Hugh Kenyon
Epithet: Director of prison administration (1910-1981)
Record type: Biographies
Biography: From ‘New Manx Worthies’ (2006):
Hugh Kenyon was the second son of Revd Thomas Kenyon, who had been a Bishop Wilson College graduate and a curate at Kirk Andreas. His mother was the daughter of Archdeacon Hugh Stowell Gill. Whilst at Rossall School, Hugh exhibited qualities of leadership and at an early age an aptitude for music. Leaving school at nineteen, he won an organ scholarship to St John's, Oxford, where he took his MA as well as pursuing his studies as an organ scholar. He seemed destined to go thence into the Anglican Church, but being a man of high principle he felt unable to subscribe to many of the 39 Articles laid down in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer.
He abandoned theology and instead, in 1934, joined Oxford House, the university charity operating in London's Bethnal Green. Thus he met up with a group of dedicated young men such as Guy Clutton-Brock. Attracted by the magnetism of Alexander Paterson's personality and by Paterson's belief that Borstals and open prisons could be used to form character, Kenyon joined the prison service. In 1935 he was chosen to assist Llewellyn and others in establishing a new Borstal at North Sea Camp on the Wash, where staff and boys living and working together created one of the most successful penal establishments between the two wars. There he met up with a group of other dedicated young men, notably Murray Dickson and his brother, Alec, who was to found Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) which in due course Kenyon's own son and nephew joined and served with in Borneo.
Another new but different type of Borstal had been built at Lowdham Grange in Nottinghamshire, to which Kenyon was appointed as Governor in 1946. In 1950 he was posted to Portland, then a Borstal where the most dangerous 'lads' were sent. Shortly before his arrival riots had caused extensive damage to the buildings. Ignoring the attempts of the staff to shield him from the most violent inmates, Kenyon insisted on direct contact with the leaders of the riot. He succeeded where perhaps a more cautious approach might have failed, and in a few days Portland was back to normal.
There followed a period when, transferred from Borstal to the prison side, he became Governor of Winson Green, Birmingham and then Assistant Director of Prison Administration. It was written of him, 'Hugh Kenyon was the housemaster who best understood boys and had most control and influence over them. He was greatly loved by Borstal boys who had come under his care'.
By the 1960s great changes to the prison service were afoot and the escape from Wormwood Scrubs by the spy Blake triggered government intervention. This led to the absorption of the Prison Commission into a department of the Home Office, with the emphasis on maximum security throughout at the expense of progress in the field of treatment and rehabilitation.
Roy Jenkins was Home Secretary when Harold Wilson, as Prime Minister, appointed Lord Louis Mountbatten to examine and report on the way prisons were run. Kenyon had by this time become Director of Prison Administration and inevitably the Mountbatten intervention turned upside down the ideals and aims which his generation had assimilated from Paterson and Llewellyn.
Amid a brief interlude of media speculation, the newspapers of 2nd September 1967 headlined 'Prison chief quits in Home Office policy split'. Kenyon had had enough. He was not going to serve out his term of office enforcing policies which were contrary to all his training and. instincts. His resignation was not allowed to be unfruitful. He was given several overseas consultative or investigative appointments, including Bermuda and the Bahamas, but most importantly a long spell in Japan in 1968-69 where a group photograph shows him seated in the front row, five seats away from one of the imperial princes.
He died of cancer on 28th February 1981, at the age of 71. In his obituary it was written 'His career covered a period during which the golden age of the 1930s faded. It was largely due to Kenyon's humanity that this fading spirit never declined into cynicism, despair or other corrupting philosophies'.
Biography written by J. Stowell Kenyon (brother).
(With thanks to Culture Vannin as publishers of the book: Kelly, Dollin (general editor), ‘New Manx Worthies’, Manx Heritage Foundation/Culture Vannin, 2006, pp.240-1.)
Culture Vannin
#NMW
Nationality: English
Gender: Male
Date of birth: 11 January 1910
Date of death: 28 February 1981
Name Variant: Kenyon, H.