T. D. Kendrick

• 1. Introduction

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  T. D. Kendrick spent much of his life keeping secrets. In 1941, an ARP warden pulled a newborn girl alive from the rubble of a Blitz-damaged home. Her mother had died in that same raid, barely ten weeks after giving birth. The child, Sally Maud Senior, would grow up knowing Kendrick only as an old family friend. She would not learn the truth until she had children of her own.

  Kendrick was born in Handsworth on the 1st of April 1895. He survived a world war, studied anthropology at Oxford, and built a career at the British Museum lasting nearly four decades. Along the way he championed an art form many colleagues had dismissed and reshaped how Britain understands its ancient past. He also held his private life so close that his own daughter did not know he was her father. How did this archaeologist from Birmingham make himself indispensable to British cultural life? And what did that life cost him, and others?

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• 2. Birmingham to Bloomsbury

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  Kendrick's father, Thomas H. Kendrick, died in 1902, leaving behind a wife and two young sons. His mother, Fanny Susan, married Prebendary Sowter three years later. The family sent young Thomas to Charterhouse School, and a year at Oriel College, Oxford, followed. Then in 1914 the war arrived, and Kendrick joined the Royal Warwickshire Regiment.

  He was wounded in France and rose to the rank of captain before the fighting ended. Back at Oxford in 1918, he finished his degree in anthropology the following year. A Master of Arts in the same subject came in 1920. He stayed on at Oxford rather than leave, beginning a Bachelor of Science that investigated the megaliths of the Channel Islands. That research experience enabled him to secure a post at the British Museum in 1922. He joined as an assistant in the British and Medieval Antiquities Department.

  His first book, 'The Axe Age: a study in British prehistory', appeared in 1925, three years after he joined the museum.

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• 3. Vikings, Saxons, and Henges

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  In 1932, Kendrick coined the word 'henge' to describe a particular class of prehistoric monument. These were ceremonial sites defined by encircling ditches and banks of soil, not by standing stones. That term entered the working vocabulary of British archaeologists and stayed there.

  He had been appointed assistant keeper at the British Museum in 1928, six years after joining as an assistant. 'The Druids: a study in Keltic prehistory' appeared in 1927. 'A History of the Vikings', published by Methuen in London, came out in 1930. During the 1930s his professional focus shifted from prehistoric art to Viking and Anglo-Saxon art. The two survey volumes he produced became standard references for scholars in the field. 'Anglo-Saxon Art to A.D. 900' appeared in 1938, the same year he was made keeper of the British and Medieval Antiquities Department. 'Late Saxon and Viking art' followed in 1949.

  In 1950, he was appointed director and principal librarian of the British Museum, a post he would hold for nine years.

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• 4. Director and the Bronze Problem

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  In the 1951 Birthday Honours, Kendrick was appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath. The honour came one year into his tenure as director.

  His approach to the collection centred on a firm belief in cleaning museum objects. The result was that numerous bronze artifacts in his department were overcleaned. He retired from the directorship in 1959, having spent thirty-seven years at the institution.

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• 5. Championing Victorian Art

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  The poet John Betjeman and the painter John Piper were among those who assisted Kendrick's advocacy for Victorian art. Kendrick's research on Victorian stained glass was used by Nikolaus Pevsner in preparing his Buildings of England series. That series is now known as the Pevsner Architectural Guides, and his observations became part of a reference consulted by generations of readers.

  In 1962, Kendrick published 'Great Love for Icarus', described as semi-autobiographical, the only work of fiction in an otherwise scholarly body of writing.

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• 6. Hidden Families

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  In 1922, Kendrick married a pianist named Ellen Martha Kiek, whom he had met at university. They had one daughter, Frances.

  Beginning in the late 1930s, Kendrick had a six-year affair with Elizabeth Senior, a woman fourteen years younger than he was. Elizabeth gave birth to a daughter in 1941. An air raid killed Elizabeth not long after the birth. The infant had been placed under a table for safety and survived; she was raised by her grandmother and aunt.

  After Ellen's death in 1955, Kendrick married Katherine Elizabeth Wrigley, born in 1903, a long-standing friend of the family. In the early 1950s, while still married to Ellen, he had also carried on a relationship with the novelist Barbara Pym. Pym had been a friend of his daughter Frances during their time together in the WRNS. Kendrick died on the 2nd of November 1979 in Dorchester. Katherine Elizabeth Wrigley, who had married him after Ellen died, survived him by less than a year.

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