Guest blog by Lianne Hackett
Introduction
This blog traces the first visit abroad of Rena Kennedy on a fact-finding trip funded by the Electrical Association for Women, and her later life as an electrical demonstrator, teacher, musician, mother and volunteer. Rena’s life shows how the growing industry of domestic electricity provided jobs and opportunities for talented young women in the middle of the twentieth century, but her story goes far beyond her work with the EAW, as described in this biographical sketch.
Visit to Sweden
In July 1947, Rena Kennedy embarked on her first trip abroad, having been awarded a bursary by the Electrical Association for Women to study electrical housecraft in Sweden. Rena had studied at the West of Scotland College of Domestic Science in Glasgow (also known as the ‘Dough School’) and had been awarded the EAW’s Diploma for Teachers in Electrical Housecraft, the first such award in Ayrshire.
The aim of the visit was to make a tour of domestic science centres, electrical research institutes and housing centres, and Rena kept a daily Journal of her trip, which was arranged by Dr Asta Kihlbom, Director of The Swedish Institute in London. Once in Sweden, her programme was arranged by Mr Lundquist of The Swedish Institute in Stockholm, encompassing visits to the Electrolux Showrooms, Elektro Helios factory & H.S.B Housing Co-operative in Stockholm; Rural Housekeeping Schools [Lanthushållsskola] at Benninge, Brogård & Västerås and a rural school, Apelryd [Apelrydsskolan], at Båstad.
Rena also met with Dame Caroline Haslett (1895-1957), prominent British electrical engineer and women’s rights advocate and Kathleen Halpin CBE (1903 – 1999) President of the Women’s Gas Council and leading Soroptimist. She also met the pioneering female Swedish Architect and Philanthropist Ingeborg Wærn Bugge, (1899 – 1991) and Ingrid Osvald, Chief Inspector of Agricultural Science Colleges in Sweden, both of whom kindly invited her into their homes.
On her return to Ayr, Rena was appointed as an electrical housecraft demonstrator to new households in the Lochside area of Ayr. She was driven by car to homes in the area. In a happy piece of circularity, Rena later taught yoga in the Lochside area as part of her yoga teaching in Ayr.
In addition to electrical housecraft, she followed many paths during her long life, several professionally, including music, cookery, dressmaking, embroidery, gardening, photography, poetry in Scots and English, yoga and tai chi.
Rena’s life was imbued with the motto ‘Yesterday returneth not. Mayhap tomorrow cometh not. There is today, misuse it not.” She embroidered the maxim for her daughters and grandchildren, each with a decorative border specific to them. Her life held tragedy, which makes the maxim to live each day especially poignant.
Early life
Rena’s life until the age of five was idyllic: a happy home in a house on the edge of the River Ayr with a long garden where she and her puppy played. Her father, the sculptor James Kennedy had taken over the family monumental masonry business and was often close to home, as the yard was adjacent to the house. Her mother, Isabella Smith Shannon Currie, sang in the church choir and looked after Rena, their only child. Family holidays were taken on the Isle of Arran where her maternal grandmother was born and raised. The family photographs show her as a happy child.
This changed abruptly when her father was badly injured in a road accident close to home, sustaining a brain injury from which he died several years later. Her mother had to be both nurse and breadwinner, managing the business and yard that adjoined their home. Rena had to learn self-sufficiency. Tragedy came also in her college days when the Canadian pilot to whom she was to be engaged was killed in a WWII bombing raid. She also suffered two bad bouts of rheumatic fever that disrupted her schooldays at Ayr Academy and led to her living with the heart condition atrial fibrillation in later life (and a love of foxgloves, given the digitalis the plant provided for her heart medication).
Education and early career
Music and friendship played a large part in restoring her heart and soul. Rena was a gifted singer (mezzo soprano) and, alongside her West of Scotland College of Domestic Science in Glasgow or ‘Dough School’ training, she studied at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music & Drama (now the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland) also in Glasgow. Performing with friends, she came to the attention of the BBC, recording programmes for its Scottish Service.
Rena also appeared in an Election Night Special in 1945. Given the snappy title of the ‘While-you-wait show’, the evening was billed as a ‘nine-spot programme’ co-compered by Rex of the Sunday Mail. Rena shared the bill with her good friends Reg [Reggie] Barrett-Ayres and Sandy Lyle together with a ventriloquist and 12-piece accordion band.
The thought of such an election night show appealed to Dr Nina Baker, independent historian of women in engineering, who gave her encouragement, knowledge sharing and support to the editing of Rena’s Journal. On sharing the cutting with her, Nina replied: “What a hoot. I have never heard of such a great idea for the long wait on election night.”
During WWII, Rena worked as an auxiliary nurse at Ayr County Hospital, where her duties included boiling quantities of eggs – all had to be just so!
A belief in community was central to Rena’s life. She joined the Iona Community, spending happy summers on Iona during the 1940s as a Youth Leader, singing in the Abbey and helping out in the Community. In 2014, her daughter Lianne transcribed and published a facsimile copy of Rena’s 1946 Journal for deposit in the Iona Community Archives via the Community’s publishing house, Wild Goose Publications.
Post war, she taught home economics for several years at Cumnock High School. With the town now featuring prominently in the media given its proximity to Dumfries House, Rena always spoke up for the young people she had taught, not joining in with the negative view that many held of the town.
Music continued to play a significant part in her life, including professional engagements, with comparisons made between her voice and that of Kathleen Ferrier.
Marriage and family life
Rena’s professional singing career was brought to a halt by her marriage in 1951. Her husband Bob (RTM Watson) came from a traditional family and saw – as was the norm in the 1950s – Rena’s role as wife and mother. He also needed her support in the entertaining that formed a core part of his career as the Shell oil company’s East of Scotland Manager. They made their home in Currie, then a village in the countryside outside Edinburgh but now subsumed into the city. Following the birth of her three daughters (1951-1955), Rena found a home for her musical energies in the Scottish Women’s Institute, conducting the Currie SWI choir and performing in musical theatre. Her talent as a performer of the songs and poetry of Robert Burns came to the fore in Shell Burns Suppers and other more informal corporate entertaining.
Rena was a skilful home cook, and entertaining at home became a hallmark of Bob’s hospitality towards colleagues and clients from the Netherlands, the USA and Japan. She supported his egalitarian ethos in arranging functions without a ‘top table’. The London ‘top brass’ were unaccustomed to sitting with their tanker drivers. Bob & Rena changed all that – in Edinburgh at least!
Bob’s sponsorship of the Edinburgh Film Festival brought them into contact with Dutch film makers and the Dutch Film Censor, many of whom became lifelong friends [Shell was at that time known as Royal Dutch Shell]. Edinburgh life saw weekends spent in the Pentland Hills, walking with friends. Annual holidays were taken with friends in the Cairngorms where the girls learned to ski and the parents enjoyed G&Ts!
In the late 1960s, a postnatal health condition led Rena to seek out yoga classes, which she found at the Scottish Yoga Centre in Edinburgh. This led the successful treatment of her condition after which Rena trained as a Yoga teacher with the British Wheel of Yoga, and became a certified Scottish Yoga Association teacher, attending seminars including in Switzerland.
In 1979, Rena was visited at her home in Ayr by Swami Satchidananda, also known as The Woodstock Guru.
Later life
Following Bob’s passing in 1989, Rena moved from their family house to a smaller home next door to a lifelong friend (and yoga pupil) in Arrol Drive, Ayr. With her daughter Lizzie, a trained horticulturalist, she planned and made a new garden with species trees, a pergola on which she successfully grew grapes and a miniature rock garden reminiscent of the larger rock garden she had created for her family home in Currie.
She taught yoga at Ayr St Columba, travelled with her daughters and to visit Linda who with her family lived in Hong Kong for several years, It was there that Rena first saw Tai Chi, this leading to over 20 years as a pupil of the 7 Stars School of Taijiquan, founded by Bob Lowey.
In 2003, Rena joined the visit to Beijing that Bob arranged to study under Professor Zhang Guande. He also introduced her to the Samye Ling Monastery in Eskdalemuir, where she became a founding member of the fundraising for the purchase of Holy Isle off the coast of Arran where a second Monastery was established. At Samye Ling Monastery, a table is dedicated in her memory, with the inscription Shao Ling (Little Dragon) which was her Tai Chi name.
In her later years, Rena continued to practise yoga and tai chi, play the piano and enjoy time with family and friends. She was cared for at home in the last year of her life by family and with live-in help from Country Cousins. She passed away peacefully at Ayr Hospital on 26 May 2017 with the sound of her much-loved oyster catchers audible from her hospital room.
Her minister Dr Fraser Aitken led her funeral service at Ayr St Columba and internment at Straiton Cemetery where she is buried beside her husband Bob. An inscription was also added to the Kennedy headstone in Ayr Cemetery on the fine granite stone carved by her grandfather, James Kennedy.
Rena’s journal
In February 2026, an edit of the Journal was deposited in the EAW/IET Archives by Rena’s eldest daughter Lianne Hackett where the deposit was kindly received by Anne Locker, Library and Archives Manager at the IET. The original Journal will form part of the IET Archives Collections.
Rena would be delighted that she is remembered in this blog post as someone whose first trip abroad was to study electrical housecraft in that most modern of countries: Sweden.