Fonds TURN III - Correspondence of Dawson Turner, Sir Francis Palgrave, and Hudson Gurney

This collection contains portions of the papers of three men, Dawson Turner, Sir Francis Palgrave, and Hudson Gurney, which together are a small proportion of the family papers first united in the possession of Sir R. H. Inglis Palgrave, son of Sir Francis and grandson of Dawson Turner.

The letters to Sir Francis Palgrave (C), who died in 1861, descended to Inglis as his eldest son, while the letters written to Hudson Gurney (B) were apparently passed to him after Gurney’s death in 1864. The papers of Dawson Turner (A) are a part of those kept in the family after the general disposal of his collections towards the end of his life. As the catalogue of the related collection in the Norfolk Record Office (‘Papers of the Turner, Palgrave, and Barker families’, MC 2847) points out, Inglis Palgrave was the natural recipient of these papers, owing to his connexion with the family banking business in Yarmouth and the fact that he lived nearby, though ownership remained with Turner’s longest-surviving daughter, Ellen Jacobson.

In 1890 Inglis Palgrave, with Mrs Jacobson’s permission, negotiated the presentation of the volumes containing the main series of Dawson Turner’s correspondence to Trinity. These volumes, comprising 82 volumes and a general index, are MSS O.13.1–32 and O.14.1–51 in this Library. Before the volumes were transferred, however, a number of family letters, and some others of a sensitive nature (cf. A2, A19, and A28), were cut out by Palgrave’s daughter Elizabeth and retained, and about the same time a selection of letters from J. W. Burgon was also removed and lent to Burgon’s biographer E. M. Goulburn (see A6). These were afterwards duly returned.

After Sir Inglis Palgrave’s death in 1919 the surviving family papers descended successively to his daughter Elizabeth Barker (d. 1946), her eldest surviving son Geoffrey Palgrave Barker (d. 1972), and his eldest son Christopher Barker (d. 2016). Parts of the collection continued to be sold or otherwise dispersed throughout this period. These include the papers given to Trinity by A. N. L. Munby in the early 1970s and catalogued as ‘Correspondence of Dawson Turner, Part II’. The present collection of papers was bought by the Library in 1991 from P. M. Pollak, a rare book dealer of South Brent in Devon, acting on behalf of an anonymous client. The collection at Norfolk Record Office already mentioned appears to comprise all the historical papers remaining in the family’s possession at the death of Christopher Barker.

The papers of Dawson Turner, Hudson Gurney, and Sir Francis Palgrave each form a separate section (A, B, and C), and a few items which are not easily assigned to one or other of these heads form a fourth (D). The items in sections A–C are grouped by correspondent, letters containing messages from more than one person being placed with the letters of the first writer, except A10/234, a letter written initially by Dawson Turner but returned to him with a message from the recipient, and A33/21, the first message of which appears to be missing.