Sir Coleridge Arthur Fitzroy Kennard, 1st Baronet

Sir Coleridge 'Roy' Arthur Fitzroy Kennard, 1st Baronet (12 May 1885 – 7 October 1948) was a wealthy English diplomat. He is mostly remembered as a supporter and literary confidant of Ronald Firbank.

Parentage

Kennard was the only child of Helen (née Wyllie) Kennard (1856–1928) and Lieutenant Hugh Coleridge Downing Kennard (1859–1886) of the 1st Battalion of the Grenadier Guards, who married in 1883. After his father's death in 1886, his mother remarried to James Laurence Carew, an Irish nationalist politician and Member of Parliament, in 1896.

Baronetcy and fortune

In 1891, the then five-year-old Kennard was created baronet of Fernhill in the County of Southampton. The baronetcy was originally intended for his grandfather and namesake Coleridge Kennard, co-founder of the Evening News and Member of Parliament for Salisbury from 1882 to 1885, who had died on 25 December 1890, before the patent was gazetted. His grandmother Ellen Georgiana Kennard had on 17 January 1892 been granted the style and precedence as if her husband had been created a baronet.

Kennard also inherited the bulk of the fortune of his grandfather.

Early life

Kennard was educated at Eton College. The portrait was exhibited anonymously in 1924 under the title "Le portrait de Dorian Gray".

Personal life Kennard married twice, and fathered two sons, and is rumoured to have been bisexual, not least due to some of his homoerotic verse.

Kennard married Dorothy on 5 April 1911, Dorothy, an author who published a book about her life in Roumania, was the only child of Barclay and his American wife, Lady Barclay, the former Beatrix Mary Jay Chapman. Dorothy's maternal grandfather was Henry Grafton Chapman Jr., who served as President of the New York Stock Exchange, and her uncle was noted writer John Jay Chapman. Her maternal great-grandfather was John Jay, the U.S. Minister to Austria-Hungary. Before their 1918 divorce, they were the parents of two sons:

Sir Lawrence Ury Charles Kennard, 2nd Baronet (1912–1967), who married Joan Liesl Perschke, daughter of William Thomas Perschke. Sir George Arnold Ford Kennard, 3rd Baronet (1915–1999), a Lieutenant-Colonel of the 4th Queen's Own Hussars who married four times. After her father's death, her brother became the 2nd Baronet, and her sister, Helen Merryday Orr-Lewis, married Sir Albert Gerald Stern.

Kennard died on 7 October 1948 and his eldest son became the 2nd Kennard baronet. Upon the death of his youngest son, the third Baronet, the baronetcy became extinct as there were no male issue.

Literary Works

Olympia, Or How the Secrets of the East were Lost For Ever: an extravaganza (Arthur Barker, London 1934), a Firbankian tale set in Persia. Les Complaintes de St Denis (Jacques Haumont, Paris 1945), erotic doggeral, some homoerotic. Caresses et Blasphèmes (Impr. de J. Haumont, Paris 1945), erotic doggeral, some homoerotic. Gestapo: France, 1943-1945 (Grant Richards, London 1947); an account of Gestapo activities and atrocities in France.