From consensus to dissensus – history and meaning in flux at Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe’s Kennedy Memorial landscape

Abstract

ions into fact. Makins was a representative of that quintessentially English phenomenon, the safe pair of hands. Ever since his congratulatory First Class award from Christ Church College, Oxford, in 1925, he had made a success of more or less everything he had attempted. In a distinguished career, sorting out the Kennedy Memorial was a footnote at best, and one that does not even merit mention in his compendious Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry. Against a background of bureaucratic manoeuvring, Sir Roger had to choose a designer to whom the aesthetic challenges of the memorial site at Runnymede could be transferred. In search of such a person, a letter was sent out, twice, on the 15 April 1964: to Gordon Ricketts, the Secretary of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA); and to the Secretary of the Landscape Institute — erroneously aggrandised in this instance to the Royal Institute of Landscape — Miss Alison Dale. Both were asked to ‘suggest the names of one or two consultants who would advise [Sir Roger Makins’s] committee on [...] matters connected with the memorial and site at Runnymede’. The RIBA wrote back with a shortlist of three — Peter Shepheard, Frederick Gibberd and Jellicoe. The Landscape Institute offered only one name, that of their co-founder and former president Geoffrey Jellicoe, though their incumbent president, L Milner White, also suggested ‘that in a matter of such public interest a competition for the design might be held’. Shrewd Sir Roger ignored this time-consuming and perilously open-ended option. Thus was sealed the fate of one of British landscape design’s best-known commissions. Jellicoe would go on to produce other highly regarded works, including the garden at Sutton Place (1980), the unbuilt Moody Gardens at Galveston, Texas (1984) and the gardens at Shute House in Dorset (1993). Though by no means a household name in 1964, he was already recognised in professional circles for his designs between the Wars at Pusey House and Mottisfont Abbey (1936–39); and after 1945 for his contribution to the Festival of Britain’s Lansbury Estate (1951) and theWater Gardens at Hemel Hempstead (1959). Yet even with these to his name, Geoffrey Jellicoe must have been pleasantly surprised by the ease with which the plum Kennedy Memorial commission fell into his lap. Makins met Jellicoe for the first time, at Runnymede, on Saturday 2 May 1964. Back at work the following Monday, the mandarin ventured into memorandum and letter to tell fellow civil servants that Jellicoe was ‘recommended to us as the best man for the job’, ‘not only willing but anxious to do the work’, and, very conveniently, that ‘his first thoughts are very much in line with [...] mine’. After the site visit, Jellicoe acted with equal celerity. He wrote to Makins on 4 May: ‘just to confirm, if confirmation is necessary, that I am very pleased and honoured to undertake the Kennedy Memorial at Runnymede. [...] Saturday morning itself was memorable!’ He asked for Makins’s permission to get a survey underway immediately; spent ‘a very wet figure 3. National Trust information panel outside the wicket gate sets out the official programme for the Kennedy Memorial (photograph by Jane Porter). studies in the history of gardens and designed landscapes: entwistle