Search FNL grants since 1931

The importance of the document in terms of understanding Swindon’s development as a town through the ages cannot be understated. Nowadays, the town is closely associated with the Great Western Railway, which certainly put the town on the map. However, prior to Brunel & Co. laying down the famous train line between Bristol and London, Swindon was a vibrant and locally important market town, as ordained by this Charter.

This diary chiefly covers the years 1940-1942, when Ayers travelled the country with Michael Rothenstein who was then working for the Recording Britain project. This had been devised by Kenneth Clark as a means of employing artists in wartime, to document threatened landscapes and ways of life, and to encourage the characteristically British art of watercolour. The project assembled some 1,500 topographical paintings and drawings (including over 40 by Rothenstein) which were given to the V&A by the Pilgrim Trust in 1949. The diary provides context for the creation of Rothenstein’s pictures; it also describes in frank, passionate detail the emotional dynamics of the often fraught marriage of two artists.

Thomas Plume's Library is an extraordinary survival. In 1704 Dr Thomas Plume (1630-1704), Archdeacon of Rochester, bequeathed his collection of c. 8,000 books to his birthplace, Maldon, to establish a public lending library in the redundant Church of St Peter.In the early 20th-century, when Thomas Plume’s Library was still a lending institution, many books went missing. Since 1987 the Trustees have been actively buying replacement books – in a few cases the originals.

The Andersonian Naturalists’ Society, founded in 1885, is amongst the earliest student societies at the University of Strathclyde. The purchase of these albums has helped us fill a clear gap in the University Archives – we had no photographs amongst our records of the Society and, furthermore, no records of the Society at all before 1930.

A rare and fascinating volume containing two editions of Josuah [Joshua] Sylvester’s mourning poetry for Prince Henry. The volume contains the bookplate of the bibliophile Sir Thomas Brooke (1830-1908) of Armitage Bridge House, near Huddersfield. The privately printed catalogue of his library from 1891 suggests that the editions were not bound together at that point.

This small rectangular cutting of 12 lines of Anglo-Caroline minuscule allows the museums service for the first time to display an example of the work of the St Albans scriptorium in the hand of one its own monks, demonstrating the style and skill of the Scriptorium team and providing a link to the works of the other acknowledged masters of the Abbey.

The diary’s entries focus, almost exclusively, on the activities of Maldon corps and predominantly on the number of people ‘saved’ in each meeting. Despite its limited content and the dearth of information about its author, this diary is a significant accession. While we hold several diaries written by officers, we have none by a member of a corps.

Steer-Webster, Royal Engineers, was the Deputy Director of Experimental Engineering. This department was tasked with devising a means to land troops and supplies on the Normandy beaches less well defended than those with harbours. The result was two floating harbours, both similar in size to Dover Harbour, prefabricated in the dockyards of Britain, towed in sections across the Channel and constructed on the Normandy beachhead by Royal Engineers. Colonel Steer-Webster played a leading role in the design, development and trials of the Mulberry Harbour and was in almost daily contact with Sir Winston Churchill during its construction and development.

The collection of papers in this collection is of a particularly local nature, they are the papers of Thomas Verner Jr. (1796-1875). Verner was appointed as receiver of the distressed Donegall estate in 1847 by the Chancery Court and retained this role under the new Encumbrance Act. Verner was related to the third Marquis of Donegall and acted as his agent in Belfast. The Donegall estate which comprised significant amounts of land in counties Antrim and Donegal included the town of Belfast.

A beautifully annotated copy of Aesop’s fables which, quite probably, was used and read at the college nearly five hundred years ago. Foremost among the many reasons to celebrate the return to Queens’ of this volume is its status as testimony to the humanist spirit that flourished at the college during the Tudor era. As such it represents a formidable addition to the unique collection of humanist texts already held in Queens’ College’s Old Library