Stone carver, letter cutter and typeface designer, born at Codicote, Hertfordshire, on 11 June 1915, the youngest of the five children of Guy Molesworth Kindersley, stockbroker and MP, and his wife, Kathleen, the eldest daughter of the arts and crafts potter Sir Edmund Harry Elton, eighth baronet, of Clevedon Court, Somerset. At the age of 15, rheumatoid arthritis brought his time at Marlborough College to an early close. It was while convalescing that he evidently began practising his skills as a carver. He subsequently went to Paris and took drawing classes at the Académie Julian and on his return to England secured employment with the London-based firm of Peter and Joseph Induni, copying in stone or marble plaster models designed by established sculptors. His reading of Eric Gill’s Art Nonsense and Other Essays (1929) led him to reject this practice as dishonest, believing, as Gill did, that a sculptor should be responsible for his work from conception to completion. In 1934, aged 19, he went to Gill’s workshop at Pigotts, near High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, and convinced Gill to take him on as an apprentice. It was here that Kindersley learnt to carve letters, a review of an exhibition at the French Gallery, London, in 1936, commending his lettering as ‘perfect’. Among the work given to Kindersley during his time at Pigotts was carving three of the large Portland stone letters – two Ls and one S – in the name BENTALLS for the façade of the department store’s new branch at Kingston upon Thames (May to June 1935). Kindersley left Pigotts in June 1936 and rented a cottage on the River Arun in West Sussex, honing his carving skills while continuing to receive lettering commissions from Gill and teaching at the nearby Horsham School of Art. Following the outbreak of the Second World War he registered as a conscientious objector and applied unsuccessfully to join the Home Guard. On 14 September 1939 he married Christine Sharpe and took on the tenancy of a small pub, the Smith’s Arms, in Godmanstone, Dorset, while continuing to cut inscriptions. In 1940 Gill died and in 1942 Kindersley returned to Pigotts to help out in the lettering workshop, now in need of skilled craftsmen. In 1946 he set up his own workshop in the village of Barton in Cambridgeshire; here he created his own style of italics and began using slate for the first time: his work in this material includes memorial tablets to Lord and Lady Greville (d. 1952 and 1959) in St Mary’s, North Mymms, Hertfordshire, and to Lord Cobbold (d. 1987) in St Mary and St Thomas’s, Knebworth. He taught calligraphy at Cambridge College of Arts and Technology, 1946–57, was an adviser to the Shell Film Unit, 1949–58, and a consultant to Letraset International, 1964–88. He obtained a divorce in 1954 and in 1957 married Barbara Pym Eyre Petrie. In 1967 he moved his workshop into the medieval Chesterton Tower in Cambridge, and in the same year was appointed Senior Research Fellow at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at the University of California, Los Angeles. In 1977 he moved the workshop yet again, to Victoria Road in Cambridge. In 1979 he was appointed an MBE. In 1986, having divorced his second wife, he married the letter-cutter and typeface designer Lida Lopes Cardozo, who had joined the workshop in 1976 and had become a business partner in 1981, after which the workshop operated as the Cardozo Kindersley Workshop. His commissions include a limestone relief for the Aldrich Bros brush factory, formerly in Diss, Norfolk (1948; in 1997, following the building’s demolition, the relief was installed on the exterior of the village hall in nearby Roydon); the Trinity College Second World War Memorial, Cambridge (1951; designed by Sir Albert Richardson); a relief map in stone showing America’s bases in the British Isles in the memorial building of the American Cemetery and Memorial, Madingley, Cambridgeshire (1960); an inscribed stone slab marking the site of the shrine of St Etheldreda in the choir of Ely Cathedral (1969); the Falklands War Memorial (1985) and relief memorial to Sir Philip Sidney (1986, with Lida Lopes Cardozo), both in the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral; the Founder’s Heraldic Achievement, Nuffield College, Oxford; and inscriptions for Franta Belsky’s statue of Earl Mountbatten, Foreign Office Green, Horse Guards Road, London (1983), Frank Dobson’s London Pride sculpture, The Queens Walk, South Bank (1987), and Ivor Roberts-Jones’s statues of Field Marshal Slim (1990) and Lord Alanbrooke (1993), both Whitehall. One of his final commissions, carried out in collaboration with his wife, was the openwork bronze gate for the British Library courtyard, commended by Bridget Cherry as ‘splendid’. Kindersley died on 2 February 1995. Of his five sons and one daughter, Richard Kindersley (1939–2025) became a sculptor and letter-cutter, and Peter (b. 1941) was co-founder of the publishing house Dorling Kindersley.
Bibliography: S. Bradley and N. Pevsner, Cambridgeshire (The Buildings of England), New Haven and London, (2014), 2015, pp. 44, 221, 264, 415, 471, 512, 551, 604, 607, 613; Cardozo Kindersley Workshop website; T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of South London, Liverpool, 2007, pp. 68, 70, 255, 443; B. Cherry and N. Pevsner, London 4: North (The Buildings of England), New Haven and London, 1998, p. 373; R. Cocke, Public Sculpture of Norfolk and Suffolk, Liverpool, 2013, p. 136; L. Hoare, ‘Obituaries: David Kindersley’ (4 February 1995), The Independent (online edn); L. Hoare, ‘Kindersley, David Guy Barnabas (1915–1995)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online edn), 2004; F. Lloyd et al, Public Sculpture of Outer South and West London, Liverpool, 2011, p. 146; Mapping Sculpture; The Times, 9 February 1995, p. 21 (obituary); P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011, pp. 77, 425, 426, 427; Who Was Who (online edn), 2007; Wikipedia: ‘David Kindersley’.
Terry Cavanagh, January 2026
