Born in Buckinghamshire, Alec Holland was raised on the Exbury Estate, on the Solent shore, where his father was groom to the de Rothschilds.  His mother died when he was eleven and he was brought up by his father, elder brother and sister-in-law.  Financial help from the Rothschilds enabled him to attend grammar school in…

Edward King was born in Lymington, the son of Richard and Elizabeth King. He was educated at Amsterdam House, Christchurch, before joining the family business in the town, which was an offshoot of his grandfather’s printing business in Yeovil. One member of the family, Charles, had moved to Lymington in 1805, and his nephew, Richard…

Reginald Hooley was a wine merchant from Winchester with a passion for fossil collecting.  He was born in Southampton and began his paleontological career by searching out specimens on the Isle of Wight, eventually discovering a new species of dinosaur.  

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.

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.

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…

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…

Hampshire was the first county to complete, before the First World War, its Victoria County History, those large red volumes that are the first-look source for so many queries. They were orchestrated and edited by William Page, but the research and writing depended to a large extent on a cohort of young graduates – mainly…

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. …

He was educated at Magdalen College and New College, Oxford, was ordained and became a Fellow of Magdalen. Between 1845 and 1905 he worked as a ‘special assistant’ in the manuscripts department of the Bodleian Library, and became known for writing its history or Annals, which was published in 1868 (2 ed. 1890). He was…