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Darnley Exhibition
Beyond the Green Baize Door: Social and domestic life at Cobham
Hall over two centuries
This selection of resources is based on an exhibition of the
same title held at Medway Archives and Local Studies Centre between
November 2005 and January 2006 as part of the Archives Awareness
Campaign 2005 to mark the completion of the listing of the family
papers of the Earls of Darnley, enabled by a Heritage Lottery Grant
made two years earlier.
The Darnley Archive is an extensive private collection, the
listing of which amounted to more than 3,000 records representing
many more individual items dating from the 18th to the 20th
centuries, when the family lived at Cobham Hall. The estate records
cover most aspects of farming the estate and managing its tenants.
The family records are extremely varied and reflect the family's
interests and official duties.
The text and images reproduced here are a selection of the items
that were included in the exhibition and they give a flavour of the
kinds of documents and records that are available. They should
provide students, teachers and other researchers with inspiration
and possible pointers to further research using the collection.
Most of Lord Darnley's collection was deposited with Kent and
Medway Archives from 1956 to 2004, before being transferred to
Medway Archives.
All the documents, with the exception of the green files, are
accessible to the public at Medway Archives
and Local Studies Centre . You can visit us at Clock Tower Building, Former Civic
Centre site, Strood. You must book an archive table in advance
and get a County Archive Research Network
(CARN) reader's ticket, for which you will need to provide two
passport-sized photographs and identification.
The
full list of documents in the Darnley collection can be found
on the CityArk online catalogue
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