A Forgotten History of Kent
by Roger Cockett
Amongst the treasures in the possession of the KAS is an Imperial Quarto size book, The Antiquities of Kent, written in manuscript by one William Dampier.
This is not the famous Dampier, navigator, buccaneer and writer, who in 1681 was obliged to cross the jungle of the Panama isthmus on foot with his manuscript journals secreted inside a length of bamboo sealed up with wax. Our William Dampier followed a somewhat different path in life and was born in 1835 in Camden Street, Maidstone, although his father was in fact born in the same part of Somerset as Dampier the buccaneer. William Dampier writes that whilst still a young boy, he conceived a “fixed determination” to write an account of the historical buildings of Kent, even though he had not yet the means nor the opportunity to do so.
Dampier writes in his preface that in the summer of 1849 at the age of 14 (a few months after the death of his father) he began upon his great task, by making notes and sketches of Leeds Castle. He recalls receiving valuable help from the then owner, Charles Wykeham-Martin. By the age of 16, Dampier was apprenticed to a printer and the census of 1851 found him working as a compositor, living in Clerkenwell, east London, with a wife and small family. He writes that “It was not until the year 1864 that circumstances arose by which I was enabled to set about... producing a book. I undertook excursions into Kent, chiefly on foot, to inspect the various buildings or objects...”.
By the time of the 1871 census though, Dampier’s personal life had begun to change for the worse. His wife had died and he and the children were living with his widowed mother in Maidstone. His occupation was now an amanuensis (ie a clerk or secretary).
The Antiquities of Kent is dated 4th December 1875 and Dampier must have had to work hard to get it ready, even by 1880, when it was advertised for sale in The Antiquary. The address in the advertisement of 47 Finsbury Circus, London EC, sounds like a place of business. Whether the book was sold at that time we do not know. By 1881 he and his remaining family had moved to Bermondsey, then in Surrey, where his mother died that year. By 1891, Dampier was living on his own in lodgings and gives his occupation as journalist. In 1892 he died, aged only 57, leaving an estate of £214 to his son and possibly to his son-in-law.
The Antiquities of Kent breaks little new ground in its subject matter and it keeps strictly within the bounds of its subtitle - “Churches, Monastic Edifices, and Castles of the County.” There are over 80 pen and ink drawings, many of them full page, accompanied by copious notes. The images are lively and show a confident draughtsman’s hand with a good grasp of perspective. Many of the notes are personal observations and one suspects that they are a bit of a “cut and paste” from the books of others. This was after all not unusual in the early days of antiquarianism when John Stow’s Survey of London was stripped almost verbatim by many a later author.
Whether or not the sale of the book at the end of the 19th century was a success is not known, but Dampier’s work remains a valuable record of the county, and an example of the commitment and enthusiasm of a Victorian antiquarian.
Castles, Baronial Halls, Manor Houses, Cromlechs etc”. The book does not cover minor buildings or history which is not directly related to buildings. Besides his closely hand-written text, its 426 pages contain 178 ink drawings, presumably by the author, many in the text but some ink and wash drawings on whole pages of heavier paper. In his preface, Dampier lists his sources as Hasted, Ireland, Lambarde, Kilburne and “others”. He also quotes from Thorpe, Philipott, Dugdale, Tanner and Grose, but gives no specific references except where he quotes an author’s words. William Dampier was never a member of the Kent Archaeological Society and the Society’s Proceedings in the period 1875 to 1885 make no mention of his work, but he does say that “much information has been acquired from the published reports of the Kent Archaeological Society”. He also says, intriguingly, that a large number of documents and papers bearing on the Cobham family – also on the restoration of the Cobham brasses were placed at my disposal by Captain F Capper-Brooke of Ufford near Woodbridge in Suffolk.” One certainly wonders what became of them.
The pages of the book are numbered, but there is no index. There are lists of 193 buildings, 179 illustrations and 116 coats of arms. These lists are not in alphabetical order in the book, but we hope to transcribe them into the correct order and put them on the Society’s website. The coats of arms are coloured and most attractive, but they seem to have been constructed from the heraldic shorthand and are not reproductions of what Dampier saw.
The Antiquities of Kent certainly does have some value for the modern reader. It is not a book of first resort for the researcher as it is largely based on secondary sources and one cannot verify its contents. Also it is of course 140 years old. However, the book does have the merit that William Dampier seems to have visited all the buildings he writes about and it thus gives us an eyewitness account of their state in the period 1849-1874. It would of course have been even better if he had given the year of each visit, as Sir Stephen Glynne did in his ‘Churches of Kent’. The drawings of buildings are generally very good but one can verge upon the amateurish, since Dampier is good with detail, but poor on proportion. He is liable to mislead a researcher who does not know a building. But even an indifferent drawing can have great value for the historian.
We may only speculate as to why the book was hand-written and not printed. Dampier of all people, as a printer, would have realised that there could only ever be the one copy. Perhaps he had hoped that a publisher would take it on but the cost had proved to be too high. Perhaps he believed that if he made just the one beautifully written, illustrated and bound copy then it would outlive him - in which case he was right.
What happened to the book? Our Member Mr Michael Leach, of Ongar in Essex, recently came across the advertisement for William Dampier’s book in a copy of the Antiquary of February 1880 and wrote asking if it could be identified. A quick check revealed that it was in the KAS Library and KAS librarians have over the years been aware of it. No record survives of its accession and perhaps it was donated soon after 1880.
The book has been very expensively bound. A tiny bookbinder’s ‘ticket’ or label is set into the inside edge of the back board, but it bears no name. Dr Peter Draper believed that the binding was done by Sangorski of London, founded in 1901. However, we now know that Dampier died 9 years before that date. A newspaper cutting of 1930 preserved in the book is an obituary of Mr J W Zahensdorf, a bookbinder who had retired in 1923 from a business founded by his father in 1844; perhaps an earlier researcher had identified him as the binder. Only the first few pages show signs of much use, but the back of the book has suffered from careless handling and the spine is beginning to detach from the binding. It will not stand up to any substantial future use by readers unless it can be repaired. Alternatively, the book could possibly be photographed and the page images made available on the Society’s website.
Poor William Dampier must have died a disappointed man back in 1892 in his south London lodging. He would never have dreamed that his life’s work might one day be made available to thousands of readers around the world via the internet.