Kenneth Funnell was the second son of Harold James Funnell (1877-1951) and Annie Maria Thorpe (1876-1963).   His older brother was Harold Norman Funnell, known as Norman (1903-19  ).   He always said that his first real memory was the news of the sinking of the Titanic on 14th April, 1912, when he was aged six and a half.   At that time he lived with his parents and Norman at Ken-Nor, Bluebell Hill, Chatham, Kent.   They had a small holding at the top of the hill next door to some flower growers.   The land was undulating and full of flints, and he and Norman were paid a few pence for every bucket of flints they collected off the land.   Their father had a shire horse, cows, and ducks, and their mother kept hens and sold the eggs at Gillingham Market.   The cows were milked twice a day, the milk put into a cooler and then collected from the churns in front of the house and bottled and marketed locally.   He went to Sir Joseph Williamson’s Mathematical School in Rochester, and although he passed the Dockyard exam, he went to work at C. Townsend Hook and Co., a paper mill in Snodland, Kent, starting on 1st January, 1923, aged 18 years.

 

    At the age of 21, in 1926,  he won the first prize in the London Institute City and Guilds Department of Technology as a Paper Manufacturer and was awarded a medal.  He started as a junior in the drawing office where he read the contentious contract for the supply of electricity from the Maidstone Corporation and noticed a mathematical mistake in the price fixing formula which had not been identified by eminent consulting engineers, which probably contributed to his progress at the Mill.

 

    In 1935 he married Morwenna Gladys Foster (1913-2006), always known as Gladys, the daughter of William Henry Foster (…….) and Ann Isabel Croscombe (…….).   In 1938 Ken was made Production Manager at the Paper Mill and the same year Ken and Gladys’s  first child was born, Ann Foster (18.4.1938), and they subsequently had three more children, Norman Richard James (15.06.1940), Jane (13.041942) and Robert Simon (17.10.44).  The two boys were always known by their last Christian names.    Ken became Managing Director of the Mill in 1963, and when Sir William Carr bought the Mill, he became a Director of the News of the World Organisation.

 

    After his retirement he served for seven years as the Kent County Councillor for the Malling Division, which included Snodland.   He was a Magistrate for sixteen years until the retirement age of 70, and on the amalgamation of the Tonbridge and Malling Courts he became the first Chairman.   In his retirement he was able to play a lot more golf which had always enjoyed.   He was Captain of Wrotham Heath Golf Club in 1976.  He also wrote a book on the history  of the Mill, called “Snodland Paper Mill”.  He died shortly after the great storm of 1987.