Preserving Items.
The items preserved here span more than six centuries and touch on naval command, Company service, the Church of England, and the intimacies of family life. They take many forms — indentures, personal letters, official papers, notebooks, research — ranging from a fourteenth-century legal document to correspondence within living memory. Disparate in period, form, and subject, they are held together by a single thread: a connection, direct or oblique, to the Purvis family and the world they moved through.
160 items in the collection — added to continuously
Highlighted Lives.
Four figures whose stories thread through the archive — select a name to view the items connected to them.
Admiral of the Blue, who spent forty years at sea and never once disobeyed an order. The wars were won by blockades, by discipline and the grinding work of holding the line. Purvis was one of those men. The subject of Iain Gordon's Admiral of the Blue.
He went to sea at eleven, joined the Bengal Army at fifteen and spent seventeen years in India before becoming a country parson in Wiltshire. A quiet life it was not. The subject of Iain Gordon's Soldier of the Raj.
Letters sent by family contain advice ahead of her trip to India as part of the Fishing Fleet — women who went to the colonies in search of a husband. Who better to offer support than Mary's relative, Elizabeth Howland, the daughter of Sir Josiah Child, the governor of the East India Company.
The memory of Britain's most famous naval hero, Horatio Nelson, passes down the generations of the Matcham family, as descendants continue to be inspired by their evermore distant uncle.