Digging and Delving

Great news - Landscapes Live! careers off in a whole new direction 

It all started, innocently enough, with a bit of research into the Kennedy Memorial Archives to find some new resources for the school visits.  Within days, Annabel Downs, the project volunteer researcher, was uncovering some serious new stuff on Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe and the design of the J F Kennedy memorial. 

Annabel writes:

I’ve been interested in Jellicoe since I first pulled out one of his drawings from his plan chest at the Landscape Institute library, and there is nothing quite like looking closely at one of Jellicoe’s original plans, inked and pencilled on tracing paper. 

I am enthusiastic in joining the team with this Runnymede project on several counts - the idea of encouraging children to explore this site and become curious about a 20c designed landscape is brilliant and we could do so much more of this. But the hard information about the process of designing the Kennedy Memorial at Runnymede was, I thought, fairly limited. I knew the LI archive had a number of Susan Jellicoe’s photos but there was none of the original drawings. I was even more keen to help with the research on this project because curiously, when I was working on the LI's archive, this was the one aspect that generated most queries.

Because the focus of the Kennedy Memorial project was on the life and death of President John F Kennedy, it was dealt with at the highest level in Government: Prime Ministers past, present and future (Harold Macmillan, Sir Alec Douglas-Home and Harold Wilson), Cabinet Office, Foreign Office, Treasury, Department of Education and Science, Ministry of Housing and Local Government, Crown Estate Commissioners, The Lord Mayor of London, the Governor of the Bank of England, Dame Margot Fonteyn, UK and US Ambassadors past and present, Her Majesty the Queen, Vic Feather, a good number of Lords, and a great number of civil servants all played a part in making this happen, with the whole thing moving almost at a sprint at times to get everything completed for the inauguration ceremony on May 14^th 1965.

I am pleased to say that a lot of Jellicoe is being discovered peeping through all this, of which more anon...