Further research has turned up more material on Kenneth MacNichol.  I have spoken with one of his descendants, the grandson from a relationship which Kenneth did not formalize with marriage.  The woman in question was named Dorothy, and she may have been the woman for whom Kenneth left Louise.  At any rate, they were a couple in the 1920s and, according to the grandson, part of the “Bloomsbury Set.”

“The Bloomsbury Set” was a loosely allied group of artists, writers, and thinkers—including Virginia Woolf and J. M. Keynes—who met around Bloomsbury, London, during the first part of the twentieth century.  It’s not easy to distill a single vision—or even say if the group cohered enough to be taken together—but there is a sense of Bohemianism about them, as they argued about the limits of domesticity, the place of women in society, and the problems with capitalism and imperialism.  If MacNichol was indeed part of this set, he would have felt at home, as it had echoes of his time in Carmel and foresaw his time in San Francisco (as well as New York, perhaps.)

But it’s not clear that MacNichol actually belonged to this group.  Certainly, he lived in the area—his flat at 120 Clapton Common, where he and Dorothy held soirees, was only a few miles from Bloomsbury.  But MacNichol’s grandson remembers the stories of the set revolving around George Bernard Shaw, DH Lawrence, and HG Wells (and his father—Kenneth’s son—remembers meeting Shaw), none of whom are usually included in the Bloomsbury Set.  Indeed, Woolf was partially writing against the realistic style of Wells.

At any rate, it seems fair to say that Kenneth probably fell in with a crowd of London thinkers that influenced him to—as he said—take on more serious material, economics and sociology, and got him thinking about how to relate writing and advertising.

At some point in the late 1920s, MacNichol and Dorothy broke up and he married again, this time, according to his grandson, a woman named Olga.  That marriage lasted only a short time before he married Netta in 1930.

There was also one other marriage not yet mentioned, Susan, whom he married in 1944.  That gives a total of 6 wives, plus one other long term relationship.