Robert Ketton-Cremer

Notable Works

• Horace Walpole: A Biography (1940) and (Revised Edition 1946) Faber and Faber, London
• Thomas Gray (1955)
• Felbrigg: The Story of a House (1962)

About

Robert Wyndham Ketton-Cremer was born in Plympton, Devon, on 2 May 1906 to Wyndham Cremer Ketton-Cremer and his wife Emily Bayly. He attended Harrow School and Balliol College, Oxford, where he published poetry. He inherited the Norfolk estate Felbrigg Hall on the death of his father in 1933. He wrote widely on the history of his native Norfolk and biographies, including of politicians William Windham and Horace Walpole, and poet Thomas Gray, for which he won the James Tait Black Award. In 1968, he was elected Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL).

Ketton-Cremer never married. He was a closet homosexual, though close friends were aware of his sexuality. Novelist and critic Anthony Powell, who dedicated his novel The Kindly Ones to Ketton-Cremer, later questioned Ketton-Cremer’s name being included in a “list of homosexual undergraduates” in Bevis Hillier’s Young Betjeman, “I never heard a suggestion that he had physical relations with another human being, at Oxford or throughout his life.”  Ketton-Cremer died on 12 December 1969 and bequeathed Felbrigg Hall to the National Trust.

Legacy

He inherited the Norfolk estate Felbrigg Hall on the death of his father in 1933 and wrote widely on the history of his native Norfolk.

His gift of Royalties to the RLF from his literary estate helps support future generations of writers.