Dame Julie Kenny, redoubtable South Yorkshire businesswoman who saved crumbling Wentworth Woodhouse

Yahoo

07-03-2025

Dame Julie Kenny, who has died aged 67, was a formidable South Yorkshire businesswoman and community leader who spearheaded the rescue of Wentworth Woodhouse, the Georgian mansion that was Britain's largest private home until its decline towards dereliction.
Julie Kenny rose to prominence as co-founder and chief executive of Pyronix, a Rotherham-based manufacturer of sensors and controls for security alarm systems. She became both a national voice in her own industry and a driving force in a multiplicity of bodies concerned with economic development, entrepreneurship and skills training for the South Yorkshire region.
She also took on sensitive assignments in local government, serving from 2010 to 2014 as an 'intervention commissioner' in Doncaster, appointed by the Secretary of State to oversee senior council appointments and governance issues; and from 2015 to 2018 as a commissioner in Rotherham, following revelations of child sexual exploitation in the town and damning criticism of its council's children's services.
Everyone who worked with Julie Kenny recognised her ability to command a room and knock heads together when necessary – but also her innate warmth and kindness. Her talents were tested to the full at Wentworth Woodhouse, where she became chair of trustees in 2014.
She described the campaign to purchase and repurpose the crumbling mansion as 'one of the most inspiring, yet hardest, challenges of my life… Many people told me it was impossible. But my view is that nothing is impossible with time, energy, and belief.'
The original Jacobean house within what is now the metropolitan borough of Rotherham had been extended to more than 300 rooms with a frontage of 618 feet by the 2nd Marquess of Rockingham (1730-82), who twice briefly served as prime minister. Having passed to the Earls Fitzwilliam, it suffered the depredations of open-cast mining in its park after the second world war and was battered by the 30-year occupancy of a physical education college.
Sold off by the Fitzwillam trustees in 1989, it was sold again a decade later before finally being acquired in 2017 – with rain pouring through the broken roof into its staterooms – for £7 million by the Wentworth Woodhouse Preservation Trust.
Four years later, with government support, major roof repairs had been completed, enabling internal restoration to advance. Revered by those who worked with her to save the structure and plan bold new uses for its quarter of a million square feet of space, Dame Julie (as she became) was a fundraiser to whom few could say No.
To all who would listen, she preached not only the importance of the physical conservation project but also its significance as 'a catalyst for creating life-changing opportunities' through community engagement, education and apprenticeships in a disadvantaged area to which she was passionately devoted.
She had been due to deliver that message on March 13 to a fundraising banquet at the Mansion House in the City of London: urging City livery companies to support the event, Lord Mayor Alastair King described Dame Julie as 'a lady who walks through brick walls'.
Julie Ann Bower was born in the Hillsborough district of Sheffield on August 19 1957 and brought up in nearby Stannington. She would later say that her determination to succeed in later life was a reaction to a harsh and unhappy childhood.
She was the fourth of five children of Cyril Bower and his Dutch-born wife Hendrika, née Klement, who divorced when Julie was five. At seven, she had to beg the grocer for tick until her mother's wage came in; at 10, she was cooking and cleaning for the family and caring for her baby stepbrother. In her own recollection, the household was violent and chaotic, with debt collectors regularly banging at the door – and at 17 she had a nervous breakdown.
A year later she decided to get out and never return. She took a train to Cornwall, found secretarial work in a solicitor's office and blamed Sheffield itself for her rough start, 'but I was wrong, I should have been blaming the family…' She was later reconciled with her mother, but not with her stepfather.
She went on to qualify as a solicitor through part-time study and to practice as a litigation lawyer until she met Paul Kenny, a fellow native of Sheffield, and returned north with him in 1986. Having sold her house to raise capital, they started Pyronix as a manufacturer of passive infrared receivers – motion sensors which usually flash red but 'if you've got one that blinks blue, it's one of ours'.
Julie gave up legal work to become full-time in the business – and to lead it as chairman and chief executive after her divorce from Paul Kenny. It grew to employ 200 staff and export to 65 countries, achieving annual sales of more than £25 million by the time it was sold to a Chinese buyer in 2016.
She chaired both the British Security Industry Association and the Security and Resilience Industry Suppliers Community, in which one colleague described her impact as 'like Fred Trueman [the fearsome Yorkshire fast bowler] among gentleman players'.
In later years she was chairman or non-executive director of several other businesses and maintained a vast portfolio of pro bono commitments and trusteeships, ranging from the National Coal Mining Museum and the Sheffield Theatres Trust to the Barnsley and Rotherham Chamber of Commerce. She was also the last chairman of the regional development agency Yorkshire Forward before its abolition in 2012.
Julie Kenny was appointed CBE in 2002 and raised to DBE in 2019; she was a deputy lieutenant of South Yorkshire and its High Sheriff in 2012. In 2022 she was installed as Master of the Company of Cutlers in Hallamshire, only the second woman in 398 years to take that prominent role in Sheffield's industrial community.
She married first, in 1977, Robert Venton and secondly, in 1986, Paul Kenny, with whom she had two sons, Oliver and Laurence, and a daughter Charlotte. Thirdly, in 2017, she married Iain Hall, who survives her with her three children and three stepchildren.
Dame Julie Kenny, born August 19 1957, died February 21 2025
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