Obituaries

Mary Finch (1923-2007)

Mary belonged to that group of remarkable women, all of them distinguished historians, who pioneered and established the archives service in the diocese and county of Lincoln. Mary, herself the author of one of the outstanding monographs on Tudor and Stuart economic history written in her generation, went on to devote more than a quarter of a century to the work of the Lincolnshire Archives, following in the footsteps of Kathleen Major, Joan Varley and Dorothy Owen. But underlying her distinguished historical and archival work there was always a deep and abiding religious faith, and this was reflected in everything she did.

Mary’s love of history began early. Brought up in Market Harborough, she attended the Collegiate School for Girls at Leicester, where she won the History Prize. She went up to Newnham College, Cambridge, where she achieved a degree of such high standard that it was not long before she returned to begin work on her doctorate. Characteristically, she came to her subject through her interest in recusant families, and particularly that of the enigmatic and tragic figure of Sir Thomas Tresham. From this beginning, her gift for historical enquiry led her on to a much wider study which bore fruit not only in her doctorate but in her subsequent book, The Wealth of Five Northamptonshire Families 1540-1640. This was published in 1956, at a time when there was sharp controversy in historical circles about “the decline of the aristocracy” and “the rise of the gentry”. This debate had engendered a good deal of heat but not very much light, until Mary came on the scene. It was she who showed what could be achieved, by meticulous research in the accounts, correspondence and legal records of her sample of families, towards building up an accurate picture of the wealth of the gentry through local studies. Most of the family archives she used were still in private hands, and her research involved her in journeys by motor-cycle across the Northamptonshire countryside, to spend long hours studying documents in the cold and ill-lit country houses of post-war Britain. The result was a landmark in the scholarship of the period, a best-seller for the local record society that published it, and a fitting monument to Mary as a historian.

When she started work on her doctorate, Mary had already decided that her career was to be in archives. On going down from Cambridge she had been appointed the first assistant archivist in the Wiltshire Record Office in Trowbridge. On completing her doctorate, she was appointed Archivist to the city of Chester. Then, in December 1958, she came to Lincoln, as Assistant Archivist in succession to Dorothy Owen. Here Mary worked with Joan Varley in the original Exchequer Gate premises of the Lincolnshire Archives Office. Here again, the cold was an abiding memory, as was the characteristic advice given by Joan Varley on how to cope with it: “Well, you must wear your mittens.” Mary immersed herself thoroughly in the collections she catalogued, gaining a deep knowledge of the families and institutions of Lincolnshire in the process. Fane of Fulbeck, Gregory of Harlaxton and Massingberd of Gunby were but three of the collections which benefited from her work. She listed the office records of the diocesan registrar, finding among them a fascinating bundle of letters of John Fardell, which she edited for the Lincoln Record Society. The articles she wrote for successive issues of the Lincolnshire Archivists’ Report are still of lasting value to researchers. Her knowledge of the archives was shared most generously with others. On discovering an unknown letter of George Herbert among the diocesan records, she communicated the details to a leading Herbert scholar, Professor Amy Charles, with full permission to publish an account of it. As an archivist, Mary was a traditionalist; if the work was to be done, it must be done thoroughly. By the time she became County Archivist in 1982, the world had moved on. She mistrusted the new world of information technology; she deplored the lack of interest among many county councillors, and the placing of the archives service with recreation and tourism. But she continued to provide an office where scholarship could flourish.

Mary’s life was not without tribulations. Her appointment in 1964 as County Archivist of East Sussex was curtailed when she was called back to Lincoln to look after her ailing parents. In her later years she suffered greatly from arthritis. But she was supported through all difficulties by her enduring faith. A daughter of the vicarage, she had been raised in the Catholic tradition of the Church of England, and this tradition remained her spiritual home throughout her life. In Lincoln she was drawn to the church of St Andrew, on the far side of Pelham Bridge, where she remained a loyal member of a dwindling congregation until its closure in 1967. In later years she attended the church of St Botolph, writing a charming account of one of its Victorian incumbents, Andrew Chrysostom Ramsay. She found the spirituality of Edward King House especially attractive. And she was a regular communicant here at Lincoln Cathedral. Mary’s religion was never thrust upon others; it was simply always there, a part of her everyday life, to which everything else related. She will be remembered as a fine historian, a meticulous scholar and archivist and above all as a person whose faith shone through in all she did. She died, peacefully in her sleep, on the Feast of St Cyprian. As we pray for her soul, we may recall the words of Bishop Edward King, in a letter discovered by Mary among the records of St Andrew’s church, as he condoled with the vicar on the death of a loyal member of his congregation: “The presence of such a [one] is a help upon the earth. But it was a nice day for the dear [one] to depart! A Sunday and the Feast of the Transfiguration.” We give thanks for Mary, praying that with her we may all be partakers of the heavenly banquet with Christ our Lord. Amen. Nicholas Bennett September 2007

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Professor Geoffrey Martin, CBE (1928-2007)

Geoffrey Haward Martin, who was a member of the council of LRS from 1969-until his resignation shortly before his death, was a medieval historian of distinction, who also revealed considerable administrative talents both at university level and then nationally as Keeper of Public Records (1982-88), an unusual but inspired appointment at a time when the PRO was undergoing many important changes. He remains the only career academic who has ever had charge of the national archives, and later felt obliged to criticise the appointment of another head of the archives who he considered to be unsuitable for the job.

Born in Essex and educated at Colchester Royal Grammar School, Geoffrey went up to Merton College, Oxford in 1947, where his enthusiasm for medieval history was particularly encouraged by his tutor, Roger Highfield, with whom, fifty years later, he published A History of Merton (1997). After a brief spell as a research fellow at Manchester University, in 1952 he went as an assistant lecturer in economic history to Leicester University.

Initially his research focussed on urban history, with Ipswich the subject of his doctoral thesis. Further work on other towns followed, including The Story of Colchester (1959), and his most important contribution to Lincolnshire history, The Royal Charters of Grantham (1963), as well as a major bibliography of British and Irish Urban history jointly produced with Sylvia McIntyre (1972). With his East-Anglian departmental colleague, Norman Scarfe, Geoffrey was instrumental in founding the Suffolk Record Society, which under their leadership had an extremely vigorous publications policy.

In the 30 years he was at Leicester, Geoffrey saw History grow from a small unit under the urbane leadership of Professor Jack Simmons to a much larger, thriving department. He was promoted to a Readership (1966) and then a personal Chair in Medieval History (1973); he also served as Public Orator (1971-4), was head of department (1975-80) and Pro-Vice-Chancellor from 1979-82. He also spent two periods as visiting professor at Carleton University, Ottawa (1958-9, 1967-8) and was a research fellow at Merton (1971), returning there again in 1990 as a Senior Research Fellow. In 1982 Geoffrey was appointed Keeper of the Public Records, to the temporary consternation of senior administrative staff at the PRO. As his obituary in the The Times (31 Jan. 2008), notes, ‘While not temperamentally attuned to the increasing bureaucracy of the Civil Service with its relentless demands for targets and performance indicators, Martin ensured that the PRO conformed to these requirements without losing sight of its enduring purpose’. Geoffrey arranged a major conference in 1986 to mark the centenary of the initiation of the great series of PRO calendars by Sir Henry Maxwell-Lyte. He also ensured that the 900th anniversary of Domesday Book in the same year was celebrated with a major public exhibition, held at Chancery Lane in the former Rolls Chapel, on a scale not attempted before or since. It was a great success, linking sound scholarship with the use of the then new technology of ‘talking heads’, and accompanied by occasional side-shows, such as morris-dancing on the lawn outside. Less fortunate was the need to disassemble the long-standing and exceptional display of records in the PRO museum in the Rolls Chapel, with the resulting loss of the beautiful 15th century chest which had belonged to Lady Margaret Beaufort, the mother of King Henry VII. Geoffrey always felt more at home in the Chancery Lane building than the new record office at Kew, which he avoided visiting as much as he could.

Retiring from the PRO in 1988, Geoffrey returned to his roots, becoming Research Professor at the University of Essex, where his polymathic interests were revealed in enthusiastic teaching on the Second World War, a major critical edition of Knighton’s Chronicle 1337-1396 (1995), which he had first encountered as an undergraduate doing the Richard II special subject at Oxford, and his many contributions to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Among his 51 entries there are a number on distinguished predecessors as archivists as well as many historians and antiquarians, including Thomas Frankland (1632/3-90), also described as an ‘impostor’. Indeed Geoffrey produced short biographies on figures from every century from the twelfth to the twenty-first, the last being for the On-line edition in 2006 on Michael Robbins, a railway historian like his friend Jack Simmons. By chance or design, Geoffrey also wrote about the benign and wise Abbot William Clowne of Leicester (d. 1378), renowned above all for his hunting abilities as Henry Knighton, one of his monks, tells us, and about Friar Tuck, ‘legendary outlaw’.

Geoffrey himself was not an extrovert but he always had a distinctive, independent and, usually, humorous take on whatever subject he was dealing with (one of us remembers him as a slim young lecturer with a rather unruly head of hair, slipping inconspicuously into lecture rooms, diffidently producing a small scroll of notes from an inside pocket, before delivering, in a slightly staccato fashion, lectures that were shot through with shafts of irony and recondite learning). Among recreations listed in his Who’s Who entry was ‘adjusting phrases’ and Geoffrey had a deep and abiding love of playing with words. To the end he retained the Elephant child’s ‘insatiable curtiosity’ about people and things. As an historian, editor of documents and member of numerous national and local learned societies, he played a full part in both academic history and in making records more widely accessible. Among many honours, we can note that he was Chairman of the British Records Association, 1981-92, Vice-President of the Royal Historical Society, 1984-8, and Member of the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments (England), 1987-94. His sage counsel and immense learning were widely shared; we are grateful that LRS benefited from his advice and long support, and we offer to his wife, Janet and their family, our sincerest condolences in their loss.

Michael Jones

David Crook