‘Lost memorials’ now on the internet

‘Lost memorials’ now on the internet

Records of hundreds of people who lived in Charlton and Bromley and their districts over a period of many centuries are now featured on the Kent Archaeological Society’s website, www.kentarchaeology.org.uk/research.

The records are in the form of memorial inscriptions, ‘MIs’, on gravestones, tablets, tombs and monuments. Charlton’s are from St Luke’s parish church, originally published in 1908 by Leonard Morgan May in a book that is now highly collectable. Since 1908 many of the MIs on the outdoor graves at Charlton are likely to have become illegible or even lost, so May’s work is of particular value to family historians and genealogists, giving the names of relatives, ancestors and descendants of the people they honour. Bromley’s records are from the parish church of St Peter and St Paul and were noted by an anonymous antiquarian who visited the church in 1829 and by Richard Holworthy, a former Kent County Council archivist, who transcribed them about 90 years ago. Many memorials at Bromley have been lost, rendered illegible, or were destroyed when the medieval church, within which there were about 100 monuments, was bombed in an air raid in 1941. Only the tower survived. Fortunately Holworthy’s transcriptions were published in The British Archivist in 1915, a copy of which survived among the papers that Leland Lewis Duncan of Lewisham, antiquarian and author, left to the Kent Archaeological Society when he died in 1923. Until now these transcriptions could be read only by those able to visit the KAS library in Maidstone, but all of them have now been transcribed and indexed by the KAS and are online and accessible free of charge.

One of the most intriguing MIs at Charlton honours Henry Frazer, ‘born of African parents, who died in 1826 aged 55 years ‘... in grateful testimony of his fidelity and devoted attention the master whom he served 30 years has raised this tomb.’ Was he a slave? He died several years before the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833.

Various members of the Fraser family and their Wallace relatives are also recorded, including Capt. Hugh John Arthur Fraser, ‘shot in Brazil while bravely quelling a mutiny’.

Also recorded are John Stuart Peddie, Surgeon, who died while serving with Captain John Franklin on his ill-fated attempt to navigate the Northwest Passage in the Canadian Arctic, and Edward Wilkinson, one of Queen Elizabeth I’s servants and ‘Yeoman of the Month to King Henry the 8th and Anne Boleyn and Edward the 6th who for 30 years ‘continued in these offices without blot of dishonesty in any of his services’.

Perhaps Charlton’s most famous MI is the one commemorating The Right Hon. Spencer Perceval, the only British prime minister to have been assassinated, whose ‘terrible death by the hand of a madman in the very midst of all his labours for his country’s good plunged all England into mourning’

Among the Bromley parishioners recorded in the MIs are Elizabeth (‘Tetty’) Johnson, (‘beautiful, elegant, talented, dutiful’), wife of Dr Samuel Johnson, the lexicographer and essayist. She died in 1752 although her gravestone bore the date 1753. Also recorded are Mary Ann Gayton, the schoolmistress who taught William Ewart Gladstone to read and Robert Booth Rawes, believed locally to have been the original of Charles Dickens’s ‘Pickwick’. Ted Connell, who runs the KAS website, says “MIs not only tell us about people who are buried in our

St Peter and St Paul's Church Bromley before 1941

Roman quern stone from East Farleigh

Excavations in a room adjacent to the oven found in building 5 at East Farleigh Roman Villa (see Newsletter no.83, page 5) uncovered a broken quern. The upper stone was broken into at least five pieces. It was 450mm in diameter by 160mm thick and if complete would have weighed at least 50 kg. Part of the 50mm thick base stone was located but not in situ. The upper stone, which still had well-cut grooves in the base, was made of the dark grey greensand which outcrops in the Sandgate/Folkestone area. The lower stone appears to be a reddish-brown millstone grit. It is hoped excavations will recommence on Buildings 3 and 5 and the area to the south on Sundays at the end of April.

Albert Daniels

Maidstone Area Archaeological Group

Roman quern stone from East Farleigh

Canterbury Archaeological Society Research and Publication Grants

The Society has limited funds available to award a grant to individuals researching any aspect of the archaeology and history of the Canterbury district. It is envisaged that a grant would not normally exceed £500. Preference would be given to work resulting in publication.

Your letter should mention:

• Your qualifications
• The nature and length of your research
• The stage you have reached in your research
• The amount you are applying for
• Any additional funding anticipated from other sources
• Your proposals for publication
• Your anticipated timetable

You may be asked to name a referee whom the Committee making the grant could consult. If successful, you would be expected to account for the money spent and give a copy of any article, pamphlet etc, to the Society’s library.

For further details, please contact the Honorary Secretary of the Grants Committee:

Mrs C M Short

An eroded gravestone at St Lukes Church in 2010. Only part of the inscription is now legible but luckily it was recorded in 1908 by Leonard Morgan May