Gordon Ward Collection

Volunteers from among the KAS membership are spending afternoons in the Library working to compile an index of the Gordon Ward Collection. Dr. Gordon Ward, a prominent member of the KAS and a Kentish Historian and Antiquarian working in the early to mid 19th century, built up a collection of booklets, pamphlets, cuttings and other ephemera of towns and villages in Kent. This collection is housed in the Library in files under the name of each location, alphabetically arranged. Some of the more important items have already been put on the Library book and visual record indexes, but the bulk of the material in the files remains to be listed.

Here is an extract from the Gordon Ward collection which might amuse, and illustrate how life has changed since 1809!

Five Guineas for Sleepy Billy

A press-cutting annotated '1809' (presumably by Gordon Ward) reads as follows:-

FIVE GUINEAS REWARD
Escaped about ten o’clock in the morning, on the 10th of May last, from the ground where he was employed with others, adjoining to St Augustine’s Gaol, Canterbury, being a prisoner, charged with felony there.
WILLIAM FRY, alias FIELD (whom since our advertisement we have learnt, is better known by the appellations of Civil Billy, and Sleepy Billy, and is noted for drinking an incredible number of successive glasses of spirits, and half pints of beer) and who answers the following description, viz.

Five feet five and a half inches high, 38 years of age, stout made, an awkward gait, dark brown hair, hazel eyes, sallow complexion, has worked as a labourer, and recently received a severe cut on the fleshy part of one of his arms, a little below the elbow, which has either left a considerable scar, or is not yet healed up; says he was born at Littlebourne, near Canterbury and is well known in and around that city, as a common depredator. It is supposed he is either employed by some farmer in houghing, or other work, in the vicinity of Canterbury, or on the Isle of Thanet, or lurking about in their grounds to pilfer anything that may come his way; it is therefore hoped for the sake of public justice, that any person meeting with a fellow answer-ing to the above description, will cause him to be secured and lodged in any of his Majesty’s Gaols, or delivered to the Keeper of St Augustine’s Gaol, Canterbury where they will immediately receive a reward of FIVE GUINEAS, together with all expenses.

N.B. Whoever is known to harbour or secrete the above-mentioned felon after this public notice will be prosecuted to the utmost rigour of the law.

William Field was indeed baptised in Littlebourne, in 1766. He was one of several children born to Abraham and Ann Field who had been married in Littlebourne in 1760. We can perhaps forgive him for taking a small liberty with his age. His mother died when he was 8.