The John F Kennedy Memorial: Stories from the Archives

Image: Photo by Susan Jellicoe, Museum of English Rural Life Susan Jellicoe/ LI collection

The huge Portland stone slab that forms the John F Kennedy Memorial was listed Grade ll in 1998. It is located on the fringe of a finger of woodland and set in an ‘acre of Runnymede’ on grazing land rising above the meadow. It is this, the rest of the site that was recently added to Historic England’s register, although it is surely hard to find a design that is not more integrated with its landscape. The JFK Memorial soon became a celebrated landscape design, it was significant to Jellicoe’s career, and it has continued to attract widespread interest and praise. Like one of the swans gliding on the Thames below, however, many feet have paddled hard to help both create and keep this designed landscape sublime, and Annabel Downs will tell some of the stories that are part of its history.

In her capacity as Secretary to the Kennedy Memorial Trust, Annie Thomas liaised between the Kennedy Trustees and the National Trust as they cared for Jellicoe’s memorial ‘in landscape and stone’ at Runnymede.  As an administrator, albeit with a rural heart and heritage, she describes her working relationship with those employed by the National Trust to care for the whole of the Runnymede site and some of the issues they had to contend with in relation to the Kennedy Memorial.

Annabel Downs is a landscape architect and garden designer; she unexpectedly helped to establish the Landscape Institute archive following the gift of a plan chest full of drawings from Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe. She is currently chair of FOLAR and as part of a growing band of enthusiasts, we are helping to raise public awareness about the many qualities of C20 landscape design and their industrious creators.  

Annie Thomas read English at Bristol University in the early 1970s. After almost thirty years bringing up a family of four and supporting her husband in inner-urban Anglican parishes, she found herself in paid employment at Goodenough College in a multi-faceted role with international postgraduate students in London and was subsequently Secretary to the Kennedy Memorial Trust from 2007 until 2019.