they had two children named Phillipa A. L. Kendon born 1928 in Bromley and Susan J. Kendon born in Cranbrook, Kent in 1935.
9. Dora Kathleen Kendon (1902-1996), Dora married the Reverend Edwin Ernest Hayward, M.A. in Cranbrook, Kent on Saturday 18^th April 1925; Rev. Hayward was Secretary of the Young People’s Department of the Baptist Union and also in 1937 Headmaster of Bethany School until his retirement in 1948. They had a daughter named Sally B. P. Hayward, born in Cranbrook in 1937.
10. Harold Joseph Kendon (1903-1971), Harold studied Agriculture at the University of London (BSc.). Harold, or ‘Plum’, was a prominent member of the Boy Scouts Association, receiving his warrant in 1931 and becoming District Commissioner of Cranbrook and Tenterden district until his retirement in 1968. He married Edith Mary Halsey (1901-1957), widow of Sidney Halsey, on 17^th March 1945 at St. John’s Church, Orpington.
11. Mavis Eileen Kendon (1905-2002), Mavis married Frederick Donald Rushbrooke in Cranbrook on Saturday 11^th September 1937; Frederick, of 46, Richmond Hill Road, Edgbaston, Birmingham, was the only son of Frederick William Rushbrooke (1861-1913) J.P., Chairman and Managing Director of Halford’s Cycle Co. Ltd; in 1938 Frederick became a Director in the company and the following year was Chief Inspector of multiple stores. Frederick and Mavis had the following children (all born Bromsgrove): Jennifer J. Rushbrooke born 1940, Maxwell M. Rushbrooke born 1942 and Karlin Kendon Rushbrooke born 1944; Karlin studied at Stourbridge College of Art from 1964-68 (Dip AD Glass & Ceramics) and taught glass at Manchester Polytechnic (1973-4) and Bristol Polytechnic (1979-82) and creates exceptional works of art in glass and ceramics.
12. Aubrey Keith Kendon (1907-2002), Aubrey, or Keith as he was known, married Winifred Florence Barham (1905-1995) in Cranbrook in 1935 and they had two children (both born in Cirencester): Judith A. Kendon born 1938 and Sarah Kendon born 1942.
13. David Gildersleve Kendon was born in Curtisden Green, Goudhurst, Kent, on 21^st June 1879; he was an architect and before the war he married Winifred Grace Brockies (1892-1962) in 1913. David and Winifred had two children: Barbara Winifred Kendon, born 1918 and Patricia Mary Kendon (1921-1992); in September 1938 Barbara was awarded her Licentiate Diploma of the Royal Academy of Music (piano); she taught dance, movement and elocution at Goudhurst Girl’s College, Doddington Hall, Nantwich, Cheshire and became Principle; she married the much older Reverend William Thomas Rees on 2^nd May 1957; Rev. W. T. Rees died in his 80^th year on 21^st June 1966. David Gildersleve Kendon became President of Bethany School and died following a motor car accident near Goudhurst on Sunday 27^th May 1934 aged 54.
14. The Times Obituary. 30^th December 1959. see Obituaries from The Times, 1951-1960. Newspaper Archive Developments Limited. 1979. p. 410. For more on the development of the English Tripos at Cambridge see The Muse Unchained. Eustace Tillyard, London. Bowes & Bowes. 1958.
15. The Bookman. The Bookman Gallery: Frank Kendon by C. Henry Warren. LXXVIII, number 467. August 1930. London. Hodder and Stoughton Ltd. 1930. pp. 277-279. Clarence Henry Warren also wrote an article on Frank Kendon and his narrative poem ‘The Life and Death of Judas Iscariot’ in The Bookman, LXXI, number 425. February 1927, in which he praises the work and calls him the most ‘sincerest of our younger poets.’ There is also a fine portrait of Kendon drawn by H. M. G. Wilson. p. 266.
16. Some Modern Poets and Other Critical Essays. Edward Davison. U.S.A. Harper & Brothers. 1928. [Chapter II. Frank Kendon and Analysed Rhyme. pp. 21-40] p. 33. see also The English Journal, volume 15, number 6, June 1926. Some Notes on Modern English Poetry by Edward Davison. pp. 407-414 in which Davison discusses the post war poetry of Edmund Blunden, Humbert Wolfe, Edward Shanks and Frank Kendon.
17. ibid. p. 36. Davison’s quotation is from Kendon’s ‘A Note on “Analysed Rhyme”’. Poems and Sonnets. 1924. pp. 95-96. The poem ‘I spend my days vainly’ also appeared in The Book of Bodley Head Verse: being a selection of poetry published at the Bodley Head. J. B. Priestley. London. John Lane. 1926. pp. 114-118. The four poems were taken from Poems and Sonnets (1924): I spend my days vainly (p. 114), Now to the world (p. 115), Ophelia (p. 117) and Sonnet XVI – ‘To that great day how slowly, oh how slowly’ [sonnet V in ‘Poems by Four Authors’. 1923. p. 112]; and in Second Selections from Modern Poets. J. C. Squire. London. Martin Secker. 1924. p. 245 along with several other of Kendon’s poems: Now to the world (pp. 234-237), The Immigrant (p. 238), The Kernal (p. 239), Sonnet [‘Now splendidly the earth awakes to vigour’] (p. 240), Sonnet [‘Weary of play, some summer eve, may chance’] (p. 241), Palestine (p. 242), The Excuse (p. 243), and The Orange (p. 244).
18. Poems by Four Authors. Cambridge. Bowes & Bowes. 1923. p. 116. The poem also appears in ‘Second Selections from Modern Poets’. ed. J. C. Squire. London. Martin Secker. 1924. (p. 241) which also has the following poems by Kendon: Now to the World, pp. 231-237, The Immigrant, p. 238, The Kernal, p. 239, Sonnet [‘Now splendidly the earth awakes to vigour’], p. 240, Palestine, p. 242, The Excuse, p. 243, The Orange, p. 244, and I spend my days vainly, p. 245.
19. The poem ‘Orpheus’ later featured in Readings from Poems of Frank Kendon, a radio broadcast on Thursday 17^th October 1929 from 8.45-9 p.m. read by Robert Harris. It was also scheduled to be included in The Best Poems of 1925, edited by L. A. G. Strong. Boston. Small, Maynard & Company. 1925, but either due to ‘simultaneous publication in book form, the absence of the authors, and other circumstances’ its inclusion was prevented (pp. ix-x).
20. George Gordon Coulton (1858-1947), Lectured at the University of Cambridge in 1911 and became a fellow of St. John’s College in 1919 when Kendon was in residence. Coulton acknowledges Kendon’s kind friendship and correspondence in his autobiography ‘Fourscore Years. Cambridge University Press. 1943. Preface, p. viii, and in ‘Father, a Portrait of G. G. Coulton at Home’. Sarah Campion. London. Michael Joseph. 1948, Campion quotes a letter of 21^st September 1939 in which Coulton writes on the subject of pacifism, saying: ‘as to pacifism I am asking Kendon to send you 2 copies of his little leaflet. Stanley [Henry Stanley Bennett (1889-1972), literary medieval historian of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, a favourite pupil of Coulton’s) and I admire him while we disagree.’ (p. 163) see also pp. 165-167.
21. The Literary Digest. Volume lxxvi [76], number 13. 31^st March 1923. New York. Funk & Wagnalls Company. 1923. Current Poetry, p. 34. The poem also appeared in Springboard, the Barnardo magazine for schools, ed. by Christopher Fry, 1925-37, volume I, number 3. Other work in periodicals includes, from The Cambridge Review: To Trespassers (poem), volume xlii [42], number1034, Friday 26^th November 1920, p. 122; To-night there is a wind (poem), volume xlii, number 1035, Friday 3^rd December 1920, p. 149; Aristotle and Campaspe (article), volume xliii, number 1074, Wednesday 7^th June 1922, pp. 413-415; Shelley (article), volume xlv, number 1114, Friday 7^th March 1924, p. 275. Kendon also wrote an article for the scientific magazine Discovery, the popular journal of knowledge, ed. C. P. Snow, volume II, number 19, October 1939, Cambridge University Press. Invitation to knowledge, VII: Fundamentals of Photography, pp. 543-549.
22. ‘Lullaby’ from the collection Arguments and Emblems (1925), also published in The Listener, volume I, numbers 12-24 (12^th June 1929), p. 834 as it featured in a radio broadcast of poetry reading from the poems of Frank Kendon on Tuesday 18^th June 1929 from 6-6.15 p.m. ‘Bright was the morning’, one of three poems published in New English Poems by Lascelles Abercrombie. London. Victor Gollancz Ltd. 1931. p. 224 [the other poems being: ‘Walking through snow’, pp. 220-223, and ‘Shall we still wrangle?’ p. 225]; the four lines were also quoted in Colonel Montague Cooke’s ‘Clouds that Flee: Reminiscences’. London. Hutchinson & Co. 1935. p. 84. ‘Bright Autumn’ found in ‘Poems of the Seasons’. Pictures by Gordon Beningfield. Selectabook. 1992. p. 97. Sonnet: ‘Now splendidly the earth awakes to vigour’ from ‘Poems and Sonnets’ (p. 74) and in Second Selections from Modern Poets. ed. J. C. Squire. London. Martin Secker. 1924. p. 240, also found in Pratt Institute. Free Library. Quarterly Booklist. Series V, number 57, spring 1926. p. 3.
23. The London Mercury, volume IX, number 53, March 1924, pp. 544-545.
24. Boys Bathing also appeared in Cambridge Poets 1914-1920. Edward Davison. Cambridge. W. Heffer & Sons Ltd. 1920. pp. 115-116 and The London Mercury, ed. J. C. Squire, volume III, number 15, January 1921, p. 258. The author, Timothy d’Arch Smith considered this beautiful poem worthy of being included in the ‘uranian’ canon of poetry purely on the subject’s imagery and while the poem certainly has an exquisite uranian quality, Kendon should not be considered wholly as a uranian poet on the basis of this, yet there are glimpses of possible misinterpretations and ambiguities in the poet’s work which may suggest otherwise. [see Love in Earnest: Some Notes on the Lives and Writings of English ‘Uranian’ Poets from 1889 to 1930. Timothy d’Arch Smith. London. Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1970. p. 171] see also ‘Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford’. Linda Dowling. Ithaca. Cornell University Press. 1994. For E. E. Bradford’s poem, see ‘My Love is like All Lovely Things’: Selected Poems of E. E. Bradford. C. Caunter. London. Arcadian Dreams. 2023. p. 140.
25. The Crane in Bloomsbury also appeared in The Best Poems of 1926. ed. L. A. G. Strong. New York. Dodd, Mead & Comp. 1926. pp. 122-123; and The Best Poems of 1925, selected by Thomas Moult. London. Jonathan Cape Ltd. 1926. p. 113. Note also that three of Kendon’s poems appeared in ‘Poems of To-Day’, London. Macmillan & Co. Ltd. 4^th series, published for The English Association. 1951.: ‘High Summer’ (number 85, p. 91) which begins ‘She frown’d at work next day and would not speak’ (taken from The Time Piece, xxv, p. 30), ‘A Secret Person Laughs’ (number 86, p. 91) which begins ‘This is the bare twig, / the iced weather around it’ (The Time Piece, pp. 69-70) and ‘Sharing Creation’ (number 87, p. 92) which begins ‘And when desire has from our eyes’ (from Cage and Wing).
26. World Within World, the Autobiography of Stephen Spender. London. Hamish Hamilton Ltd. 1951. pp. 72-75. see also Stephen Spender: A Literary Life. John Sutherland. Oxford University Press. 2005. p. 65. [1^st published, London. Penguin Books Ltd. 2004].
27. Radio Times. Volume 24, number 302. 12^th July 1929. p. 61 (continued on p. 62).
28. ibid. volume 25, number 319. 8^th November 1929. p. 387.
29. The Music of Peter Warlock. I. A. Copley. London. D. Dobson. 1979. pp. 208-209. The Warlock/Blunt carol, ‘The Frostbound Wood’ (song for voice and piano) was published in the Radio Times, volume 25, number 325, 20^th December 1929, pp. 856-857. For Kendon’s ‘The Rich Cavalcade’ see The Choral Music of Peter Warlock, volume 5. Thames Publishing. 1994.
30. Three Poets of Today by Frank Kendon. The Bookman. LXXVI, number 456. September 1929. London. Hodder and Stoughton Ltd.1929. pp. 302-303. Kendon also provided reviews and literary criticism for The London Mercury, see: VIII, number 48, October 1923, pp. 661-663; IX, number 50, December 1923, pp. 207-208; IX, number 53, March 1924, pp. 549-550; XI, number 64, February 1925, pp. 432-434; XI, number 65, March 1925, pp. 546-548; XIII, number 74, December 1925, pp. 214-216; XIII, number 75, January 1926, pp. 320-322. Also in the Fortnightly [Review]: 1931, volume 120. pp. 427-428; 1931, volume 130. pp. 806-808, also pp. 539-540; 1932, volume 131. pp. 113-116; 1933, volume 133. pp. 115-118, also pp. 399-400, also pp. 805-806; 1933, volume 136. pp. 381-382; 1934, volume 136. pp. 123-124. Kendon’s poem ‘Tristram’ is reviewed by Arthur Ball in The Fortnightly, 1934, volume 136. pp. 381-382. Kendon’s works were also reviewed in The Times Literary Supplement: Mural Painting (1923. p. 743), Poems and Sonnets (1924. p. 188), Arguments and Emblems (1926. p. 201), The Life and Death of Judas Iscariot (1926. p. 932), The Small Years (1930. p. 531), The Adventure of Poetry (1932. p. 812), Tristram (1934. p. 488), The Cherry Minder (1935. p. 563), The Time Piece (1945. p. 620 and 31), Each Silver Fly (1946. p. 297), Cage and Wing (1948. p. 179), Jacob & Thomas: Darkness (1950. p. 798), Martin Makesure (1950. p. 321, 341 and 357) and Thirty-Six Psalms (1963. p. 1,016).
31. Op. cit., The Bookman. August 1930. p. 278.
32. Adam Kendon, born 4^th April 1934 was an authority on gesture and communication, as in sign language. He read Botany, Zoology and Human Physiology (and Experimental Psychology for Natural Sciences) at the University of Cambridge; continued Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford (D.Phil. 1963, Oxford) and Cornell University. He worked at the Institute of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University and published several books on the subject, such as: ’Studies in the Behaviour of Face-to-Face Interaction’ (1977), ‘Sign Languages of Aboriginal Australia’ (1988), ‘Conducting Interaction: patterns of Behaviour in Focused Encounters’ (1990), ‘Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance’ (2004) and ‘Sign Languages in Papua New Guinea’ (2020). He died on 14^th September 2022.
33. The author, Joseph Needham, praises the staff of the Cambridge University Press and particularly shows his gratitude for Kendon in the author’s note to volume IV (‘Physics and Physical Technology, part II, Mechanical Engineering’. C.U.P. 1963. p. liv) saying, ‘our friend Frank Kendon for many years Assistant Secretary, whose death occurred after the appearance of volume 3. Known in many circles as a poet and literary scholar of high achievement, he was capable of divining the poetry implicit in some of the books which passed through the Press, and the form which his understanding took was bestowal of infinite pains to achieve the external dress best adapted to the content. I shall remember how when Science and Civilisation in China was crystallising in this way, he “lived with” trial volumes made up in different styles and colours for some weeks before arriving at a decision most agreeable to the author and his contributors – and what was perhaps more important, equally so to thousands of readers all over the world.’
34. see Henry James in Cambridge. Geoffrey Keynes. Cambridge. Heffer. 1967, also chapter 6 ‘Henry James in Cambridge’, of The Gates of Memory by Geoffrey Keynes [Oxford. Clarendon Press. 1981. pp. 64-80] Keynes also describes S. C. Roberts, saying that the ‘eighteenth-century flavour of Sydney’s highly individual personality was greatly enjoyed by his friends and colleagues; naturally he was an authority on Dr. Johnson and his circle. He completed his career as Master of Pembroke, having been for many years a Fellow of the College, and was awarded a knighthood in 1958.’ (p. 51)
35. Early members of the Baskerville Club (1^st meeting on 28^th October 1903) consisted of: Charles Sayle (St. John’s), A. T. Bartholomew (Peterhouse), Arthur Frederick Andrew Cole (1883-1968, King’s, Club Secretary), Stephen Gaselee (1882-1943, King’s), John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946, King’s), Godfrey Isaac Howard Lloyd (1875-1939, Trinity), Charles Donald Robertson (1879-1910, Trinity) and Francis John Henry Jenkinson (1853-1923, Trinity, 1^st Club President); later members included: Montague Rhodes James (1862-1936, Kings, member in 1905), novelist and biographer Ralph Straus (1882-1950, Pembroke, member in 1913), he also wrote under the name Ralph Strode; Geoffrey Langdon Keynes (1887-1982, Pembroke, member in 1913). The Club disbanded in 1931.
36. John George Hookham, artist born Epsom 26^th August 1899; trained at the Slade School of Art and taught at the Cambridge School of Art. He provided illustrations to several books including: ‘Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland’. George Gamow (1940), ‘Good Neighbours’. Walter Rose (1942), ‘Poltergeist over England’. Harry Price (1945) and ‘Mr. Tompkins in Paperback’. George Gamow. 1965, which combines ‘Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland’ and ‘Mr. Tompkins Explores the Atom’ (1945). Hookham became a good friend of Kendon’s who dedicated his novel, ‘Martin Makesure’ to Hookham who sadly died in Cambridge on 20^th October 1972.
37. The Irish Weekly and Ulster Examiner. Saturday 16^th February 1935. p. 3. Also appearing in Argosy magazine, volume VI, number 8, August 1945, p. 2 and volume IX, number 8, August 1948, p. 4; other poems by Kendon in Argosy are: Summer, volume VIII, number 51, August 1930, p. 80; Boys Bathing, volume X, number 63, August 1931, p. 78; Exile, volume V, number 3, April 1944, p. 53; In Praise of December, volume IX, number 12, December 1948, p. 4.
38. Op. cit., The Bookman. August 1930. p. 279.
39. Life and Letters, volume xi, number 63, March 1935. London. Constable & Co. Ltd. pp. 675-676.
40. James Ernest Turner (1909-1975), author of several novels and poet. His volumes of poetry are: Pastoral (C.U.P. 1942), The Alien Wood: Twenty Elegies (C.U.P. 1945), The Hollow Vale (C.U.P. 1947), The Interior Diagram and Other Poems. Cassell. 1960, The Accident and Other Poems. Cassell. 1966. Autobiography (2 volumes): Seven Gardens for Catherine. Cassell. 1968, and Sometimes into England. Cassell. 1970. Turner was also connected with the haunting of Borley Rectory and published My Life with Borley Rectory. The Bodley Head. 1950, among many other splendid works. The correspondence between Kendon and Turner from 1942-1955 (15 letters) are held at the Cambridge University Library.
41. Liverpool Daily Post. Tuesday 30^th May 1950. p. 3. The Aberdeen Press and Journal of Saturday 13^th May 1950 (p. 2) said that Martin, ‘without a coin in his pocket determined to prove that he need not be a slave to civilisation and society, to ascertain whether a man’s right to live still existed. Unknown to him [Martin] his wife followed on a parallel course and each ran into a succession of experiences that moulded them into better beings. Their experiences are described with all the feeling and sensitiveness of the poet’s mind that is Frank Kendon’s.’
42. Op. cit., The Times. 30^th December 1959.
43. From the Guinness award winning poem of 1956-57, ‘Approach to Ely’ in the Eagle magazine of St. John’s College, Easter 1956. see The Guinness Book of Poetry, 1956/57. London. Putnam. 1958. pp. 28-29]