Rattenbury, Arnold 1921-2007 (Arnold Foster Rattenbury)
Rattenbury, Arnold 1921-2007 (Arnold Foster Rattenbury)
OBITUARY NOTICE—
See index for CA sketch: Born October 5, 1921, in Hankow, China; died April 26, 2007. Journalist, designer, and author. Rattenbury was a poet who was also well known in England as an exhibition designer. Born in China, where his missionary father was working, he was sent to England to attend St. John's College, Cambridge. He had not yet completed his studies before the war began, and he enlisted in the British Army. An accident in which he severely broke his arm left him unfit for duty, and so he returned to civilian life. He edited the London magazine Our Time, a Communist Party publication, as well as Theatre Today in the late 1940s before becoming a freelance journalist and designer. Still believing in socialism, he continued to work for the Communist Party of Great Britain's West England Branch for a time, but his focus was changing. By the 1960s, he was specializing in exhibit design. He was also a poet, and though he had been writing verses since college his first collection, Second Causes, was not released until 1969. He also published the collections Man Thinking (1972) and The Frigger Makers (1994), as well as Exhibition Design: Theory and Practice (1971).
OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:
PERIODICALS
Times (London, England), June 9, 2007, p. 82.