About Gloucestershire Notes and Queries

Gloucestershire Notes and Queries

Gloucestershire Notes and Queries was an illustrated quarterly magazine devoted to the history and antiquities of Gloucestershire, published from 1879. Founded and first edited by the Reverend Beaver Henry Blacker, an Irish Anglican priest and historian who had settled in England, it collected short notes, queries and replies on the county's families, parishes, churches, registers and folklore, in the manner of the national journal Notes and Queries. Its first volume was published in 1881, covering the years 1879 to 1881. After Blacker's death in 1890, the editorship passed to the solicitor, genealogist and publisher William Phillimore Watts Phillimore, founder of the publishing firm Phillimore and Co. Nine volumes are listed in standard bibliographies up to 1902, library catalogues record later volumes and a suspension of publication in the early twentieth century, and its bound volumes remain a working source for Gloucestershire genealogists and local historians.

Foundation and the notes and queries format

The magazine took its model and its title pattern from Notes and Queries, the national antiquarian journal founded in 1849, in which scholars and amateurs printed short factual notes, asked questions about points of history, genealogy and custom, and answered one another's queries in print. Gloucestershire Notes and Queries applied that formula to a single county. It described itself as an illustrated quarterly magazine devoted to the history and antiquities of Gloucestershire, and it began publication in 1879 under Blacker's editorship. The quarterly rhythm and the bound-volume format were central to its purpose: individual parts carried parish register extracts, family pedigrees, church inscriptions and readers' questions, and subscribers could bind the parts into permanent volumes of county reference. The first collected volume, covering 1879 to 1881, was published in 1881, and publication of bound volumes continued at roughly three-year intervals through the 1880s.

Beaver Henry Blacker, the founding editor

Beaver Henry Blacker (31 May 1821 to 11 November 1890) was an Irish Anglican priest and historian. Born in Dublin, the eldest son of Latham Blacker and a grandson of the historian and priest George Miller, he was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, where he was three times a recipient of the vice-chancellor's prize for English prose, taking his BA in 1843 and his MA in 1846. He served as curate-in-charge of Donnybrook from 1845 to 1856 and was appointed to the vicarage of Booterstown in 1857, resigning in 1874 on his retirement to England. In England he was curate-in-charge of Charlton Kings in Gloucestershire in 1875 and 1876 and senior curate of Cheltenham in 1876 to 1878; he lived for three years in Stroud and moved to Clifton in 1881. Blacker brought a topographer's habits to the county he had adopted: before founding the magazine he had privately printed the monumental inscriptions of the parish church of Cheltenham in 1877, and he contributed more than sixty articles to the Dictionary of National Biography. His earlier Irish work, including his sketches of the parishes of Booterstown and Donnybrook published in parts between 1860 and 1874, gave him the model of parish-by-parish record publishing that he then applied to Gloucestershire.

The Blacker volumes, 1879 to 1890

Blacker edited the first four volumes of Gloucestershire Notes and Queries: volume I, covering 1879 to 1881, volume II, 1882 to 1884, volume III, 1885 to 1887, and volume IV, 1888 to 1890. The volumes were substantial books; volume III, published by Wm. Kent of London and others in 1887, ran to sixteen pages of preliminaries, 694 pages of text and a further 66 pages of publishers' advertisements, bound for many subscribers in half calf with marbled boards. The imprint pattern, London publishers alongside provincial ones, including Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent and Co. in the catalogue records, reflects how such county journals were sold: through the London trade to a national antiquarian market, as well as to readers in the county itself. Blacker's death in November 1890, at Clifton in Bristol, ended the first editorship; he was buried at Deans Grange Cemetery in Dublin. An "In memoriam" notice by William George opened volume V, in its first part for February to March 1891, recording the magazine's debt to its founder.

Content: families, registers and places

The magazine's contents show what its readers wanted preserved. Volume II included articles on Lord Northwick's collection of pictures, extracts from the Dyrham parish registers, the rectors of Uley, the Daunt family, the Rudder family, Nash Court and the Steps, and marriages at Hampnett between 1737 and 1754. Volume III carried pieces on the Longden family, Rodmarton church, the Dorney family, inscriptions in St Mary's Cemetery in Cheltenham, Thornbury Castle and the manor of Pucklechurch. This mixture was characteristic: genealogy of county families, transcripts of parish registers before such transcripts were widely printed, church and monumental inscriptions, and the histories of individual houses, manors and villages. For genealogists, the register extracts and family articles were the core value, because they put records held in parish chests into print where they could be searched. For local historians, the notes on buildings such as Thornbury Castle and on collections such as Lord Northwick's pictures recorded a county that was already changing.

W. P. W. Phillimore and the second editorship

After Blacker's death, the editor was William Phillimore Watts Phillimore (27 October 1853 to 9 April 1913), an English solicitor, genealogist and publisher. Born in Nottingham, originally with the surname Stiff, which his father changed by royal licence to Phillimore in 1873, he studied at The Queen's College, Oxford, and took a second-class degree in jurisprudence in 1876. In 1897 he founded the publishing business that bears his name, Phillimore and Co. He edited volume V of Gloucestershire Notes and Queries, covering 1891 to 1893 and published at Bristol by William George and others in 1894, a volume of 590 pages whose articles included the Arrowsmith family, the Trotman family, the earldom of Berkeley, the Stiffs of Hawkesbury, Maisemore bells and the families of Longden and Clutterbuck. Phillimore was a natural successor: from 1888 he campaigned for the creation of local record offices, preparing bills for Parliament, and he initiated several record publication societies, including the Index Library in 1887, which became part of the British Record Society, the Scottish Record Series in 1896, the Thoroton Society of Nottinghamshire in 1897, the Canterbury and York Society in 1904 and the Irish Record Society in 1909.

Later volumes and suspension

Under Phillimore the volume sequence continued: volume VI covered 1894 to 1895, volume VII 1896 to 1897, volume VIII appeared in 1901 and volume IX in 1902, the last volume listed in the standard summary of the run. Library records complicate that tidy ending. The Internet Archive's catalogue record for the title notes that supplements were issued for volumes 6 to 10, and that publication was suspended in 1903 and again from 1905 to April 1913, indicating that a tenth volume and a fitful later life followed the ninth volume. Such suspensions were common for subscription antiquarian journals, whose survival depended on a small body of committed subscribers and on an editor with the energy to extract copy from contributors. Phillimore died at Torquay on 9 April 1913, the month the recorded suspension ended, and no long second life for the magazine followed. Taken together, the records describe a magazine that ran, with interruptions, from 1879 into the early twentieth century.

Place in Gloucestershire bibliography

Gloucestershire Notes and Queries holds a fixed place in the bibliography of the city and county. The bibliography of the City of Gloucester lists it among the county's journals, dated 1879 to 1902, alongside the Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, which began in 1876 and continues. The two titles divided the field between them: the Transactions carried longer archaeological papers for a learned society, while Blacker's and Phillimore's magazine carried the short notes, queries, pedigrees and register transcripts that society journals had little room for. Its volumes are cited in works such as The Buildings of England volume for Gloucestershire, and antiquarian booksellers continue to describe and sell its bound volumes as standard county reference works, with the contents of each volume listed article by article for buyers researching particular families and parishes.

Survival and access today

The magazine survives because it was designed to be kept. Subscribers bound their quarterly parts into cloth or half-leather volumes, and sets entered public and university libraries in Britain and the United States. The HathiTrust digital library holds the bibliographic record used by modern reference works, and digitised volumes, including volumes 8 to 10, are available through the Internet Archive, whose copy was contributed by the George A. Smathers Libraries of the University of Florida. Digital access has given the journal a second working life: family historians searching a Gloucestershire surname, a parish register transcript or a church inscription are still directed to its pages, and its transcription project presence on Wikisource, where Blacker's works are catalogued, reflects continuing volunteer interest in making its contents searchable. A quarterly that began in 1879 as a correspondence column for county antiquaries thus remains, in scanned form, part of the everyday toolkit of Gloucestershire genealogy.

Legacy

The legacy of Gloucestershire Notes and Queries is measured in preservation. In its pages, parish registers were transcribed, inscriptions were copied from stones that have since weathered, family papers were summarised, and questions about the county's past were asked and answered in permanent form. Its two editors embodied the two sides of Victorian and Edwardian antiquarianism: Blacker, the clergyman-topographer who recorded his adopted county parish by parish, and Phillimore, the solicitor-publisher who turned record publishing into a profession and campaigned for the local record offices that eventually took over the work. County notes and queries journals were published all over Britain in this period, but few ran as long, changed hands as successfully, or remained as consultable. For anyone tracing a Gloucestershire family or building, the magazine Blacker founded in 1879 is still one of the first places the trail leads.