The Gresley Library: One Family Name Across a Century of Books

Some books arrive with a story attached. These arrived with a surname.

A while ago we bought a small group of antiquarian books at auction. As we worked through them, the same name kept turning up: written on front endpapers, engraved on a bookplate, filled in by hand on a school prize label. Gresley. Not once, but across three different hands and more than a century of reading.

We can't give you a neat family tree linking every owner, and we won't invent one. What we can show you is what the books themselves tell us, which turns out to be quite a lot.

A very old name

The Gresleys were Norman. Domesday records Nigel de Stafford holding the manor of Drakelowe in Derbyshire at the end of the eleventh century, and his descendants held it for something close to nine hundred years. They took their surname from Castle Gresley, founded a priory nearby in the early twelfth century, and in 1611 were granted a baronetcy that was the sixth oldest in Britain. It lasted more than three and a half centuries before dying out in 1976. The family finally left Drakelowe in 1931 after twenty-eight generations, and the hall was demolished in 1934 to make way for a power station.

They were not a family much given to caution. Sir Nigel, the sixth baronet, served as a young man in the Royal Navy until rheumatism, it seems, ended his naval career, inherited the title in 1753, discovered he was sitting on coal, and in 1775 got an Act of Parliament through to dig his own canal. It went on to hold a monopoly on Newcastle-under-Lyme coal for forty-two years. His grandson Sir Roger, the eighth baronet, went the other way entirely: Christ Church, Oxford without troubling to take a degree, a celebrated London dandy, and a seat in Parliament for South Derbyshire, after the voters of Lichfield turned him down in 1826. He is said to have gambled away most of the family fortune, selling nearly everything to stay solvent, including his grandfather's canal. He died at thirty-seven, and in May 1838 his library went under the hammer in London.

And from the Netherseal branch came the most famous Gresley of all: Sir Nigel Gresley, the engineer behind Flying Scotsman and Mallard, which still holds the world speed record for a steam locomotive at 126 miles an hour. This year marks 150 years since his birth in 1876, and the railways have spent the summer celebrating him.

The family motto is Meliore fide quam fortuna: better in faith than in fortune. On the evidence, the fortune side was tested more than once.

Charles Gresley, Esquire, of Lichfield

The Noble and Gentle Men of England by Evelyn Philip Shirley, 1859, Charles Gresley of Lichfield's copy

The book that unlocked the collection is Evelyn Philip Shirley's The Noble and Gentle Men of England, a first edition of 1859. Pasted inside the front board is an armorial bookplate reading Liber Caroli Gresley Armigeri de Lichfield A.D. 1854: the book of Charles Gresley, Esquire, of Lichfield.

Shirley set out to record every ancient knightly and gentle house still surviving in England, county by county. So when this book arrived, Charles Gresley could turn to the Derbyshire pages and find his own family waiting for him.

It gets better. Beneath the bookplate, Gresley has written the single word "From", and below it pasted a cut fragment of a letter in Shirley's own hand, signed in full. It isn't an inscription, and we're careful to say so, but it is Shirley's autograph, kept on purpose by the man he wrote to.

Whoever owned this book didn't stop there. Tipped in at the preface is a newspaper cutting reporting Shirley's death in 1882, and a second folded cutting about the Baronetage sits loose inside, pencil-dated 1898. Either Charles Gresley lived on and kept adding to his book, or a later owner carried on the habit. We can't tell you which, but somebody cared about this volume for a very long time.

The Complete Sportsman c.1760 and Walton's Complete Angler 1826, signed Charles Gresley

The same name, in the same flourishing hand with the same looping underline, appears on the front endpapers of two sporting books that arrived together: The Complete Sportsman, c.1760, and Walton and Cotton's The Complete Angler, 1826. One teaches you to chase things across a field; the other teaches you to stand very still in a river. Between them they cover most of what an English country gentleman did with his time. The Sportsman was rebound in the nineteenth century, and inside its front board is still the bright ticket of B. Hunt & Sons of Birmingham, bookbinders: somebody cared enough to have it properly dressed. We've kept the two together, because they so clearly belong together.

Roger Gresley's hunting library

Three Lionel Edwards illustrated sporting verse books from Roger Gresley's hunting library, 1925 to 1929

Move forward to the 1920s and the name belongs to a young man building a shelf of hunting verse. Three Constable books illustrated by Lionel Edwards, two by Will H. Ogilvie and one by Captain Edric G. Roberts, were given to Roger Gresley year by year, at least one of them by his mother at Christmas.

Then, in June 1947, Roger struck his own name through in every one of them and gave the lot to Timothy, signing in pencil "with love, Bone". We don't know what the occasion was. Whatever it marked, the gesture was deliberate and complete, and it's still perfectly legible across three endpapers nearly eighty years later. It's our favourite thing in the whole collection.

A schoolboy's prize

The Golden Treasury, Palgrave, 1919 Uppingham School prize binding awarded to R. Gresley in 1921

The third Gresley name in the group belongs to a boy. In 1921, R. Gresley of the Lower Fourth at Uppingham School was awarded Palgrave's Golden Treasury, the 1919 Oxford Edition, bound in full morocco with the school's seal in gilt on the front board: Archdeacon Robert Johnson, who founded the school in 1584, seated at his desk with his boys before him. The Latin prize label is filled in by the headmaster, Reginald Herbert Owen, who later became Bishop of Wellington in New Zealand. Judging by the pencil form marks still in the front, the boy took his prize and went straight back to lessons.

What the books tell us

Here's where we draw the line. The signatures, the bookplate and the prize label are facts: they are written, printed and pasted into the books themselves. How Charles, Roger and R. Gresley stood in relation to one another, we can't tell you, and we'd rather say so than guess.

That said, there's one question we keep coming back to. R. Gresley was in the Lower Fourth at Uppingham in 1921, which would make him about thirteen. Five years later, from Christmas 1926, books were being given to a young man named Roger Gresley. The dates fit rather neatly, and it's tempting to think the schoolboy and the huntsman are the same person, and that the R. stands for Roger.

It's also exactly the sort of thing we won't put in a listing. A listing is a description of what you're buying, and every claim in it should be something the book itself can back up. Nothing in either book links the two names: no matching signature and no shared inscription, just two initials and a run of dates that happen to line up. Calling the Golden Treasury "Roger Gresley's school prize" would make it sound more certain, and more valuable, than the evidence allows. So the listings say only what the books say. Here, among friends, we're happy to wonder out loud. If you know more about these Gresleys than we do, we'd genuinely love to hear from you.

What we can say is that these books kept the name. From a Georgian sporting handbook to three hunting books handed on with love in 1947, somebody in that family was still reading, collecting and passing them on well into living memory. They came to us as a group, and for the time being they're together on our shelves. Each will eventually go to a new home of its own.

The Gresley books in the shop

Each one is one of a kind. When it's gone, it's gone. As always, Kat wraps every book by hand in good heavy paper, thick enough to pass for wallpaper, and boxes it with the care these old things deserve. UK delivery is free.

Chris & Kat, Novel Relics

Sources and further reading

Everything we say about the books themselves comes from the books: the signatures, the bookplate, the prize label and the cuttings tucked inside. For the family history, we leaned on these:

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