Edith Agnes Kathleen Young, Baroness Kennet, FRBS (née Bruce; formerly Scott; 27 March 1878 – 25 July 1947) was a British sculptor. Trained in London and Paris, Scott was a prolific sculptor, notably of portrait heads and busts and also of several larger public monuments. These included a number of war memorials plus statues of her first husband, the Antarctic explorer Captain Robert Falcon Scott. Although the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes her as "the most significant and prolific British women sculptor before Barbara Hepworth", her traditional style of sculpture and her hostility to the abstract work of, for example Hepworth and Henry Moore, has led to a lack of recognition for her artistic achievements.
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. She is the grandmother of the sculptor Emily Young and of the writer Louisa Young.
Born on 27 March 1878 at Carlton in Lindrick, Nottinghamshire, Kathleen Edith Agnes Bruce was the youngest of the eleven children of the Church of England clergyman Lloyd Stuart Bruce (1829–1886) and his first wife Jane Skene (c. 1828–1880), an amateur artist. An orphan by the age of eight, she was brought up by a relative, William Forbes Skene, in Edinburgh, Scotland, where she attended St George's School before being sent to boarding schools in England, including a convent school run by nuns.
Scott studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London from 1900 to 1902. Then, with two friends from the Slade, Jessie Gavin and Eileen Gray, Scott enrolled at the Académie Colarossi in Paris. Although she had taken some modelling classes at the Slade, at the Académie Colarossi Scott concentrated on sculpture and within three months had a statuette of a mother and child accepted for the Paris Salon, where it won a medal. She was befriended by Auguste Rodin who, although he was not formally taking students at the time, agreed to mentor her and for Scott to visit his studio on a regular basis. In Paris, Scott also met Aleister Crowley, who wrote several poems about her, Gertrude Stein, Edward Steichen, Isadora Duncan and, very briefly, Pablo Picasso. Scott and Duncan became friends and in 1903 travelled to Belgium and the Netherlands together.
In December 1903, following the Ilinden uprising Scott joined a relief mission to Macedonia, undertaking logistic duties and some basic nursing work at refugee camps. There, in February 1904, Scott fell ill with a life-threatening bout of influenza and, possibly, typhoid. When she recovered she decided to return to Paris and boarded a freighter for Marseille but, finding herself to be the only women on the ship, disembarked at Naples and spent some months in Florence before returning to Paris and reopening her studio. 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.
Marriage to Robert Falcon Scott
In London, Scott took a flat in Cheyne Walk and made a series of portrait busts, mostly of young men. She became acquainted with George Bernard Shaw, Max Beerbohm and J. M. Barrie, whose former home she later bought. At one point she became seriously ill with an abdominal cyst and was thought unlikely to live. Scott recovered and subsequently assisted her upstairs neighbour, a district maternity nurse, on house calls to deliver babies.
In October 1907 she met Captain Robert Falcon Scott at a tea party having briefly seen him at a lunch hosted by Mabel Beardsley several months earlier. The two spent ten days together before he left London on Naval duties but within a month they had decided to marry. Their wedding was on 2 September 1908, in the Chapel Royal at Hampton Court Palace with Rodin among the 150 guests. The couple took a house on Buckingham Palace Road in London and in September 1909 their son Peter Scott, who became famous in painting and conservation, was born.
In July 1910, she accompanied her husband to New Zealand to see him off on his journey to the South Pole and in October that year they spent a fortnight together at Lyttelton, on the South Island, before Captain Scott and his crew departed on 29 November. Kathleen Scott returned to England and, after extended stop-overs in Australia and Egypt, arrived at Dover in February 1911. It has been suggested that, in her husband's absence, she had a brief affair with the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen. This has been denied by others.
In London, Kathleen Scott created portrait busts and heads of various friends and relatives and also worked on a statuette of Florence Nightingale while supporting fund-raising exercises for the Antarctic expedition. She received her first commission for a public monument, a life-size statue of Charles Rolls, which was unveiled in April 1912. When Rolls's family lent Scott some of his clothing for her model, she was shocked to find they had included blood-stained items from his fatal air crash. During 1912 she also created portrait busts of, among others, the Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, Fridtjof Nansen, Compton Mackenzie plus a series of figures of bishops for the chapel at Winchester College and a sculpture of a baby for a hospital. At the end of the year she began working on a statuette of her husband.
Kathleen Scott decided to travel to New Zealand to meet her husband on his return from Antarctica. She 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. The bodies of Captain Scott and his companions were discovered on the 12 November 1912 and the news reached London on 11 January 1913 with a memorial service, attended by King George V, being held at St Paul's Cathedral on 14 February 1913. Five days later a wireless message finally reached the ship Kathleen Scott was on and she was informed of her husband's death. She 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.
On her return to London, Scott and her son were the subject of intensive public and press attention which she tried to counter by embarking on a concentrated period of work. She began work on large statues of Captain Scott, Asquith and Captain Edward Smith. In August 1913 she spent some time in Andorra and in 1914 she went to North Africa. After trekking in the Sahara, Scott returned to Britain shortly before World War I began.
During World War I, Scott initially set aside sculpture and worked in a variety of other roles to support the British and Allied war effort. She 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 Hôpital Temporaire d'Arc-en-Barrois at the Chateau d'Arc-en-Barrois where she subsequently worked for a time. Scott then worked on the assembly benches of a Vickers electronics factory at Erith in south London. In England she also worked on three statues connected with the Terra Nova expedition. The first to be commissioned, by the mayor of Cheltenham, was her statue of Edward Wilson which was unveiled in July 1914. Her statue of Scott in his naval greatcoat with a husky at his feet was commissioned by officers of the Portsmouth naval base and dockyards and was unveiled in February 1915. Her bronze statue of Captain Scott was unveiled in central London in November 1915, although Scott did not attend the ceremony and spent the day at the Vickers factory.
In March 1916 Scott travelled, via Paris and Rome, to the quarry in Carrara, Italy, where she carved the white marble Statue of Captain Robert Falcon Scott which was erected at Christchurch Central City, New Zealand, in 1917. Later in 1916, she struck up a close friendship with the Australian geologist and polar explorer Sir Douglas Mawson, who was stationed in Sandwich, Kent, while working for the British Ministry of Munitions. Historian David Day in 2013 suggested that the pair had conducted an affair there; however, this is refuted by historian Tom Griffiths, who says that they were united in grief at the time and found solace in each other.