Richard D North

In 1924, Stanley Kennedy North drew two maps, one for the Thomas Cook tourist business and the other a London transport map for the 1924 British Empire Exhibition (the one featured in The King's Speech).

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Before he married his second wife HelenKennedy, and adopted her name, my grandfather Stanley married Vera Rawnsley, and they produced my father, Paul. She later married, first, Filson Young, and, second, Clifford Bax.

Here is Staney's stained glass portrait of a young woman, by family tradition, his wife Vera.

This is the third of three posts on Stanley Kennedy North's work for the Colman family of Norwich mustard fame. (See #1 here and #2  here.)

SKN did three pieces of stained glass for the great Norfolk mustard makers, and this, the third, is a large (I guess six foot by six foot) set of panels which add up to a heraldic device celebrating the Colman's. It is currently (October, 14) dismantled as panels, in store at the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, in the care of NNUH's Arts Project and its chief, Emma Jarvis.

The panel is built round a pair of panels with the text (repunctuated):
"Geoffrey Russell Rees Colman, 1892 – 1935, chairman of this hospital 1932-33, in whose memory this maternity wing was built by his parents Russell James Colman and Edith Margaret Colman, in the year of our Lord 1938. For thy peace thou wast beloved."

Here's a gallery of other images from this heraldic work:

This is the second of three posts on Stanley Kennedy North's stained glass commissioned by the Colman family of Norfolk. Here, further to the first SKN glass post, on his Wheel of Life, is another, on his Tree of Life. The third post is a heraldic panel devoted to the Colman's.

Here's a gallery on The Tree of Life:

And some discussion of the work…

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Stanley Kennedy North did three beautiful large stained glass works for the  Colman mustard family of Norfolk to commemorate their donations to Norwich's pre-NHS hospitals. The works are now in the care of the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital's Arts Project, managed by Emma Jarvis.

This is #1, The Wheel of Life, is on display. See here for #2, The Tree of Life and see here for #3 for SKN's Colman family heraldic device.

Here is a gallery of the Wheel of Life:

The Wheel of Life is about six feet high by four or five feet wide. Typically of SKN's work, it is a joyous mix of Arts and Crafts and Modernism. It celebrates the human, including agriculture; flora and fauna; and has an astrological theme as well.

Stanley North, or Stanley Kennedy North (and sometimes, as below in the carol work, Kennedy North) as he became on his marriage to Helen Kennedy (his second wife), was a strikingly modern illustrator but almost as much a passionate medievalist – as we see in various images in the rest of this page.

The image below is a detail from SKN's triptych for the Royal Academy of Music, which best described at the RAM's online museum and best seen at the BBC/PCF site.

SKN's Royal Academy of Music tribute to Tobias Matthay, detail

Moving on to other rather similar Stanley North medievalist offerings, see below… More »

Stanley North, by then calling himself Stanley Kennedy North, in recognition of his marriage to Helen Kennedy, illustrated and (presumably) produced this marvellous little book, Mr North's Maggot (so called after a folk dance formulation). It is dedicated to Helen and has a foreword by Cecil Sharp, the great revivalist (and preserver) of the form and founder of the English Folk Dance and Song Society.

Here are two galleries of SKN's Maggot. The first has smallish images and alterates the illustrations with related scraps of lyric:

The second has larger, cropped images, and text and illustrations are unsorted:

Sometime during the autumn of 1914 (I am presuming), my grandfather, Stanley North produced these marvellous images to illustrate Geoffrey Whitworth's "Child's ABC of the War". It was in the spirit of much of the artistic and literary response to the declaration of war.

Here is a gallery of the complete work…