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Celebrating Hampshire Historians

Furley, John Sampson

6 February 1855 - 23 April 1949

He was a son of Richard Lee Furley, a shipowner of Hull and Gainsborough and was educated at Winchester College and Christ Church, Oxford, where he graduated with a First in Mods and Greats. He used to say: ‘I owe everything to be elected a scholar of Winchester at the age of 12.’  In his Winchester in 1867 he described his time as a pupil as a period when the ‘privileged classes…in perilous ignorance and isolation’ were getting involved in the Portsmouth Mission and initiatives (Firth, p. 231).  After university, with the exception of a year at Tonbridge School, he taught at Winchester and was for 16 years a housemaster and 11 years in command of the cadet corps.  However, he did not enjoy being a schoolmaster and gained more satisfaction after he had left the school in 1915. In 1909 he had been elected to Winchester City Council and served as Mayor in 1911-12, He became an alderman in 1925 and gained the Freedom of the City in 1931. He chaired city council committees on education, museums and library, and sanitation, and also chaired the Watch Committee. He was elected to the Hampshire County Council, becoming an alderman in 1918 and chairing the education committee and the first planning committee under the Town Planning Act 1925.

Furley was a giant of local history between the wars and worked for many years on the archives of the city of Winchester. His books included one on Winchester City Government in the 14th and 15th centuries, another on Winchester town life in the 14th century, and a third on the Hampshire Quarter sessions in the 17th century. 

The rubric to his extensive papers held by the HRO (11M92W) describe them as: ‘transcripts or calendars and translations of Winchester city charters and grants, ordnance books, city court rolls and piepowder court rolls, account rolls of city officers and of St John’s Hospital and enrolments and proceedings at the court of the Clerk of the market, [also] a transcript of the 1187 Hyde Abbey charter [and] notes and location plans relating to Winchester mills. Also includes original list of inhabitants on north side of Winchester, [in the] 18th century. He also transcribed and translated the deeds of the manor of Testwood, Totton (HRO, 11M31/55).

He was not, a ‘dusty antiquarian’, according to his obituarist in The Wykehamist, who wrote: ‘Nothing seemed too modern for him, and although no one could have a deeper appreciation of traditional values, he saw them as being continued through a series of social changes leading to the betterment of material conditions, and to the improvement of educational standards, for the vast majority of his countrymen.’

In 1894, he married Ellen Phillips, but they had no children. Before 1901 he acquired Kencot Manor Farm, Oxfordshire, which in 1949 he donated to the National Trust. In retirement he lived at Lechlade, Goucestershire.

Sources

Alum. Oxon.

Anon, JS Furley, obituary, The Wykehamist, 25 May 1949, pp. 462-3.

Winchester College, J. D’E. Firth, 1949. P. 231

Portrait

J S Furley at Wincheter College Photograph of him as housemaster for Chernocke’s, Winchester College, 1909.

J S Furley  JS Furley, by Oswald Hornby Birley, Kencot Manor Farm, Art UK

Contribution to county’s history

He used his classical education to make scholarly studies of the archives of the city of Winchester, leaving a vast canon of personal papers and published books that are an invaluable resource.

Relevant published works

  • The Minor Endowed Charities of Old Winchester, Charity Organisation Review, June 1913 (Longmans)

  • City Government of Winchester from the records of the XIV and XV centuries, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1923

  • Mills and Waterways of Old Winchester, 1930, Jacob & Johnson, 1930

  • Winchester in 1867, Warren & Son, Winchester, [1936].

  • Quarter Sessions Government in Hampshire in the Seventeenth Century, Warren & Son, Winchester [1937]

  • Town Life in the 14th Century as seen in the court rolls of the City of Winchester, 1946, Warren & Son, Winchester

Critical Comments

Other Comments

His contributions to municipal government are another arm of his life which would repay more study.

Contributor

Barry Shurlock, 7 May, 2023

Keywords

Winchester, archives

Any queries or further suggestions for this part of the list should be addressed to celebrating@hantsfieldclub.org.uk.

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