Westcountry Studies. Issue 8. June 2019.

Westcountry Studies a bibliographical newsletter on Devon and its region Issue 8 June 2019

Since the last issue there has been little progress on maintaining the coverage of current output, apart from monitoring Devon and Westcountry titles in the British National Bibliography. The main emphasis has been working on the listings of maps, a total of some 19,000 records - of which more later. One example of the often obscure nature of Devonian titles was revealed after a visit to Orchard Paradise in Burnham Nurseries near Newton Abbot. This proved to have been run for many years by the Rittenhausen family, a leading firm of orchid growers and experts in the field. As a result writings by the family have been added to the bibliography.

It will be noticed that the Devon and Exeter Institution is now linked to the Devon bibliography and it is hoped that this will be a way for it to find an institutional base, perhaps becoming a research project of the University of Exeter. An article entitled "Re-imagining local studies in Devon: reclaiming the local community's published heritage in an age of austerity" will  appear in the international peer-reviewed journal Global Knowledge, Memory and Communication in an issue devoted to community archives. The solution for Devon, which proposes moving the responsibility for local studies documentation from public libraries to museums rather than archives might not appeal to all, but at least it might get people talking. 

Pages updated since the last issue of the newsletter include 2019 publications
A new page is: Exeter town maps

Exeter Day

The Exeter Heritage Network has brought together some 25 groups involved in all aspects of the city's heritage and almost 20 of them were represented at St Nicholas Priory in the Mint on 15 June. The display stands were crammed into the atmospheric Norman undercroft where there were also refreshments available. Talks on Exeter Cathedral, organ building in Exeter and a newly discovered map of Exeter were given in the meeting room on first floor and it was the starting point for walks conducted by the Red Coat Guides. It was a great success, with some 400 visitors coming through the doors. This is typical of comments received: ‘Brilliant event. Very informative talk on the “new” map. Lots of friendly chat. Looking forward to your next event of this type - and the venue was stunning’

Exhibitors included the Devon and Exeter Institution, the Friends of Exeter Cathedral, the Friends of RAMM, the Dissenters Graveyard Trust, the Cygnet Theatre and many others. The Devon Heritage Centre displayed the newly discovered Exeter map of 1743 about which Todd Gray spoke to two packed audiences during the day. Exeter Civic Society's stand presented its work on blue plaques and a biographical  index of Exonians - more of which later. It also showed a changing series of images from the Devon bibliography - rebranded the Devon and Exeter bibliography for the occasion. The Kent Kingdon Bequest was also highlighted - more on this below. 

The Kent Kingdon Bequest
This is the residue of what was once a major funding source for the Royal Albert Museum and Exeter City Library. Further information can be found on the Bequest's website. The following extracts from the latest annual report bring the picture up to date. 

At the annual meeting in 2018 meeting Trustees clarified that grants could also cover the acquisition on-costs including conservation, transport, postage.  Such costs would be considered as part of a grant application. They stressed the importance of using KK funding as match funding, demonstrating where possible tangible local support for projects within funding applications. Trustees also discussed working with Wren Music to digitise the final Baring Gould broadside ballad volume, not available during the Devon Traditions project, using funds donated to KK by the Devon Dialect Society. This should give Devon Heritage Centre access to the master images of all volumes in the project. Ian Maxted presented an exhibition of images from manuscripts formerly in the Exeter Cathedral Library on the occasion of rededicating the Exeter Civic Society blue plaque to Sir Thomas Bodley on 11 August 2018. The Trustees had expressed an interest in obtaining further images from items now in the Bodleian Library for Exeter.

While no purchase grants were made during the financial year 2018/9 a watercolour by Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827) French prisoners under escort to Exeter Castle for forfeiting their parole dated 1799 available from Karen Taylor Fine Art at a price of  £8,200 with museum discount was proposed to the Trustees in January 2019. With grants by the FEMAG of £3,000 and the V & A Purchase Grant Fund of £2,750 the balance requested of £2,450 was agreed by Trustees. A cheque for this sum will be signed at the Annual meeting in July.

No grant applications were received for the Westcountry Studies Library during the year although in June 2019 the Trustees agreed to grant the South West Heritage Trust £1,000 toward an item in  Bonham’s auction 26 June: A memorandum book begun by Revd. James Burdwood of West Alvington in the county of Devon, dated 1649 and continued until at least 1724. The estimate was for £2,000 - 3,000 but the hammer price was £8,000 and unfortunately SWHT were unsuccessful.

A biographical index of Exonians

This project is a spin-off of the Devon bibliography and seeks to fill the gaps for the many individuals who cannot be commemorated on the streets of Exeter by blue plaques. The Civic Society can only fund two or three a year and there is also the risk of overkill as pedestrians in Exeter end up with blue spots before their eyes. Exonian biographical notes is in its early stages and seeks to remedy this. Brief biographical notes and references to other sources are being compiled for persons who have been proposed for commemorative plaques, for individuals of no fixed abode, where a precise address cannot be ascertained for fixing a plaque or indeed for notable - or even notorious - individuals who might not deserve a plaque - Bishop Phillpotts springs to mind. Exeter's links to the wider world is the theme of the Global Lives module in the History Department of the University of Exeter and it is hoped that they can provide brief biographical entries for the index - it appears that some 120 individuals are registered for the coming term and last year's students were an enthusiastic bunch. It might also be possible to extend this index to other localities.  

A new old map of Exeter - and some 19,000 other sheets. 
The newly updated page of Exeter town maps was stimulated by Todd Gray's snapping up at auction of the engraved map by William Birchynshaw: A platforme of the city of Exon 1743. Both the map and the engraver are unknown to map historians. The very title shows it to be an archaic work, and indeed it looks back to the bird-eye view tradition of Hooker rather than the more modern style adopted by Ichabod Fairlove in 1709. The engraver seems to have been a pewterer and examination of the map with its slightly blurred lines suggests that it might have been engraved on a soft pewter plate as an antiquarian curiosity and never intended for wider publication. Pewter is an alloy traditionally of tin and lead In any event his endeavours were put into the shade by the arrival of John Roque on the scene who the following year was to publish has magnificent plan of Exeter using modern techniques of cartography. The map is to be published by the Devon and Cornwall Record Society later this year with an accompanying well illustrated account of Exeter's long tradition of mapping.   

The unexpected appearance of William Birchynshaw and his map has stimulated work on the maps section of the Devon bibliography. Apart from the page of Exeter town maps, for which some images have been added, the published maps of other towns and of the county as a whole have been amended - a total of some 2,000 items. Ordnance Survey mapping is being separately covered and this adds another 17,000 sheets. The opportunity is being taken to add links to the excellent county series of six inch and 25 inch maps covering the period from the 1860s to the 1930s, digitised and freely available on the website of the National Library of Scotland. For the later national grid sheets SIM and SUSI printouts held by the Devon and Exeter Institution have also been included. Details of editions have not been added for all sheets and it is also hoped to extend the identification of parishes represented on large scale OS plans. The history of recent Ordnance Survey mapping indicates how information can become harder to access after digitisation. After the war sheets were revised after a certain number of units of change had been recorded on each kilometer (for 1:2,500) or quarter kilometer (for 1:1,250) sheets. Thus for sheet SX9292SW, which covers Exeter Cathedral, issue A appeared in 1951, B in 1960, C in 1966, D in 1977 and E in 1991. This had the advantage that significant change was recorded by a published edition as soon as it emerged, but the disadvantage was that adjoining sheets may have been updated at different dates - if at all - although it was possible to order updates on microfilm. Local studies librarians in Devon scanned the Ordnance Survey monthly publication lists and a considerable proportion of the bookfund was allocated to these expensive sheets. The arrival of digital mapping changed all that. In about 1995 the hard copy sheets were discontinued. Individuals could order printouts of the kilometer square, or indeed a map centred on any grid reference, whenever they wanted and be sure to obtain the most up to date mapping  - and they could also select the data sets they required. For the librarian it became difficult to know how to update large scale Ordnance Survey information, which remained expensive. At that time I represented public libraries on BRICMICS (the British and Irish Committee on Map Information and Cataloguing Systems). Meetings were in two parts. In the morning members exchanged information on mapping developments which inevitably led to grouses over Ordnance Survey. In the afternoon they were joined by Ordnance Survey and the issues were thrashed out. One main problem was the lack of a standard set of archived data which was compatible with the discontinued national grid sheets. From the 1990s a set of raw data was downloaded annually for the British Library, but there were problems with the changing software which converted this data into a visible form. Also at that time the data would only be accessible in the national libraries. I argued for the periodic production of raster (perhaps TIFF or PDF) files of the entire dataset in kilometer squares, perhaps every ten years, to tie in with the national census. This could provide a national standard edition which local libraries could acquire. To my knowledge nothing has come of this. In Devon licences have been taken out by local authorities to use OS digital data for their area and it is possible to access this on the internet for public rights of way. The current dataset is under a licence dated 2018, but it is unclear whether the data for earlier licences has been retained and whether it is publicly accessible. The OS dataset for Know Your Place is dated 2017. Once the location of earlier OS datasets is known it should be possible to add them to the Devon bibliography