November beginnings: "One watched, on the pale semicircular beach, wave after wave shedding again and again smoothly, a film of mother of pearl." Virginia Woolf, 1927

   Godrevy  Lighthouse, St. Ives

" 'What you need to do is get behind the counter, Richard.'  My Uncle George was speaking on the beach at Carbis Bay, St. Ives.

The counter he was referring to was that of the Hogarth Press, run by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, which at that time, in the late twenties, was becoming the forum of the Bloomsbury Group.
I was sixteen and had just been superannuated from Marlborough after I had failed, during three and a half years, to get beyond Lower School*.
An informal discussion was going on about my future, in which my aunt and my mother, though present, took little part -- busying themselves with Thermos flasks.
My uncle explained that he had met Leonard Woolf at the Cranium Club and, hearing that he was on the lookout for 'a likely young man', had persuaded him to take me on as an apprentice publisher."

A Boy at the Hogarth Press   Richard Kennedy  1972

Still a gauche, if well-meaning schoolboy, who read Russian novels and wanted to be an artist,  Richard Kennedy's career with Leonard and Virginia Woolf at 52 Tavistock Square was not entirely a success.

 "he was clumsy and a little absent-minded."  Virginia Woolf's "Orlando".  
illus.© R. Kennedy

"I have started to go to Pitmans …I find myself drawing the backs of people's heads instead of getting on with my typing."  Kennedy did design several covers for their Hogarth Press books, but he was dyslexic* and not good with sums (working out discounts), nor as a travelling salesman, even for the bestseller Orlando (1928), and finally managed to order quite the wrong size of paper needed for the uniform edition of Virginia's novels.  "LW refuses to speak to me...I suppose I have really got the sack…Wrapped up parcels all day. LW is still irate and glares at me."

Memorial to Virginia Woolf in Tavistock Square, London

He is best known now for his insider view of life at the Hogarth Press,  and the personalities of the Bloomsbury world in his memoir, A Boy at the Hogarth Press, 1972.

Virginia Woolf at work."She looks at us over the top of her steel-rimmed spectacles, her grey hair hanging over her forehead and a shag cigarette hanging from her lips."  
© Richard Kennedy

It was Richard Kennedy's experience at the Hogarth Press which helped him to get onto a journalism course at UCL (where he met his future wife).  He followed this with an art course at Regent Street Polytechnic and then worked in advertising. He was RAF ground staff during the war and then made his name as an illustrator,  particularly for quality children's books.

The Stream that Stood Still,  Jonathan Cape, illus. © Richard Kennedy, 1948

Blue Birds over Pit Row, by Helen Cresswell  illus. © Richard Kennedy 1975

The popular children's author Helen Cresswell became a close friend, sharing Kennedy's interest in Jung and transcendental meditation.  When he was first commissioned to work on a series of her books in the 1970s, she was warned he was forgetful and went to meet him at the station:
"I had no idea what he looked like, but, having scanned everyone as they left the train, I ended up with this six-foot-two tramp wearing hobnailed boots and trousers held up with a tie, and this was him. ...
He was such a talented artist and he was a marvellous writer too, despite being dyslexic. … He was a lovely, lovely man, and so diffident.  He was really like a big child. " (quoted from The Book Collector, 1999)

Another friend and colleague, John Randle,  commented on  first meeting Kennedy in 1964:
"I was somewhat struck by the distracted air of the artist, but even more so by the fluidity and sureness of line of his drawings."

A Boy at the Hogarth Press was published by The Whittington Press in 1972.
see www.Levenger.com