My mother comes from a long line of Kennett's from Kent. Her grandfather was Thomas Kennett a chimney sweep from the St Nicholas area in Kent. He married Annie Jane Pointer from Romney Marsh and they lived in and ran a boarding house in Arklow Square, Ramsgate. Annie taught him to read and write. They had 10 children. Peter Herbert worked for Odd Fellows insurance. Herbert became a town councillor in Gloucester and had a daughter called Ruby. Clifford was brought up by his paternal grandparents being the eldest and worked in the wholesale friut and veg market in Margate. Anne worked in the box office of Ramsgate theatre. Lillian went into domestic service. Bruff worked for Baroness Orzy and became her cook. She married her groom Archibald Hooper. Jim, Stephen Jarvis, worked in a hotel in Ramsgate and then as a silver waiter with his brother Dick or Oldring Alex at the Trocadero in London. Dick was a veg chef. Jim was made redundant and went to work for British Rail.Gertie went into service and went to Australia with the family where she was apparantly unhappily married. Betty married a Golder.
Her mother met her father Samuel Levine, a headmaster of a boys boarding school in Minster. She was named after Estelle Levine her French grandmother. Samuel paid school fees for my Uncle Ronnie who attending a boarding school in Eastbourne until he was 14. He then transferred to a school in Ramsgate with my mother and gained enough qualifications to go to university. He chose instead to work for New Zealand Assurance company, where he became a manager before serving in the Royal Artillary in Normandy, France where he died in 1945.
When my grandmother Liilian was widowed she became the manageress at Express Dairies Kensington. She had lived in a third floor luxury flat in mansions at Parliament Hill Fields on Hampstead Heath with Wynn Davies who died of TB and left her penniless as he gambled as well as being chief accountant at Barnes of Hampstead. During this time my mother attended a private school.
