SJ

St John of Bletsoe

1281-1920

From: 1281 To: 1920

These documents had been held by Coutts Bank and were deposited with Northamptonshire Record Office in 1956. The deposit was transferred from Northamptonshire Record Office to Bedfordshire Record Office in 1984. The history of the archives of the Bedfordshire branch of the St John family is complex. In 1936 the trustees of the 19th Lord St John, then a minor, deposited title deeds, letters, maps, estate papers etc (which had presumably until then been kept at Melchbourne Park) at the County Record Office at Shire Hall, Bedford, which was then under the control of Dr G H Fowler, chairman of the Records Committee. Dr Fowler sent to the Historical Manuscripts Commission a report on the archive which stated that the documents had suffered badly from damp, vermin and careless handling, and were still wet when deposited. Dr Fowler also reported that about 1902/03 the Reverend R C McLeod, a friend of the family, had done some work on them, breaking up any surviving archive order, and attaching to each item by means of a metal paper clip, a note of contents. In the intervening years of damp storage the clips had rusted, and the rust dramatically increased the area of damage. Thus at a time when the Record Office was staffed by one archivist and one document repairer, it was essential to repair and conserve, and most of the documents once at the Record Office show repair work done either by Dr Fowler himself or by the Record Office document repairer. Before his death in 1940 Dr Fowler began cataloguing, and many items contain his neatly written notes of contents ready for the eventual full list. He reported tht the collection "contains very little which is older than the XVIIth century; and tends to confirm a rumour, heard some years ago, that the late Moubray Lord St John (d. 1934) had burnt many of the earlier documents". However, the only section of his catalouge to be completed was a list of the maps, which was included in the "Catalogue of the Enclosure Awards, Supplementary Catalogue of Maps, and list of Awards upon Tithe, in the Bedfordshire County Muniments", published in 1939. Dr Fowler died in August 1940. Both members of the Record Office staff had been called up at the outbreak of the war, and for a time the Record Office was closed. In 1940 Lord St John, now of age, withdrew the collection, and subsequently much of it was dispersed. Some items have been subsequently turned up in sale catalogues, but the maps may well have been destroyed or have left the country, since none has since that time been identified in England. Local rumour is that many documents were sold at the Melchbourne post office during the 1939-45 war to American airmen, then stationed in the locality. Material indentified in sale catalogues includes 23 charters relating to Kimble in Bucks, sold by Sothebys 11 December 1979 and now in the Buckinghamshire Record Office; 15 other documents in the same sale relating to Beds, Hunts and Northants; and a fine heraldic manuscript of 122 pages, mentioned by Dr Fowler, which was sold at Sotherbys on 13 March 1979 when it was purchased for Lydiard Park Museum. In 1945 miscellaneous deeds and papers, which appeared to be the residue of the archive, came on the market, and were bought from a bookseller by Mr F J Manning of Luton, who then deposited them at the Record Office. The collection was so incomplete that it was difficult to arrange, but a list was made and has the catalogue mark 'J'. The introduction to this catalogue contains a useful account fo the history the St John family's connection with Bedfordshire. It was known that other, more modern title deeds, were lodged wby the St John family at Messrs Coutts Bank in the Strand, and these were reported on for the National Register of Archives (no date given), and the archive contained besides title deeds manorial papers and correspondence and solicitor's papers. The documents were deposited at the Northamptonshire Record Office, and given the call mark 'SJ', and here the collection was sorted, numbered, and most documents catalogued on paper slips. From these the Northants Record Office produced a summary list which was circulated by the National Register of Archives, and in which certain numbered documents were described fairly fully. In 1984 this collection had come into the ownership of a sister of the Lord St John, and she was happy for them to be transferred to the Bedfordshire Record Office, since the bulk of the archive was Bedfordshire. The Northamptonshire Record Office first took the opportunity to photocopy all documents touching that county. The transfer took place in July and August 1984 and by the end of the year the documents previously numbered but not abstracted, had been catalogued, and the whole typed out. The collection continues to have the letter 'SJ', which it had in Northamptonshire. In the course of cataloguing work it was obvious that at some point some of the papers deposited between 1936 and 1940 at the Bedfordshire Record Office had been transferred to Coutts Bank, for many of the itmes that came from Northampton had been repaired by Dr Fowler, and had paper slips in them in his hand with notes for the eventual catalogue. Thus is should now be possible, using botht eh 'J' and the 'SJ' catalogues, and comparing them as far as possible with Dr Fowler's summary list made for the Historical Manuscripts Commission, to work out approximately what has been lost out of the family archive since 1940. The order and the catalogue numbers given by the Northamptonshire Record Office have been retained. The analysis at the beginning of the paper catalogue was taken from the excellent summary list produced after 1956 by the Northants Record Office for the National Register of Archives.

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