The ‘Political’ Earls of Derby 1820 - 1950
In this episode I am thrilled to be talking to two very dynamic colleagues from the University of East Anglia, both of whom are experts in Victorian politics and have specialised in the 14th and 15th Earls of Derby. They are Dr Geoffrey Hicks and Dr Jennifer Davey, and I was amused to hear from Jennie how the archive material for her book on Lady Mary Derby, was found in a tin trunk during an estate disco in the 1970s. This tin trunk had been left untouched for nearly eighty years and the contents were riveting.
We also hear how our curator Dr Stephen Lloyd discovered the original manuscripts of the 14th Earl of Derby’s travel journals of his journey around Europe from 1820 to 1822. The six handwritten volumes were rediscovered in a cupboard in the Library at Knowsley Hall in 2018 and were transcribed and edited by the late Professor Angus Hawkins, just before he sadly died in 2020. Stephen and I finished off Angus’s editorial work and published the journals in December 2022 in tribute to Angus’s extraordinary scholarship on Edward Geoffrey, 14th Earl of Derby, as seen in his brilliant two-volume biography called ‘The Forgotten Prime Minister’. The European travel diaries of the 14th Earl, ‘A Grand Tour Journal 1820-1822: the Awakening of the Man' were published by Fonthill Media in 2022 (also available on Amazon). The 14th Earl’s North American travel journals from 1824 to 1825 are currently being edited by Dr Lisa Francavilla at the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, Monticello, University of Virginia in Charlottesville, and are due to be published in autumn 2025.
Above: The 14th Earl’s European travel journals 1820-22; image courtesy of the Derby Collection
Dr Stephen Lloyd has also discovered around 600 Roman coins in the archives in a box file mislabelled in the name of an old Derby property. Inside was this treasure trove of hitherto unknown and undiscovered coins, which have now been fully conserved and catalogued by local coin-specialist Alan Dawson between 2012 and 2020. We think that these must have been acquired by the 14th Earl as a young man on his travels in Rome as he had been a distinguished a classics scholar at Christ Church, Oxford University. We know that Stanley didn't buy art on this journey but that he travelled with a copy of Byron’s famous poem ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’, so it would be entirely in keeping with his interests that these coins would have been brought back by him to add to the family collection.
I hope you enjoy listening to this episode, listen in here.