Obituary

OBITUARy

joy saynor, m.a.

Joy Saynor died after a short illness on 17th July 2014. She was born in Kilburn in 1926 to Alfred and Margaret D’Eye, the family moving to Shoreham in 1928, where they lived in ‘Friars’, a cottage in the High Street, one of three constructed within an ancient three-bayed timber-framed house which dates from at least the 16th century. Joy attended school in Otford and in 1939 joined the Bromley Grammar School; she recalled seeing Red Cross trains passing through Shoreham with wounded from Dunkirk. Later in 1940 she was evacuated to Harlech, North Wales, and attended Barmouth County School. From there she went up to Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, in 1944 to study history, the enduring passion of her life. On graduating, following the profession of her father, she became an adult-education tutor with the Workers’ Educational Association and the University of London Centre for Extra-Mural Studies. She lectured throughout Kent and South London and conducted many local history courses, her enthusiasm and ability to share her vast knowledge generating a renewed interest in local history among amateurs wherever she taught.

She married and brought up her family in Beckenham but her devotion to Shoreham never flagged, and in the 1960s she embarked on a University of London diploma devoted to the history of the village in the 18th and 19th centuries. She obtained permission from the Mildmay family – the greatest local landowning family in the 19th and 20th centuries – to examine two metal document boxes of the family records held by a solicitor in Tonbridge. These were of great interest, and she transcribed numerous deeds, tenancies, land holdings and agricultural records, besides marriage settlements, etc., for the period between 1830 and 1950. This corpus, now known as the Mildmay Papers, has achieved great long-term significance due to the Tonbridge solicitors having since lost the two boxes entrusted to them complete with their original contents!

In 1980 Joy returned to live in Shoreham, in her childhood home, acquiring a second bay of the original house, where she lived for the rest of her life, becoming very involved with many aspects of village life, including the WI, the Village Hall management, and a continuing interest in the Parish Council. In 1997 she promoted the foundation of the Shoreham Historical Society of which she became President, and which she represented on the Kent History Federation.

Her meticulous and far-ranging researches into all aspects of Shoreham’s past, including its archaeology, buildings and oral history, together with her generosity in sharing her knowledge will long be remembered. In 1989, jointly with the late Malcolm White, she published the first definitive history of the village, Shoreham, a village in Kent, which incorporates many of her varied researches. Many smaller publications across the county were initiated by Joy, all of which have increased our knowledge of Kent’s past. In 1969 Joy joined the Kent Archaeological Society, publishing on Shoreham’s parish administration in Archaeologia Cantiana (1972), and was elected to the Council, and subsequently served on several committees. A daring commercial innovation for the KAS was her production of distinctive badged tea towels which proved very popular. She became an Officer of the Society as its Honorary Excursions Secretary, and organised many interesting visits both within and outside Kent. Further afield, the trips to Ireland and France were memorable to all those who participated, most of whom became ‘regulars’! A day trip to the Pas de Calais was rather marred by an exceedingly slow lunch in a French town, but we eventually escaped to our main destination, the renowned Field of Cloth of Gold, which proved to be an immense cabbage field surrounding a very small formal monument, but all enjoyed the expedition. A later memorable week-long visit via Luxemburg to Alsace, based on Colmar, was flawless, with visits to Rheims, Strasburg and many other places of interest.

In May 2014, happily just in time to acknowledge her many years of valued services to the KAS, Joy was elected a Vice-President. She will be greatly missed in Shoreham and beyond.

c.p. ward

OBITUARy