David Kindersley
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David Guy Barnabas Kindersley (11 June 1915-1995) was a British stonecutter and typeface designer. His carved plaques and inscriptions in stone and slate are to be seen on many churches and public buildings in the United Kingdom. Kindersley was a designer of the Octavian font for Monotype in 1961 as a fine book face. He and his wife Lida Lopes Cardozo designed the main gates for the British Library.
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[edit] Early life
Kindersley was born at Codicote near Hitchen, the son of Major Guy Molesworth Kindersley a stockbroker MP and the grandson on his mother's side of the Arts and Crafts potter Sir Edmund Elton. He was educated at St Cyprian's School, Eastbourne, where "he had a wonderful time", becoming head boy, and the sharpness of his eye was shown by his outstanding skill at shooting. However the time was tinged with sadness on the death of his elder brother Hallam at Westminster. Kindersley went on to Marlborough College, but left after three years because of rheumatoid arthritis. After recovery he was sent to Paris to learn French and startied sculpture with the Iduni brothers. He began to read the books of Eric Gill and decided to become a stone-cutter. He became an apprentice to Gill in his workshop at Pigotts High Wycombe in December 1934, with the support of his father who insisted on paying an apprenticeship indemnity. For Gill he worked on important commissions including Bentall's store in Kingston upon Thames, St. John's College, Oxford and Dorset House.
[edit] Independent activity
Kindersley left Gill in 1936 and set up his own workshop on the River Arun where he still worked on commission for Gill. He married his first wife Christine at the beginning of World War II and with her ran a tiny pub in Dorset. As a conscientious objector he refused to be put in a position where he would have to kill; he sought, however, to join the Home Guard, but his application was rejected. On the death of Eric Gill in 1940, he spent some time sorting out the affairs of Gill's workshop at Pigotts.
[edit] Cambridge workshop
In 1945 Kindersley moved to Cambridgeshire, and set up his first fully-fledged letter-cutting workshop at Dales Barn in the village of Barton. This was a time of stylistic liberation for Kindersley, in which he broke away from Gill in his decorative embellishments of cutting, in his growing predilection for lettering on slate and the combination of lettering with heraldry. But in the organisation of the workshop, and his aims for it, the sense of dynastic inheritance was strong. At this time he started teaching calligraphy at Cambridge Art School, having initially gone to enrol for the course. He had a major commission carving relief maps for the American War Cemetery and also became a consultant for film titles through his cousin Sir Arthur Elton who was in charge of film making at Shell Oil.
Kindersley invented a system for the accurate spacing of letters, which though often praised, has not seen wide adoption. In 1952 he submitted a design, MoT Serif, to the British Ministry of Transport, who required new lettering to use on UK road signs. Although the Road Research Laboratory found this was more legible, his all-capitals design with serifs was passed over in favour of that of Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert. Many of the street signs in England, especially in Cambridge use Kindersley fonts.
The survival of a workshop culture in a post-war climate of industrial expansion preoccupied Kindersley through the 1950s and 1960s when he was a leading figure in the Designer Craftsman Society and the Crafts Council of Great Britain of which he eventually became Chairman.
He moved his workshop from Barton to the 14th century Chesterton Tower in 1967 and then, ten years later, to the converted infants' school in Victoria Road, the premises the Cardozo Kindersley Workshop still occupies. In these successive locations Kindersley was able to demonstrate how well a small, specialist, quasi familial grouping of crafts people could work to an impeccably high standard whilst sustaining itself financially.
In January 2000 a memorial plaque designed by Kindersley's widow was unveiled at Addenbrooke's Hospital to join more than 20 lettered plaques and inscriptions created by David Kindersley and his workshop. The first plaque had commemorated the opening of the new hospital in 1962.
Kindersley's children by his first marriage included Peter Kindersley co-founder of Dorling-Kindersley.
[edit] Contemplative aspects
At Barton, Kindersley evolved his own ideas of wholeness, his mid-20th century development of Gill's 'cell of good living in the chaos of our world', the place of integration where bed and board, home and school and work and worship merge.
Though not formally religious, David Kindersley had a strongly contemplative side. He was a maker who was also a quester, deeply influenced by the writings of the Russian philosopher P. D. Ouspensky and for a time a member of the Walker Group, an Ouspenskyist self-help discussion group in London. His view of the workshop was always to remain essentially spiritual.
The drawing, cutting, painting and fixing in position became a workshop ritual in which not just Kindersley and his assistants but the client, whose involvement was seen as the completion of the almost mystic triangle, all shared. Working out from this disciplined framework David Kindersley designed a number of typefaces and devised a computerised typesetting system, translating Ruskinian ideals of creative individuality and human judgment into 20th century technology.
[edit] Publications
- Kindersley, David and Lida Lopes Cardozo (1981). Letters Slate Cut: workshop practice and the making of letters. London: Lund Humphries. ISBN 0853314292.
[edit] References
- Oxford Dictionary of National Biography - Lottie Hoare, Kindersley, David Guy Barnabas (1915–1995), 2004,
- Montague Shaw David Kindersley: His work and workshop Cardozo Kindersley Editions 1989
- Fiona MacCarthy, ABC: David Kindersley. Cambridge: Kettle's Yard Gallery (2000).
- G. W. O. Addleshaw Architects, Sculptors, Painters, Craftsmen 1660-1960 Whose Work is to be Seen in York Minster Architectural History, Vol. 10, 1967 (1967),
