23rd December 1942

Wednesday

Glorious sunny morning, but very cold.  Rushed up to St. Clare Drive this morning to see Doctor Laver's books.  Poulter was in one of his usual scatter-brained moods, hurling books into tea-chests in no sort of order, and only making a very inadequate list of them.

So ends the old Doctor’s life-work.  Mrs. Lyon-Campbell was very nice, but she has no idea what she is doing.   The poor old thing is nearly 82 now.  She put on one side a large number of odd drawings, notebooks, extracts from the Court Rolls, Colchester wills, copies of church registers, etc., and at my request added the “Perlustration of the Banlieu of Colchester”, a rare collection of notes on the place names in the borough, begun by Henry Laver and finished by the Doctor.

I insisted that Poulter should look inside the cover of every book to see if it had the Museum or the Essex Archaeological Society’s bookplate, as once the books go to London we shall never see them again.  The Morants, Salmon, Newcourt, etc. which I brought away to Holly Trees in February 1941 are to go, including the fine copy of the Colchester volume which belonged to Morant’s grandson, Philip Hills (formerly Astle) of Colne Park.  This has many extra notes, and a pencil portrait of Morant, apparently similar to that in the Morant MSS.

This book should of course be bought by the Essex Archaeological Society, so I ‘phoned Benton [Secretary of the E.A.S.] tonight to tell him of it.  To my surprise he was not in the least interested, and thought it not worth more than £3.  I will give £3-3-0 for it myself, if I can get it so cheaply.  Benton says that the Society is much too hard up to think of buying books.  They are likely to be poorer next year, as I shall not continue my subscription after this year.

In the papers today it states that 6 were killed in “an East Coast town” yesterday.  There were alarms at Ipswich and Colchester, so it may have been at Felixstowe, Harwich or Dovercourt, but we never hear.

Taylor from New Hall, Lt. Wigborough, came in today.  In the course of conversation about milk, he mentioned that old Mr. Aldred of Moulshams never had fresh milk before the war, always tinned stuff, because he regarded it as being much “cleaner”.

Lovely moon tonight.