Robert Wyndham Ketton-Cremer, (2 May 1906 – 12 December 1969) was an English landowner, biographer and historian. He bequeathed his

family seat A family seat or sometimes just called seat is the principal residence of the landed gentry and aristocracy. The residence usually denotes the social, economic, political, or historic connection of the family within a given area. Some families ...

Felbrigg Hall Felbrigg Hall is a 17th-century English country house near the village of that name in Norfolk. Part of a National Trust property, the unaltered 17th-century house is noted for its Jacobean architecture and fine Georgian interior. Outside i ...

, to the

National Trust The National Trust, formally the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty, is a charity and membership organisation for heritage conservation in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. In Scotland, there is a separate and ...

Early life

Robert Wyndham Cremer was born in

Plympton Plympton is a suburb of the city of Plymouth in Devon, England. It is in origin an ancient stannary town. It was an important trading centre for locally mined tin, and a seaport before the River Plym silted up and trade moved down river to P ...

, Devon, on 2 May 1906 to Wyndham Cremer Ketton-Cremer and his wife Emily Bayly. He was educated at Harrow School. He and his brother assumed the surname Ketton-Cremer in 1924. He won an exhibition to Balliol College, Oxford where he read English Literature. While at Oxford he published poetry.

Life at Felbrigg

He was a descendant of the Wyndham family, who owned the Felbrigg estate in Norfolk,Mary Lascelles, Robert Wyndham Ketton-Cremer, 1906–1969".
''Proceedings of the British Academy'', 56 (1970

972 Year 972 ( CMLXXII) was a leap year starting on Monday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. Events By place Byzantine Empire * Spring – Emperor John I Tzimiskes divides the Bulgarian territories, recent ...

, pages 403–414. and was known as "the Last Squire".Robert Windham Ketton Cremer.
National Trust. Retrieved 1 August 2017. He inherited the estate on the death of his father in 1933. Wyndham Ketton-Cremer's heir, his younger brother Richard, died in Crete during the Second World War. Ketton-Cremer also owned the Beeston Regis estate, including what is now

Beeston Hall School Beeston Hall School is an independent day and boarding preparatory school for boys and girls in the village of Beeston Regis, Norfolk. Founded in 1948, Beeston Hall currently accommodates 125 pupils aged 4 – 13 making it the largest boardin ...

. Ketton-Cremer never married. He was a closet homosexual, at a time when homosexual acts were still criminalised though close friends were aware of his sexuality. With regard to intimate relationships, the novelist and critic

Anthony Powell Anthony Dymoke Powell ( ; 21 December 1905 – 28 March 2000) was an English novelist best known for his 12-volume work ''A Dance to the Music of Time'', published between 1951 and 1975. It is on the list of longest novels in English. Powell' ...

, who dedicated his novel '' The Kindly Ones'' to Ketton-Cremer (who read proofs of Powell's books and suggested improvements, up to the time of his death)https://anthonypowell.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/nl50.pdf wrote in 1988, questioning the appropriateness of Ketton-Cremer's name being included in a "list of homosexual undergraduates" in

Bevis Hillier Bevis Hillier (born 28 March 1940) is an English art historian, author and journalist. He has written on Art Deco, and also a biography of Sir John Betjeman. Life and work Hillier was born in Redhill, Surrey, where the family lived at 27, Wh ...

's ''Young Betjeman'', "I knew Ketton-Cremer... and never heard a suggestion that he had physical relations with another human being, then t Oxfordor throughout his life." He stood godfather to the children of his friends, including

Tristram Powell Tristram Roger Dymoke Powell'Powell of The Chantry' pedigree, Burke's Peerage website (born 25 April 1940) is an English television and film director, producer and screenwriter. His credits include ''American Friends'', episodes of series Foyle's ...

, son of Anthony Powell.

Public appointments

He was a justice of the peace and as such was required to witness two hangings. He was a major in the East Norfolk Home Guard during the Second World War. He served as

High Sheriff of Norfolk The high sheriff is the oldest secular office under the Crown and is appointed annually (in March) by the Crown. The High Sheriff of Norfolk was originally the principal law enforcement officer in Norfolk and presided at the assizes and other imp ...

in 1951–52 and was a trustee of National Portrait Gallery.

Writing

Ketton-Cremer wrote widely on the history of his native Norfolk as well as number of biographies, including one of Whig statesman

William Windham William Windham (4 June 1810) of Felbrigg Hall in Norfolk, was a British Whig statesman. Elected to Parliament in 1784, Windham was attached to the remnants of the Rockinghamite faction of Whigs, whose members included his friends Charles J ...

, one of politician Horace Walpole, and one of the poet

Thomas Gray Thomas Gray (26 December 1716 – 30 July 1771) was an English poet, letter-writer, classical scholar, and professor at Pembroke College, Cambridge. He is widely known for his '' Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,'' published in 1751. G ...

, for which he won the

James Tait Black Award The James Tait Black Memorial Prizes are literary prizes awarded for literature written in the English language. They, along with the Hawthornden Prize, are Britain's oldest literary awards. Based at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, Uni ...

. An annotated bibliography was published in 1995. His works include: *''The Early Life and Diaries of William Windham''. Faber and Faber, London, 1930. *''Horace Walpole: A Biography''. Faber and Faber, London, 1940; revised edition 1946. *''Oliver Le Neve and his duel with Sir Henry Hobart'', National Trust Collections, Felbrigg Hall, 1941 *''Norfolk Portraits'', 1944 *''A Norfolk Gallery'', 1948 *''Country Neighbourhood''. Faber and Faber, London, 1951. *''Thomas Gray'', 1955 *''Norfolk Assembly'', 1957 *''Forty Norfolk Essays'', 1961 *''Felbrigg: The Story of a House'', 1962 *''Norfolk in the Civil War: A portrait of a society in conflict.'' Faber and Faber, London, 1969.

Honours

In 1968, Ketton-Cremer was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA). He was also an elected

Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London A fellow is a concept whose exact meaning depends on context. In learned or professional societies, it refers to a privileged member who is specially elected in recognition of their work and achievements. Within the context of higher education ...

(FSA) and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL). He was awarded an honorary

Doctor of Letters Doctor of Letters (D.Litt., Litt.D., Latin: ' or ') is a terminal degree in the humanities that, depending on the country, is a higher doctorate after the Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) degree or equivalent to a higher doctorate, such as the Docto ...

(LittD) by the

University of East Anglia The University of East Anglia (UEA) is a public research university in Norwich, England. Established in 1963 on a campus west of the city centre, the university has four faculties and 26 schools of study. The annual income of the institution f ...

in 1969.'KETTON-CREMER, Robert Wyndham', ''

Who Was Who ''Who's Who'' is a reference work. It is a book, and also a CD-ROM and a website, giving information on influential people from around the world. Published annually as a book since 1849, it lists people who influence British life, according to i ...

'', A & C Black, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc, 1920–2016; online edn, Oxford University Press, 2014; online edn, April 201
accessed 4 Aug 2017
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Death and legacy

Ketton-Cremer died on 12 December 1969. He bequeathed Felbrigg Hall to the National Trust. A brief memoir was written shortly after his death by the literary scholar

Mary Lascelles Mary Madge Lascelles (7 February 1900 – 10 December 1995) was a British literary scholar, specialising in Jane Austen, Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson, and Walter Scott. She was vice-principal of Somerville College, Oxford, from 1947 to 1960, a ...

. To mark the 50th anniversary of the decriminalisation of sexual activity between men in England and Wales, in summer 2017 the National Trust organised a national "Prejudice and Pride" campaign highlighting the LGBT themes in its properties. At Felbrigg Hall that included displaying a short film— narrated by

Stephen Fry Stephen John Fry (born 24 August 1957) is an English actor, broadcaster, comedian, director and writer. He first came to prominence in the 1980s as one half of the comic double act Fry and Laurie, alongside Hugh Laurie, with the two starring ...

— in which it was revealed that Robert Wyndham Ketton-Cremer was gay, a fact previously only known to his close friends. Three of Ketton-Cremer's godchildren criticised the decision, claiming that a public outing would have been against Ketton-Cremer's wishes and accusing the Trust of using their godfather's private life to generate publicity. Fry defended the Trust's decision, justifying it by stating that in his view Ketton-Cremer had only kept his sexuality a secret because of pervasive homophobia and fear of prosecution during his lifetime. Catherine Bennett, in ''

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...

'', considered it "unfortunate" that the Trust attached the "ambiguous" Ketton-Cremer, who "had neither, his family says, come out nor moved... in circles where homosexuality was unconcealed" to the Prejudice and Pride campaign, as opposed to a figure such as the openly gay

James Lees-Milne (George) James Henry Lees-Milne (6 August 1908 – 28 December 1997) was an English writer and expert on country houses, who worked for the National Trust from 1936 to 1973. He was an architectural historian, novelist and biographer. His extensi ...

, "who more or less assembled the Trust’s collection of historic houses"; the "dire" short film featuring "someone silently mpersonatingKetton-Cremer" was considered "undeniably ambitious in imagining how etton-Cremermust have felt about his sexuality" in light of the fact that "unhelpfully, the squire appears to have left no records." Fry's stance- that objection to the dubiously-accurate "outing" of Ketton-Cremer must be attributed to homophobia- was also criticised as lacking nuance.

References

External links

Literary Norfolk: Ketton-Cremer, Felbrigg.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ketton-Cremer, R. W. 1906 births 1969 deaths English biographers People from Felbrigg 20th-century biographers English landowners People educated at Harrow School Alumni of Balliol College, Oxford English poets High Sheriffs of Norfolk English LGBT writers British gay writers English justices of the peace Fellows of the British Academy Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature Fellows of the Society of Antiquaries of London British Home Guard officers Trustees of the National Portrait Gallery Historians of Norfolk 20th-century male writers People from Plympton 20th-century LGBT people British LGBT poets