Search FNL grants since 1931

George Murray Levick served as surgeon and zoologist on the Terra Nova Expedition led by Robert Falcon Scott which saw Levick spending the austral summer of 1911-12 at Cape Adare where he studied an Adélie penguin rookery. The largest Adélie penguin colony in the world, Levick was the first person to observe the entire breeding cycle of this bird species.

The notebooks also contain observations of penguin behaviour that at the time were deemed too indecent for publication, leading Levick to write some passages of text in the first notebook in Greek. In order to preserve decency, Levick’s paper based on his observations titled The sexual habits of the Adélie penguin was not included in the official Scott expedition reports of 1915.

A small group of letters of the artist, engraver and poet David Jones (1895-1974) to his friend Morag Owen (née McLennan), together with some related papers. In his later years living in Harrow, Jones was increasingly supported by a large circle of friends, one of whom was Morag Owen, a young art student at the time of their first meeting in 1948. Once Morag married and moved away, she became one of the many friends with whom Jones corresponded frequently and at length.

The letters, the later ones written in his distinctive combination of black, red and green ink with notes and postscripts added at angles in the margins, cover a variety of topics, although a recurring theme is his declining health.

This book arose from a trip the Scottish photographer James Craig Annan (1864-1946) made to northern Italy in 1894, in the company of the artist David Young Cameron. The photographs he took during this trip are regarded as some of his finest. They show his mastery of using a hand-held camera to capture fleeting moments (what Cartier Bresson would later define as the 'decisive moment'). Annan's approach to photography was to select first the general composition and then to “wait until the figures unconsciously group and pose themselves.” The resulting eleven photogravures in this book are classics of the pictorialist tradition in late 19th-century and early 20th-century photography.

This rich and extensive archive documents the lives of four generations of a family who held positions of influence locally, nationally and across the British Empire and beyond. These include a Rear Admiral, an Admiral of the Fleet, a Commander-in-Chief of the East Indies and a Governor of Queensland. The collection also includes extensive correspondence and journals for the women of the family. The archive is of outstanding national, regional and local significance covering more than 200 years of our history. It tells the story of many significant naval, historical and social events, highlighting the role of Scots within the empire. It is also a wonderful portrayal of local, family and community identity. The archive provides a rich source of local history, documenting estate management and the lives of the many individuals who lived or worked on the estate.

In 2019 the Kent History and Library Centre was awarded a grant to acquire two contrasting items.

One is a title deed dated 6 January 1375 by which John Lowyn of Wincheap granted John Bertelot of Thanington four acres of land and one virgate of meadow in the parish of Thanington, now suburb of Canterbury to the south of the city. Before we acquired this deed, our earliest document relating to Thanington dated from 1429. The other document is a lavishly decorated map of lands in the parishes of Midley, Old Romney, Lydd, Kenardington, Warehorne and Woodchurch, dated 1687.

Greenock is often seen as a post-industrial town in decline and is overshadowed by its neighbour, Glasgow. These acquisitions help us explore the literary and artistic side of 19th-century Greenock in an attempt to show this unexplored history.

Sir Joseph Noel Paton was a Scottish artist, illustrator and sculptor. He had a great interest in, and knowledge of, Scottish folklore which is reflected in his paintings. Paton studied at the Royal Academy in London in 1843 and it was during this time that he met John Everett Millais. Allan Park Paton (1817 or 1818–1905), a writer and patron of the arts, was one of the most accomplished and eminent citizens of the 19th-century Greenock. He is probably best remembered as the Librarian of the Watt Library.

Thanks to the generosity of the Friends of National Libraries, the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) was able to obtain a number of drawings relating to the construction of Tower Bridge at auction.

Jenny Lane (1835-?) was the eldest daughter of George Lane, a market gardener in Pulborough, Sussex. She married twice, firstly to George Collins and then in 1885 to William Norton Western. In her younger years, Jenny was lady’s maid to Lucy Renshaw, travelling companion of Amelia A. B. Edwards. The journals describe in detail their various trips including the 1873–1874 journey through France and Italy, crossing from Brindisi to Alexandria on the Simla, thence up the Nile to Dendara, Karnak, Luxor, Aswan, Philae and Abu Simbel, and the return journey via Port Said, through Lebanon to Damascus, Baalbek and Beirut, Constantinople, Athens, and the Rhine. They contain vivid descriptions of the landscape, weather and peoples, and anecdotes and observations of fellow travellers and places visited. They cover the period from 4 September 1873 to 6 March 1876

This album is a unique 'visitors' book' compiled by Percy and Mary Bate between 1903 and 1948, and contains 109 silhouettes of their friends and acquaintances hand-cut from black paper. Sitters’ autographs also accompany the majority of the silhouettes.

Bate’s position at the Royal Glasgow Institute enabled him and his wife to cultivate a social circle of key luminaries of the Glasgow art scene of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This volume therefore provides a unique record of the informal creative networks that flourished in Scotland’s great industrial city during this period.

No sooner had we collected John Pattenden’s survey from Stowmarket than we were alerted to the appearance on eBay of another 17th-century map.