39 Facts About Kathleen Scott

Edith Agnes Kathleen Young, Baroness Kennet, FRBS was a British sculptor.

Kathleen Scott was the mother of Sir Peter Scott, the painter and naturalist and of the writer and politician Wayland Young from her second marriage to Edward Hilton Young.

Kathleen Scott is the grandmother of the sculptor Emily Young and of the writer Louisa Young.

An orphan by the age of eight, Kathleen Scott was brought up by a relative, William Forbes Skene, in Edinburgh where she attended St George's School before being sent to boarding schools in England including a convent school run by nuns.

Kathleen Scott studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London from 1900 to 1902.

In Paris, Kathleen Scott met Aleister Crowley, who wrote several poems about her, Gertrude Stein, the photographer Edward Steichen, Isadora Duncan and, very briefly, Pablo Picasso.

In December 1903, following the Ilinden uprising Kathleen Scott joined a relief mission to Macedonia, undertaking logistic duties and some basic nursing work at refugee camps.

Kathleen Scott spent the summer of 1906 at Noordwijk in the Netherlands supporting a pregnant Isadora Duncan and then spent some months on an island near Methana in Greece before moving to London.

In London, Kathleen Scott took a flat in Cheyne Walk and made a series of portrait busts, mostly of young men.

Kathleen Scott recovered and subsequently assisted her upstairs neighbour, a district maternity nurse, on house calls to deliver babies.

The couple took a house on Buckingham Palace Road in London and in September 1909 their son Peter Kathleen Scott, who became famous in painting and conservation, was born.

Kathleen Scott returned to England and, after extended stop-overs in Australia and Egypt, arrived at Dover in February 1911.

In London Kathleen Scott created portrait busts and heads of various friends and relatives and worked on a statuette of Florence Nightingale while supporting fund-raising exercises for the Antarctic expedition.

Kathleen Scott received her first commission for a public monument, a life-size statue of Charles Rolls, which was unveiled in April 1912.

Kathleen Scott decided to travel to New Zealand to meet her husband on his return from Antarctica.

Kathleen Scott left Liverpool on 4 January 1913 for New York, then travelled by train to New Orleans and El Paso and went camping in Mexico before sailing from California to Tahiti.

Five days later a wireless message finally reached the ship Kathleen Scott was on and she was informed of her husband's death.

Kathleen Scott continued on to New Zealand where she was given the diaries and letters which had been recovered when her husband's body had been found.

Kathleen Scott began work on large statues of Captain Scott, Asquith and Captain Edward Smith.

Kathleen Scott helped to set up an ambulance service for the French army by transporting vehicles to northern France and raised money and recruited volunteers to support the establishment of a hospital at the Chateau d'Arc-en-Barrois where she subsequently worked for a time.

Kathleen Scott then worked on the assembly benches of a Vickers electronics factory at Erith in south London.

In March 1916 Kathleen Scott travelled, via Paris and Rome, to the quarry in Carrara, Italy where she carved the white marble statue of Captain Kathleen Scott which was erected at Christchurch, New Zealand, in 1917.

In 1917, Kathleen Scott served as a private secretary to Sir Matthew Nathan in the Ministry of Pensions.

Kathleen Scott resigned that post towards the end of 1917 but resumed working for the Ministry in Paris for a short while.

Kathleen Scott visited Paris immediately the war ended and worked to promote the formation of the League of Nations.

Kathleen Scott continued to receive considerable press coverage for her dignified manner as the widow of a national hero while continuing to work as a sculptor.

Kathleen Scott received numerous commissions for portraits, war memorials and regimental pieces and had three works shown at the Royal Academy in London in 1919.

The Lawrence statue was one of several idealised sculptures of young male nudes that Kathleen Scott created throughout her career.

Kathleen Scott's second son, Wayland Hilton Young, who became a writer and politician, was born the following year.

Marriage to a politician suited Kathleen Scott who had long counted several leading statesmen, most notably Asquith but Lloyd George, Austen Chamberlain and Stanley Baldwin, among her social circle.

Kathleen Scott visited Italy in 1930 and 1936, attended the Paris Salon in 1932 and, most years spent some weeks in Switzerland with her sons.

Kathleen Scott created a plaque depicting Queen Mary for the ocean liner of the same name, made busts of George V and Neville Chamberlain, a memorial for Poets' Corner and a statue of the actor Sabu.

Kathleen Scott's work was in great demand in the years preceding the Second World War.

Kathleen Scott was the subject of BBC Television's first programme on sculpture in 1937 and the following year a illustrated volume, Homage.

At the start of World War II, Kathleen Scott volunteered to work with plastic surgeons as she had done in World War I but was not called upon although she did host a number of evacuee children at her country cottage in Norfolk near Fritton Lake for a short time.

Kathleen Scott died, from leukaemia, at St Mary's Hospital, Paddington, near to her Lancaster Gate home in July 1947.

Kathleen Scott's grandchildren include the artist Emily Young and the writer Louisa Young, her biographer.

In 1913, Kathleen Scott was granted the rank of a widow of a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath.

Kathleen Scott was played by the actress Diana Churchill in the 1948 Ealing Studios film Kathleen Scott of the Antarctic, with John Mills as her husband.