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Biography:
"Second son, born 5am at St Mary's Nursing home, Parsons Green." - so reads the entry in a tiny leather diary dated August 7th 1917. The diary belonged, according to family folklore, to a direct descendant of Robert Bane of Invervak, Harold Robinson a London lawyer, this son was Kenneth.
The family lived in Pinner, but Kenneth's father soon decided to move his young family, out of what was then a smog laden London, to Tunbridge Wells in Kent. He spent most of his childhood in the area before entering Wrekin College, Shropshire in 1931.
We met in Cambridge in 1990. A love of poetry, nature, the joy and pathos of music, were just some of the things that gave us such affinity. We believed together we could find that "quiet place that's green away from all mankind." There was however literary work planned or to be completed first.
Work at the Needham Institute on Science and Civilisation in China with his friend of fifty years, Joseph Needham, already over ninety, was a priority. He was also anxious to get his ideas for a very special book that had formulated in his mind into print. The poetry he had been writing since he was a boy still scattered in numerous notebooks, on scraps of paper, and some clearly lost, needed collating. There were indeed many projects to complete for a man already approaching the autumn of life.
This short biography is intended only to present Kenneth the literary man, the writer, the poet. His personal life so rich with happiness, sadness, stories of adventure, fun and accomplishment, military memoirs, and tales of Sarawak, must wait for another time.
Having had a fascination for poetry from an early age, by the time he began to read Classics at Oxford in 1936 he was already a published poet and had received prizes not only for his own work but also for his poetry translation.
In his second year, while studying Greats at University College, he was approached by C.K.Ogden, the inventor of 'Basic English' who requested that Kenneth write some poetry in 'Basic'; some of those poems can be found in this collection.
While still at Wrekin College in Shropshire his essay on Sir Stamford Raffles -which won the first prize of fifty guineas, a fortune to a schoolboy in the 1930s - prompted the head of the Raffles family to engage in correspondence with this young lad, correspondence which still survives, suggesting that he consider a career in Malaya. He did in fact work in Japanese translation and interrogation centres in Malaya, New Delhi and Singapore in 1945-46.
Kenneth was commissioned into the Royal Artillery and in December 1939 he joined the British expeditionary force in France as a gunner officer. The campaign in the Low Countries followed in 1940 and you will recognise many poems written during these desperate times, including his experiences at Dunkirk.
Hospitalised in 1942 in Cosham following injury he was visited not only by General Montgomery his commanding officer but by his friend C.K. Ogden resulting in Kenneth collaborating with H.G.Wells, at Wells' request, to translate the much celebrated Time Machine into Basic English. The vision was that people with a limited command of English could not only read and enjoy this imaginative and important work, but that Basic English could also open many other doors in education and literature.
Selected by the War Office to learn Japanese, he met John Pike who was to become a lifelong friend. Both were seconded to the Intelligence Corps and it was in this capacity that Kenneth served in Malaya and New Delhi as translator and interrogator. Later when interrogating the Japanese in Singapore he was present for the release of his own cousin from the dreaded prisoner of war camp, Changi.
During this period, poems of a sombre nature spilled from his pen on to scores of little scraps of paper. Due to the constraints of war and its obvious literary limitations, sadly some only survived in part. Grief for friends lost and horrors witnessed certainly coloured that period of Kenneth's writing.
After the war he worked for a short time on the preparation of educational booklets, filmstrips, etc., and on language simplification and research with C.K.Ogden.
In 1946 he returned as Edwin Arnold Memorial Scholar to Oxford, to study Classical Chinese. His plan was to become an archaeologist working at the Western end of the Great Wall of China. It was here in Oxford that Kenneth met Dr Joseph Needham and agreed to write a contribution on acoustics for one of the volumes of Science and Civilisation in China.
Apart from bringing up a family, studying and writing a thesis, he found time to write new poems some of which were printed in Poetry from Oxford, and the freshly re-introduced Oxford Poetry, which after four years silenced by the war, is a marvellous document for historians of poetry.
These post war years were not years of plenty and sadly it was not easy to find a suitable place to live particularly if you had a small child. For a while Kenneth lived with his first wife Peggy and young son James in a real gipsy caravan in Oxfordshire, sold later for twenty guineas, a princely sum to them at that time. The small family embraced the essence of this extended community life style and I believe there are elements of that influence in his book, The Way and The Wilderness.
In 1949 Kenneth set up the Makers Club, the aim of which was to bring together writers of verse and music. Activities included the reading of verse and plays, singing, speech, rhythm and ultimately the recording of examples of polyphonic verse. Sadly it has not been practical to include any of his polyphonic poetry in this collection, but some is still available, together with some old 78-rpm records from his Makers Club days, to anyone interested.
In 1952 he joined the Overseas Education Service and was appointed Education Officer in Singapore where he initiated the first teacher training in the Chinese language. Some especially happy times in Sarawak, ultimately as Director of Education, followed where he not only made many wonderful friends but wrote short stories of his experiences. In Sarawak he would often frequent the villages and Long Houses of the Dayaks and other peoples, their remarkable orchestras evoking in him the music of the Choe and Han. The fourth volume of Science and Civilisation in China was published while he was there and included Kenneth's contribution, the section on Acoustics, combining not only his interest in, but his knowledge of, sinology, music and Chinese history.
In 1968 he joined UNESCO as advisor to the Government of West Cameroon on educational planning in order to help them integrate education in the Francophone and Anglophone parts of the country. During this period he wrote a number of books and papers on education and some of his poetry in a lighter vein comes from the years spent in South East Asia.
Kenneth was a fine man who typified all that was best about a generation whose plans, lives and education were interrupted by the war in which they fought, a generation that had to mature abruptly. His long career in education continued in Paris and Hamburg still working for UNESCO Institute for Education as editor of the International Review of Education and other publications until 1979, when he decided it was time to join his old friend Joseph Needham in Cambridge as sub editor of Science and Civilisation in China. Together they worked towards the opening of The Needham Research Institute and library, a welcome move from their cold, cramped offices in Brooklands Avenue.
It was in Cambridge that Kenneth achieved his long held ambition to write a book about the complexities of modern science and the challenges that result from our present understanding of the universe. The Way in the Wilderness was published in 1993, followed by its sequel, Beyond the Wilderness. Both books were greatly influenced by his Taoist ideas and principles. His friend of 50 years, Joseph Needham, died March 1995 at the age of 94. Joseph Needham: A Soliloquy, written by Kenneth and used at Joseph's memorial, was printed in the Cambridge Review 1995.
Kenneth's editing of the final volume of 'Science and Civilisation in China, Volume 7 - Joseph's conclusions', was a mammoth task and he was becoming increasingly frail. However, never one to disappoint, he managed to complete the work and it was published by the Cambridge University Press in 2005 and launched at the University Library Bookshop just before Christmas of that year.
Kenneth sadly died soon after, in June 2006, before he was able to complete his other lifetime ambition to assemble just some of the many poems he wrote into a small anthology. This is the result; poems inspired by Peggy his first wife, poems of a little son who died in infancy, poems of other lands, other dimensions, and the stark poetry of war. Poems too that are very special to me.
In one of the many letters he left me, addressed, 'to Angela in the darkest hour', he asked me to: "Sort out my poems and in sorting them we will be talking together."
