Search FNL grants since 1931

Displaying 151 - 160 of 1973
Item date: 1499-1873
Date acquired: 2018
Grant Value: £1,736
Item cost: £3,742
Institution: East Sussex, Brighton and Hove Record Office
Town/City: Lewes
County: East Sussex

In about 1970 a young articled clerk at a solicitor’s firm in the Sussex market town of Battle was required by his principal to clear old papers from a room above the stables in the office yard. Most were destroyed, but the young man could not bear to consign a few of them to oblivion; he knew that the ones he could read were of importance and guessed, quite rightly as it transpired, that those he could not were probably very old.

Fifty years later that articled clerk, now a pillar of the legal community in the West of England, decided that it was time to realise the value of what he had salvaged. His haul formed Lots 376-380 at the Clevedon Salerooms in March 2018.

Author: Richard Fry (1759-1842)
Item date: c.1793-1820
Date acquired: 2018
Grant Value: £1,500
Item cost: £3,000
Institution: Dr Williams's Library
Town/City: London

The Library was very pleased to acquire a substantial manuscript commonplace book by Richard Fry (1759-1842) largely dating from the early 19th century. Fry is an interesting figure in the history of 19th-century Congregationalism and Unitarianism and the subject of a major controversy in 1798. Born at Devonport into a Congregational family, he trained for the ministry first at the Western Academy, Bridport, and then from 1778 at Homerton Academy in London. He entered the ministry at Warminster, Wiltshire, in 1781, and in 1785 he moved to Billericay in Essex. His ministry was at first uncontroversial, and he enjoyed some success, but his religious opinions gradually altered and a number in his congregation detected a departure from orthodox Calvinism.

Author: Ann Read
Item date: 1930s
Date acquired: 2018
Grant Value: £500 [Smaller Libraries Fund]
Item cost: £767
Institution: Dorset History Centre
Town/City: Dorchester
County: Dorset

One of two grants awarded to Dorset History Centre in 2018 enabling them to acquire original designs from the Poole Pottery.These colourful, attractive items form part of a much larger business archive which was dispersed at the point of the company's liquidation in 2003. This resulted in two large sales of archival material in both London and Dorchester. Much of the archive was acquired for DHC by a coalition of public and private fundraising across Dorset, but significant parts of the archive went into private hands. DHC has been involved in selective and intermittent acquisition of Poole Pottery material to add to the principal archive ever since. The bulk of the archive was catalogued in 2009 thanks to a grant received from The National Archives via its cataloguing grants programme and can be accessed online.

Author: Truda Carter
Item date: 1930s
Date acquired: 2018
Grant Value: £234 [Smaller Libraries Fund]
Item cost: £234
Institution: Dorset History Centre
Town/City: Dorchester
County: Dorset

One of two grants awarded to Dorset History Centre in 2018 enabling them to acquire original designs from the Poole Pottery.These colourful, attractive items form part of a much larger business archive which was dispersed at the point of the company's liquidation in 2003. This resulted in two large sales of archival material in both London and Dorchester. Much of the archive was acquired for DHC by a coalition of public and private fundraising across Dorset, but significant parts of the archive went into private hands. DHC has been involved in selective and intermittent acquisition of Poole Pottery material to add to the principal archive ever since. The bulk of the archive was catalogued in 2009 thanks to a grant received from The National Archives via its cataloguing grants programme and can be accessed online.

Item date: 1766
Date acquired: 2018
Grant Value: £900
Item cost: £1,377
Institution: Derbyshire Record Office

Winster is a beautiful and historic village in the Peak District National Park.  In the mid-18th century it was a prosperous lead mining town but when the mines flooded, the industry died and the population shrank.  The village’s former prosperity is visible in the fine bu

Author: Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
Item date: 19th century
Grant Value: £20,000
Item cost: £1.8m
Institution: Charles Dickens Museum
Town/City: London

In 2017, the Charles Dickens Museum was approached by a private collector in America and given a rare opportunity to consider acquiring material before the remainder of the collection was sold. The collection – which we believe was the largest private collection of Dickens material in the world – had been amassed over a period of 40 years.

We have acquired over 300 items including 145 autograph letters, 54 manuscript items, 25 books from Dickens's own library and 33 artworks.

This acquisition brings outstanding material into a public collection where it can be accessed, researched and displayed, thereby extending the knowledge and appreciate of Dickens’s life and work.

Item date: 15th to 20th centuries
Date acquired: 2018
Grant Value: £3,750
Item cost: £7,500
Institution: Cotesbach Educational Trust

These documents provide crucial material relating to the first generation Marriotts of Cotesbach Hall, now occupied by the 8th generation of the family and where, through the efforts of many, we now have the most wonderful facility (principally HLF funded), namely an environmentally controlled archive which is accessible to the public, schools, researchers alike. Amongst the collection are documents relating to the purchase of Cotesbach Estate in 1759, which will fill in many missing pieces of an intriguing story.

Item date: Late 18th century
Date acquired: 2018
Grant Value: £2,000 [Smaller Libraries Fund]
Item cost: £2,500
Institution: Cornwall Record Office - Kresen Kernow
Town/City: Redruth
County: Cornwall

The Cornwall Record Office already held the Helston Borough archive, as well as the Argal manor collection but the former was conspicuously light on Poor Law and settlement papers and this was because that content had, at same point in the past, been separated off from the Borough archives, as represented in the documents which were offered to the Record Office. The Office was very keen to acquire this collection to augment what was already a very extensive Borough archive and to provide a much better resource for the study of the family and social history of this key Cornish town which received its first charter in 1336.

Item date: late 13th century
Date acquired: 2019
Grant Value: £10,000
Item cost: £100,000
Institution: Canterbury Cathedral Archives & Library
Town/City: Canterbury
County: Kent

‘The Lyghfield Bible’, illuminated manuscript on vellum, late 13th century.

It is almost certain that the Lyghfield Bible was produced in Paris by professional scribes and illuminators in the later 13th century. Paris was the centre of the production of 'Pocket Bibles', of which the Lyghfield Bible is a fine example. Pocket Bibles brought all of the books of the Bible into one volume of a small format, and were produced in large numbers from the later 13th century onwards. The volumes were designed for personal learning and devotion, and they were particularly convenient for scholars and travelling preachers.

The script of the Lyghfield Bible is tiny but impeccable, with its Latin written in two columns on fine vellum. Each book of the Bible begins with a tiny exquisite illumination.

The Bible is a highly important addition for our collections.

Author: Winifred Knights
Item date: c. 1933
Date acquired: 2018
Grant Value: £1,500 [Smaller Libraries Fund]
Item cost: £1,800
Institution: Canterbury Cathedral Archives & Library
Town/City: Canterbury
County: Kent

These four preparatory drawings are for the painting ‘Scenes from the Life of St Martin’, which forms the altarpiece of St Martin’s Chapel in the North-East transept of the Cathedral. Knights completed the painting in 1933.

The painting itself was lent to the Dulwich Picture Gallery in 2016 for its widely acclaimed retrospective exhibition on Knights, and was displayed alongside a number of her preparatory drawings. The exhibition highlighted the importance of the Cathedral’s painting amongst the artist’s oeuvre. For the Cathedral, the painting is a highly significant example of 20th-century art, and also of work by women artists.