It has been pointed out to me what a dour lot some of Ramsgate’s town councillors and officers look in some of the photographs I have published recently. So I thought to publish this little bit to correct the record.Arthur Bloomfield Courtenay Kempe became Mayor of Ramsgate on November 9th 1938 he dressed like one too, top hat and frock coat.
He was only a peacetime mayor for a short time before the outbreak of World War Two, he set out to make Ramsgate into a holiday camp of a town. He managed to sell the towns holidays to Coventry with "All in holidays" at £3.17.6d the slogan, with his charisma keeping what a wonderful place Ramsgate was for a holiday on the front pages of the national press.
When war broke out in September 1939 of came the top hat and on went the tin hat and he put all of his efforts into looking after the population of Ramsgate.
He and the borough engineer Dick Brimmell were responsible for the network of airraid shelter tunnels under the town that saved so many lives, I publish a book about the tunnels, The Ramsgate Tunnels by Nick Catford, they are a truly remarkable achievement.
In 1946 he produced a book, Midst bands and Bombs about Ramsgate both as a premier holiday resort and as a front line town, I also publish a reprint of this book.
In 1950 he was made a Freemen of the Borough of Ramsgate.
Click here for more pictures of A B C Kempe
Click here for sample pages from Midst bands and Bombs
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Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.