Robert Wyndham Ketton-Cremer, JP, FSA, FRSL, FBA (2 May 1906 – 12 December 1969) was an English landowner, biographer and historian.
[1] Ketton-Cremer wrote widely on the history of his native Norfolk as well as number of biographies, including one of Whig statesman William Windham, one of politician Horace Walpole, and one of the poet Thomas Gray, for which he won the James Tait Black Award.
At Felbrigg Hall that included displaying a short film— narrated by Stephen Fry— in which it was revealed that Robert Wyndham Ketton-Cremer was gay, a fact previously only known to his close friends.
[11] Fry defended the Trust's decision, justifying it by stating that in his view Ketton-Cremer had only kept his sexuality a secret because of pervasive homophobia and fear of prosecution during his lifetime.
[12] Catherine Bennett, in The Guardian, considered it "unfortunate" that the Trust attached the "ambiguous" Ketton-Cremer, who "had neither, his family says, come out nor moved... in circles where homosexuality was unconcealed" to the Prejudice and Pride campaign, as opposed to a figure such as the openly gay James Lees-Milne, "who more or less assembled the Trust's collection of historic houses"; the "dire" short film featuring "someone silently [impersonating] Ketton-Cremer" was considered "undeniably ambitious in imagining how [Ketton-Cremer] must have felt about his sexuality" in light of the fact that "unhelpfully, the squire appears to have left no records."
Fry's stance- that objection to the dubiously-accurate "outing" of Ketton-Cremer must be attributed to homophobia- was also criticised as lacking nuance.