Roy Kitchin
Roy Kitchin (6 December 1926 – 1997) was a British sculptor and art educator who worked primarily with steel. He was lecturer in Sculpture at Newcastle University. He co-founded the Open Air Museum of Steel Sculpture in Shropshire, England. Early life Kitchin was born in Peterborough. When his father's confectionery business collapsed in 1936, the family relocated to Birmingham in the industrial West Midlands. Kitchin completed his secondary education in the Quinton area of Birmingham and at the age of fourteen became an apprentice to the woodwork trade, specialising in joinery, constructing ammunitions boxes and correcting those of others that did not meet the stringent standards of the Ministry of Defence. It was whilst working as a joiner that he made his first attempts at carving the human figure. Reflecting on this early desire to carve, Kitchin has described how he chanced upon images of sculpture in the pages of the Encyclopædia Britannica his mother had bought for him to look at pictures of aircraft. At the age of eighteen, with the Second World War in full momentum, Kitchin was conscripted to work in the coalmines as a ‘Bevin Boy’. Conditions in the mines proved particularly harsh and within only