The Cranbrook papers: stray letters from a politician's archive

THE main body of the papers of the Conservative statesman Gathorne Gathorne-Hardy, 1st Earl of Cranbrook (b. 1814, d. 1906), were deposited by the 4th Earl in the Suffolk Record Office at Ipswich (Ref. HA 43; NRA report 1182); these papers were drawn upon by his son A. E. Gathorne-Hardy in his biography of Cranbrook, and remain a valuable source for historians. Extracts from Cranbrook's long series of diaries-twenty-one volumes in all-have recently been pubhshed. One small previously unrecorded cache of Cranbrook material, however, was not among the papers deposited at Ipswich: a group of letters offered at the Lawrence Fine Art of Crewkerne sale of 28 October 1982 (lot 326), acquired by the British Library, and now Add. MS. 62537.