Leach was educated at Winchester College 1863-1869 and at New College, Oxford. He won the Stanhope English Prize in 1872 and was a fellow of All Souls College 1874-1882. He was called to the Bar at the Middle Temple in 1876 and joined the Western Circuit. From 1884, he was Assistant Charity Commissioner (Endowed Schools…

Leland has been called ‘the father of English local history and bibliography’. His Itineraries, compiled c 1538 to 1543 provided a crucial source of comment and raw material for many who followed after and introduced the county as the most obvious unit for studying the local history of England.

Anna Massey Lea was born in Philadelphia in 1844 to an affluent Quaker couple, Joseph Lea and Susanna Massey.  She was the oldest of their six daughters.  She took lessons in art from an early age and also studied anatomy at the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania.  From 1865, when the family moved to Europe,…

John Marsh was born in Adderbury, Oxfordshire, the son of George Marsh, a master carpenter, and his wife Catherine. It is unknown how or when he arrived in Hursley, Hampshire a distance of some 80 miles from his home. Nor do we know much about his education – he does not appear to have attended…

F.T. Madge, or Canon Madge, as he was usually known later in life, was in a line of Cathedral Librarians that recognized the historical importance of its holdings in the late 19th century. He was the son of Thomas Hellier Madge, rector of Kettering, Northants, whom he followed into the church, He was ordained priest…

Surgeon, soldier, politician and historian, Richard Harmon Luce, born at Halcombe, Malmesbury, gained a first in Natural Sciences at Christ’s College, Cambridge and then qualified as a surgeon at Guys Hospital.  In WW1 he served as Director of Medical Services of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force rising to rank of Major-General and was knighted in 1919. …

John Latham was born in Eltham, Kent. He went to Merchant Taylors’ School, London then trained as a surgeon and set up in practice at Dartford, Kent. An internationally recognised ornithologist, for which he was awarded a doctorate in 1795 for his proposed classification of birds by the University of Erlangen in Germany, amongst other…

He was a Catholic priest whose extremely successful 8-volume History of England, from the First Invasion by the Romans to the Accession of Henry VIII, which was published in 1819 and in later editions, is said to have been the most popular work in print until the publication in 1874 of Richard Green’s Short History…

Educated at Balliol College, Oxford, he became Senior Science Master at Portsmouth Grammar School. Remembered as ‘a good scholar with wide interests and a remarkable memory’ (Washington and Marsh 1976, 29) in the 1880s and 1890s he wrote books on chemistry and geometrical drawing for Army candidates.  His interests also included Tudor Portsmouth, on which…

Dorothy Liddell was born at Benwell, Northumberland to John Liddell and his wife Emily (née Berry) one of their six children.  In 1904 the family moved to Sydmonton Court near Newbury and four years later to Sherfield Manor near Basingstoke.