WRAPPED IN SLOW MUSING:
FRANK KENDON – A QUIET EXPLOSION IN POETRY
BY
BARRY VAN-ASTEN
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. 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; 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
Frank was educated at
After the war, Frank
entered St. John’s College, Cambridge on 30th September 1919, not
long after his 26th 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
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.
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.
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 (
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
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 20th
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.
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,
In 1926 Kendon’s ‘The
Life and Death of Judas Iscariot’ was published by
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
‘After applying
unsuccessfully for a post at the
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 20th 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.’
In the summer of 1930
Frank Kendon married the schoolteacher, Elizabeth Cecilia Phyllis Horne (1907-2001)
in
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 4th 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 10th 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.
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
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
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
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
In 1932 Kendon
published The Adventure of Poetry (
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
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
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 ‘
Kendon’s volume of
poetry, The Cherry Minder was published in 1935 by J. M. Dent & Sons,
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’. [
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 18th 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
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 28th 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
Frank’s wife, Celia
Kendon died on
‘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:
- ‘Shall we still wrangle?’ New English
Poems. Lascelles Abercrombie.
- ‘The Excuse’ [Frank Kendon]. Poems by Four
Authors.
- Clarice Ellen Mildred Kendon (1890-1968),
Clarice trained at the Ladie’s College, in Goudhurst and taught music at
- Ella Winifred Kendon (1891-1984), Ella
trained at the Ladie’s College, in Goudhurst and at University (B.A. Wales
and
- 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
- 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’.
- Freda Constance Kendon (1898-1966), in
1928 Freda married Wilfred Henry Piper (1901-1986) in
- 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
- Dora Kathleen Kendon (1902-1996), Dora
married the Reverend Edwin Ernest Hayward, M.A. in
- Harold Joseph Kendon (1903-1971), Harold
studied Agriculture at the
- Mavis Eileen Kendon (1905-2002), Mavis
married Frederick Donald Rushbrooke in Cranbrook on Saturday 11th
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.
- Aubrey Keith Kendon (1907-2002), Aubrey,
or Keith as he was known, married Winifred Florence Barham (1905-1995) in
- David Gildersleve Kendon was born in
Curtisden Green,
- The Times Obituary.
- The Bookman. The Bookman Gallery: Frank
Kendon by C. Henry Warren. LXXVIII, number 467. August 1930.
- Some Modern Poets and Other Critical
Essays. Edward Davison.
- 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.
- Poems by Four Authors.
- The poem ‘Orpheus’ later featured in
- George Gordon Coulton (1858-1947),
Lectured at the
- The Literary Digest. Volume lxxvi [76],
number 13.
- ‘Lullaby’ from the collection Arguments
and Emblems (1925), also published in The Listener, volume I, numbers
12-24 (12th June 1929), p. 834 as it featured in a radio
broadcast of poetry reading from the poems of Frank Kendon on Tuesday 18th
June 1929 from 6-6.15 p.m. ‘Bright was the morning’, one of three poems
published in New English Poems by Lascelles Abercrombie.
- The London Mercury, volume IX, number 53,
March 1924, pp. 544-545.
- Boys Bathing also appeared in Cambridge
Poets 1914-1920. Edward Davison.
- The Crane in
- World Within World, the Autobiography of
Stephen Spender.
- Radio Times. Volume 24, number 302.
- ibid. volume 25, number 319.
- The Music of Peter Warlock. I. A. Copley.
- Three Poets of Today by Frank Kendon. The
Bookman. LXXVI, number 456. September 1929. London. Hodder and
- Op. cit., The Bookman. August 1930. p.
278.
- Adam Kendon, born
- 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.’
- see Henry James in
- Early members of the Baskerville Club (1st
meeting on 28th 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, 1st 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.
- John George Hookham, artist born Epsom 26th
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
- The Irish Weekly and
- Op. cit., The Bookman. August 1930. p.
279.
- Life and Letters, volume xi, number 63, March
1935.
- 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):
- Op. cit., The Times.
- From the Guinness award winning poem of
1956-57, ‘Approach to Ely’ in the Eagle magazine of
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