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Hugh Kemp
Hugh Kemp
HUGH Kemp, the Yorkshire artist, forester and conservationist who has been credited with being first to introduce commercial Christmas tree growing and then holiday cottages to the Dales, has died aged 84.
So successful was the combination of Christmas trees and forestry coupled with conservation – shaped powerfully by his wife Jane Kemp – that red squirrels moved into his valley in Wensleydale a decade ago, probably from Cumbria:
Bird and other animal life in their valley near Hawes, also increased dramatically, further encouraged by extensive mixed planting and sensitive management, providing a rich range of habitats.
Such was Mr Kemp’s entrepreneurial instinct that he laid claim to beginning the holiday cottage industry in the Yorkshire Dales after investing the first of his Christmas tree income in cottages in Gayle and barns in Snaizeholme before advertising them successfully. Lets quickly rose to cover 40 weeks of the year.
Yet he achieved all this in the face of initial opposition: locals and visitors alike told him neither would work after he bought the 90-plus acre farm at Mirk Pot in Snaizeholme in 1967.
They felt trees wouldn’t grow at a thousand feet above sea level and didn’t belong in the landscape; and that visitors only arrived in coachloads, as he recorded in his 2007 book Tees & Wildlife in Wensleydale.
A wider campaign by environmentalists against upland conifer growing became fashionable in the 1980s – they would be amazed to see the biodiversity of Snaizeholme and the progress of squirrels, pine marten, deer and birdlife now.
Snaizeholme became a Yorkshire Naturalists’ (later Wildlife) Trust Reserve in the 1970s too, but the Kemps withdrew it after what they felt was unimaginative advice and unrealistic management suggestions. Few seemed to understand that both the business and wildlife had to flourish.
Later Mr Kemp invested in property in York, which had also benefited from his phoned-through flood warnings taken from the weather station he ran in Snaizeholme for 12 years for the Yorkshire Water Authority, the Met Office and The Agromet Station in Harrogate.
Hugh Kemp was born in York in 1927 where his father was a civil servant. However most of his childhood holidays were spent on his grandfather’s farm on the edge of the Yorkshire Wolds and these visits were to be a great and happy influence on him.
His time as an art scholar at Birmingham Art School and then The Ruskin School of Art in Oxford, following National Service starved of light and colour as a “Bevin Boy” down a coal mine in Staffordshire, led to a parallel passion and career as an artist:
At Ruskin, he studied under Albert Rutherston. He believed, as did so many contemporary artists, that an artist’s salvation was to develop not only one’s own style, but more importantly one’s own language.
Visiting artists to the Ruskin in the late 1940s included Richard Rowntree, John Minton, John Piper and Victor Pasmore. He also met Jane there for the first time and later married her after his first marriage ended in divorce. But not before he had learned how to make money from trees and property in Kent and on the Isle of Mull.
The Kemps made a great success of Christmas Trees, forestry, holiday cottages, conservation and his painting in Snaizeholme over more than 40 years.
Hugh Kemp is survived by Jane, their boys David and Magnus and his son Chris from his first marriage as well as his grandchildren.
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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