Kemp, Harry

Harry Vincent Kemp (1911-1994) was born the son of a self-educated engineer. He was educated at Stowe and at Clare College, Cambridge, where he read mathematics. At Cambridge he became a Communist, but gave up on this as a teacher shortly afterwards, an intellectual development which he wrote about with his friend, Laura Riding, in the late thirties and published as The Left Heresy in Literature and Life (Methuen, 1939). During the War he was at first at conscientious objector, but on the fall of France he decided to join up and spent most of the next six years as a radar officer in the North East, being transferred abroad in 1945. By this date he had met the painter, musician and musicologist, Marylin Wailes (1896-1990), with whom he spent 'ten years of happy domestic life' (according to the obituary he wrote for himself in 1976). He spent his career teaching mathematics and writing poetry as a hobby. He married and divorced twice, and had two children.