Kenneth William Edwin Gravett, M.Sc. F.I.E.E.

Ken Gravett was born on 27 April 1930 at the house in New Malden, Surrey, which was to be his home for the rest of his life and graduated with a first-class honours degree in electrical engineering from King’s College, London. After several years at the Post Office Research station at Dollis Hill, in London, where he worked on undersea cables, he was appointed to a lectureship at Battersea Polytechnic, later Battersea College of Advanced Technology and, later still, part of Surrey University. He was a natural teacher, helped by his phenomenal memory, and held posts at Brighton and Borough Polytechnic in London before joining the Inner London Education Authority as an inspector and subsequently Head of Higher and Further Education. Apart from his rewarding professional career, Gravett’s great interest was vernacular architecture and he acquired an unequalled knowledge of the timber-framed buildings of south-east England. But his was more than an academic interest; he travelled round the countryside and historic towns and villages, advising owners on the history and construction of their houses and, through his liaison work on the planning of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link, saved a number of historic buildings from demolition. He joined the Surrey Archaeological Society at the age of fourteen, already a keen photographer and draughtsman of timber-framed buildings, but as his enthusiasm grew conflict arose over the role of local history within the SAS. The result was that Gravett set up the parallel Surrey Local History Council, organizing its publications and an annual conference and, though he was elected an Honorary Vice-President of the SAS and remained an active member, he concentrated his architectural studies increasingly on Kent. He was chairman of the Kent Archaeological Society’s Historic Buildings Committee for many years and set up its invaluable Index; he also organized the annual Building Recorders’ conference for thirty-six years and was president of the KAS for ten. His practical help in producing the New Records Series for the society was a positive contribution to the work of the Publications Committee, and his imaginative contributions to the Visits Committee have never been bettered. His book, Timber and Brick Building in Kent (1971) is illustrated by the exquisite late-nineteenth century drawings of early Kentish houses by J. Fremlyn Streatfeild, originally intended for a new edition of Edward Hasted’s History of Kent (1778-99) but never before published. It is regrettable that so much of Gravett’s encyclopaedic knowledge died with him or is buried in his files. He was a Fellow of the Antiquaries for more than thirty years; in his ILEA days he was a regular reader in the library on Saturday mornings and, in retirement, he rarely missed a Thursday meeting until his health began to fail towards the end of his life. Gravett was a large man and large in his bounty to the Antiquaries. Apart from a few small legacies, he left his entire estate, including the proceeds from the sale of his house and car, to the Society’s library. From his own valuable collection of some 12,000 books, the librarian was instructed to select whichever titles he needed and to sell the rest for the benefit of the library – a sale which added £40,000 to the bequest in addition to enhancing the book stock.Gravett was a skilled photographer and left his collection of 80,000 negatives to the National Monuments Record, making him the largest single contributor to the archive. He died on 21 November 1999, aged 69, and his ashes were scattered over one of the ponds in St Leonard’s Forest.