Visitors returning from a trip to see my mother, Mary Kenyon, who has died aged 94, would never be asked how she was, but always “what did you eat?” She was an artist with a four-ring 1970s cooker.
Born in Ilkeston, Derbyshire, the daughter of Mabel (nee Rowell) and Captain Claude Humphrys, Mary grew up in Nottinghamshire. When her father retired from the navy, he bought a fruit farm in Essex. She went to Chelmsford high school, where she was head girl in 1939. She recalled going with the headteacher to give sweets to the girls sheltering in the trenches dug in the school playing fields during the second world war.
Mary studied English at Somerville College, Oxford (where she was tutored by JRR Tolkien), then volunteered for foreign service, hoping to be “a beautiful spy in Valparaiso”. Instead she was sent to Bletchley Park, to the famous Hut 6 (tasked with decoding the Enigma transmissions), where she worked with Asa Briggs. Interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, she recounted how filthy the Bletchley huts were, as no cleaners were allowed to enter. She did not tell her family about Bletchley until the 80s and was sad that her father had not known about her war service.
After the war she worked at the publisher Eyre & Spottiswoode, and met Max Kenyon, a music critic, whom she married in 1948. They moved to a dilapidated medieval hall house in Hutton, Essex. Mary recalled the trauma of cooking for her brother-in-law, the TV chef Philip Harben (married to Max’s sister), who arrived for dinner in his Bentley, with the villagers staring through the kitchen windows.
In 1950 the local authority declared the house uninhabitable and issued an order for it to be demolished. This bureaucratic vandalism prompted Mary to found the Hutton Preservation Society. Its influence was crucial as Hutton’s population grew from 400 to 17,000 as London expanded.
Mary made her first poppy appeal collection in 1938 and her last in 2015, by which time she was a well-known figure at the local train station in Shenfield. She was a churchwarden and parish council member for more than 60 years and a trustee of a 16th-century charity providing for the parish poor. One of her last acts was to dictate a letter to me containing forceful guidance to her fellow trustees.
Max died in 1991. Mary is survived by their three children, Susanna, Corinna and me, and by five grandchildren, Charlotte, Alice, Cordelia, Henry and Ned, and a great-grandson, Archie.
