Eric Kennington: Cunning Memorial Font
Title: Cunning Memorial Font
Artist: Eric Kennington (1888–1960, British)
Location: St Michael’s, Betchworth (C of E)
Date: 1949–51
It is not clear exactly who suggested the Cunning memorial take the novel form of a font but Kennington is known to have greatly admired a series of elaborately carved 12th- and early 13th-century fonts he inspected during the latter half of the 1930s in Herefordshire, Worcestershire, Dorset and Shropshire. Given the artist’s practical and down-to-earth nature, it is likely that idea of the memorial possessing a practical function would have greatly appealed to him along with the thought that a font was at the centre of one of the happiest occasions to take place within any church as the site for where numberless new members were baptised and welcomed into the Anglican faith.
The PCC Minutes in July 1949 indicate that Kennington had already decided on the material for the font – it was to be carved from Ancaster stone – and on its attractive decorative scheme. Carved into the sides of the font would be four figures: a Mother holding a small baby in her arms by a crib; a benign St George spearing a rather unthreatening, almost apologetic- looking dragon; Christ being baptised in the river Jordan; and the most innovative element, but relevant to the font’s memorial purpose, an RAF pilot, complete with a stylish ‘pencil moustache’ standing with jaunty insouciance pulling a parachute behind him with his left hand as if he has only recently had to parachute out of his stricken aircraft and having safely reached earth was gathering up the parachute for reuse as regulations demanded.
Eric Kennington (1888–1960, British) had been a sincere if idiosyncratic Anglican since before the First World War. Unlike many, his Christian faith was not weakened by his searing experience of front-line combat as a private in the 13th battalion of the London Regiment (the Kensingtons) in France in 1914–15; if anything, he emerged from the Great War with his attachment to the Anglican church strengthened. He decided to become a full time sculptor in 1922 and his first public monument, to the First World War dead of the 24th Infantry Division was unveiled in Battersea Park in October 1924. The Bishop of London officiated at the ceremony and after having a word with Kennington was hopeful that he might be able to produce sculpture for the interior of an Anglican Church. His hopes, however, would not be realised although he was soon to receive a flood of high-profile sculpture commissions.
Further Information
Medium: Ancaster stone
Permanent display
See Kennington’s Cunning Memorial Font on the Ecclesiart map here.
Commissioner: Revd Kenneth G Hoare & Mrs Annie Cunning
Other artworks in churches by Eric Kennington: recumbent effigy of T. E. Lawrence on his tomb in St Martin's church, Wareham, Dorset (1940)
Related A+C journal article(s): Excerpt from Jonathan Black’s ‘A very British sculptor’ in Art and Christianity 78.