Displaying 231 - 240 of 1976
Item date: 1928-1931
Date acquired: 2016
Grant Value: £1,500
Item cost: £5,500
Institution: RIBA Architectural Library
Town/City: London
This important archive of Heston Aerodrome, Middlesex, documents the construction and early operating of Britain’s first private airport. It consists of approximately 160 letters, 20 photographs, 65 drawings, 2 brochures and press cuttings.
Heston Air Park was conceived by fellow pilots and aircraft co-owners Nigel Norman and Alan Muntz in 1928, and constructed by their new company, Airwork Ltd. However it was all designed by Leslie Magnus Austin ARIBA (1896-1975). The Archive contains the correspondence between Norman and Muntz at Airwork and Austin from the initial stages in 1928 to 1931. It covers the purchase of land, construction, architecture and everything needed to build an airport, as well as recording a major disagreement regarding who should get the credit for the design of the new airport.
Author: Sylvia Lynd
Item date: 1888-1952
Date acquired: 2016
Grant Value: £2,000
Item cost: £7,000
Institution: Reading University Library
Town/City: Reading
County: Berkshire
Sylvia Lynd played an important role in 20th-century literary culture as a judge for the Book Society (the British equivalent of the American Book-of-the-Month Club) and the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize. The Hampstead home that she shared with her husband, the writer and journalist Robert Wilson Lynd, was a notable literary meeting place, and the Lynds’ circle included many publishers, literary journalists and writers, including Victor and Ruth Gollancz, J.B. Priestley, Rose Macauley, and Hugh Walpole. Other guests at their home included James Joyce (who held his wedding reception there) and W.B. Yeats. In her own right Lynd was a significant pastoral poet, but will perhaps be best remembered for her prominent role as a literary tastemaker and influential female judge on the new book clubs and literary prizes formed during the interwar years.
The University of Reading holds the Archive of British Publishing and Printing, along with related book trade material, including the Mark Longman Library (formerly the library of the National Book League). It also holds several collections of the papers and literary manuscripts of 20th century authors, with a notable focus on modern poets and Irish writers. With this in mind, the Special Collections at Reading is a natural home for the papers of Sylvia Lynd.
Item date: mid 19th century
Date acquired: 2016
Grant Value: £700 [Smaller Libraries Fund]
Item cost: £1,827
Institution: Museum of English Rural Life [Reading University]
Town/City: Reading
County: Berkshire
The Museum of English Rural Life at the University of Reading purchase of twenty-two rare agricultural pamphlets from the mid-19th century, which relate to the agricultural innovations and economics of the period, enhancing its existing collection strengths in British agricultural history. The collection includes rare works on early applications of agricultural chemistry, studies of production and demand, and farmers’ reports on the use of new agricultural equipment. They provide a unique insight into the economic and technological developments in British agriculture in the mid-19th century, a pivotal period that marked the final stages of the British Agricultural Revolution.
Item date: 18th-20th centuries
Date acquired: 2016
Grant Value: £5,000
Item cost: £33,443
Institution: Norfolk Record Office
Town/City: Norwich
County: Norfolk
In September 2016, the Norfolk Record Office purchased a wide range of documents sold at auction in the Morningthorpe Manor Country House Sale. A keen local collector had accumulated this eclectic array of documents over a number of decades. It ranged in date from the 15th to the 20th century and included diaries, deeds, maps, photographs, playbills, manorial records, estate records, travel journals, business records and political broadsheets. However, there was one strong theme linking everything together: Norfolk. It was estimated that the Record Office would require about £30,000 to secure the items of clear significance to the county’s heritage. However, the Record Office did not have purchase funds available – it needed to raise money and to do so very quickly.
A major contribution was made by the Friends of the National Libraries who not only provided a grant of £5,000, but also were able to make a decision extremely quickly. This meant that the £5,000 could be used as a seed of a campaign from which the Record Office’s fundraising partner, NORAH (the Norfolk Archives and Heritage Development Foundation) was able to secure an additional £25,000. Having reached its target the Record Office was able to secure 86 lots at the sale.
Author: Virginia Woolf
Item date: c1928
Date acquired: 2016
Grant Value: £3,000
Item cost: £9,375
Institution: National Trust, Knole
Town/City: Sevenoaks
County: Kent
The book was written by Virginia Woolf for her lover Vita Sackville-West (1892–1962), who was born and brought up at Knole. It tells the story of the house through the life of Orlando, a character whose life spans the 400–year history of Knole and who mysteriously changes sex half way through. The book was published the year Vita’s father died and Knole passed to her uncle, Major Charles Sackville-West (Edward Sackville-West’s father), thus cutting Vita’s ties with her childhood home. When Woolf wrote Orlando she sought to capture in fiction Vita’s feelings for Knole and her aristocratic heritage. The character Orlando was effectively a mythologised portrait of Vita.
Author: David Jones
Item date: 10-11 July 1967
Date acquired: 2016
Grant Value: £650
Item cost: £1,300
Institution: National Library of Wales
Town/City: Aberystwyth
County: Ceredigion
An important letter from poet and artist David Jones (1895-1974), author of In Parenthesis, to novelist Anthony Powell. The letter was bought for the National Library of Wales with the aid of a grant of £650 from the Friends of the National Libraries.
The letter, which is dated 10-11 July 1967, discusses Welsh history and genealogy, topics on which these two men of letters - both of Welsh descent - shared a common interest. The National Library of Wales’ extensive David Jones Archive - the most complete archive of the artist-poet’s work in existence - contains two associated letters from Powell to Jones, dated 8 and 16 July 1967 respectively (NLW, David Jones Papers, CT2/2). It also contains a draft of a letter from Jones to Powell, dated 15 July 1967, but in fact responding to Powell’s letter of 16 July (NLW, David Jones Papers, CF1/12, f. 12).
Author: Robert Louis Stevenson & Fanny Stevenson
Item date: June 1885-May 1892: most often n.d
Date acquired: 2016
Grant Value: £5,000
Item cost: £33,800
Institution: National Library of Scotland
Town/City: Edinburgh
The 38 letters of Robert Louis Stevenson to Anne Jenkin are published in the comprehensive Yale edition of his letters, but of the 15 which Fanny sent to Anne, only the heart-rending letter written the day after Stevenson’s death is known to be published. It is therefore in Fanny’s letters that the research value of the collection probably lies.
Anne was the widow of Fleeming Jenkin, Professor of Engineering at Edinburgh University. In that capacity he taught Stevenson, and though the latter showed little aptitude or interest in the subject, the two became close friends and Stevenson enjoyed visiting the Jenkin family in Edinburgh. Like Stevenson, the Jenkins were fond of amateur dramatics, and with their three young sons Stevenson must have been in his boyish element. Fleeming Jenkin died very suddenly in 1885 aged 52, and this correspondence begins when Anne asks Stevenson to write a memoir of her husband. A postscript to the earliest Stevenson letter in the collection reads ‘Dear me, what happiness I owe to both of you!’
Item date: 15th/16th century
Date acquired: 2016
Grant Value: £4,000
Item cost: £23,400
Institution: Lambeth Palace Library
Town/City: London
A manuscript memorandum book made for Archbishop Thomas Bourchier (c.1411-1486). Bourchier was Archbishop of Canterbury for 32 years, during the tumultuous period of the Wars of the Roses: he crowned Edward IV, Richard III and Henry VII. His activities within the diocese of Canterbury, however, are less well documented. The official record of this Archbishop’s administration is held by Lambeth Palace Library, as part of its long series of archiepiscopal registers from 1279 onwards. F.R.H. du Boulay, in his published edition (1957) of Bourchier’s register, notes that it contains no visitation returns and is in some other ways less complete than one might have expected, perhaps suggesting physical loss or that some information was never formally written up. This may not be wholly surprising, given the disruptive events that were taking place at the same time.
The volume which has now been acquired may help to fill some of the gaps in our knowledge of the more local aspects of Bourchier’s tenure of the see of Canterbury and thereafter.
Author: James Watt
Date acquired: 2016
Grant Value: Gift via FNL
Item cost: Gift via FNL
Institution: Royal Library, Windsor Castle
Town/City: Windsor
County: Berkshire
In 2016, a collection of the papers of James Watt was donated by the Watt family to the Royal Library, Windsor Castle. The donation was made through Friends of the National Libraries.
Watt was a master at the Royal Naval College at Osborne, and tutored the two eldest sons of George V and Queen Mary, both future Kings.
The collection includes Royal Naval College reports for the Prince of Wales, autograph letters from the Princes, and about 75 letters from Henry Hansell (tutor to the royal children) to Watt with drafts of his own letters to Hansell.
Author: Sir George Calvert
Item date: 16th November 1622
Date acquired: 2016
Grant Value: £1,200 [Smaller Libraries Fund]
Item cost: £3,120
Institution: Kiplin Hall
A letter written to the Marquess of Buckingham by Sir George Calvert in November 1622, when Calvert was one of the two principal Secretaries of State to James I, with responsibility for external affairs. George Calvert was born on the Kiplin estate in 1579 and built Kiplin Hall in the early 1620s. In 1620 he founded a colony in Newfoundland, which he named Avalon. He was created 1st Baron Baltimore in 1625 and founded Maryland in 1632, just before his death.