Leland Duncan

Nearly everything on these pages has the same person underneath it. The list of who paid for the tower, the candles burning before the images, the chantry priests, the churchwardens, the vicars back to about 1200, the state of the churchyard, what the fire took — all of it was assembled by one man, and he was not a historian by trade.

Leland Lewis Duncan was born on 24 August 1862 at 1 Vicarage Terrace, High Road, Lewisham — a few hundred yards from this church, in a terrace named after the vicarage. He lived in Lewisham the whole of his life. He died on 26 December 1923, aged sixty-one.

The day job

He joined the War Office in 1882 and stayed forty years, retiring in 1922 and receiving an OBE for it. Everything below was done outside that.

He was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1890, at twenty-seven. Two years later, at twenty-nine, he published The Parish Church of Saint Mary, Lewisham, Kent: its Building and Rebuilding; with some account of the Vicars and Curates of Lewisham — the book this website has been quoting on almost every page.

In 1902 he was made a Member of the Royal Victorian Order for his work on the coronation of Edward VII, invested two days after the ceremony.

The method

His subject was wills. He copied them by hand at Somerset House by the thousand, and the Kent Archaeological Society’s own account of him says he was known to slip away from the War Office during working hours to do it. That is reported at second hand and we pass it on as such, but it is the right shape for the career: a man with a secure clerkship and a great deal of stamina, spending it on documents nobody was paying him to read.

The other half was gravestones. He recorded monumental inscriptions across Kent — Hawkhurst, Little Chart, Lydd, Tenterden, Lewisham — before systematic recording of them was a normal thing to do. A great many of the stones he copied are now unreadable or gone, which converts a hobby into the only surviving record.

The results ran to books: Testamenta Cantiana in 1906, The History of the Borough of Lewisham in 1908, The History of Colfe’s Grammar School and a life of its founder in 1910, Memorials in Tenterden Churchyard in 1919, and an index of Kent wills finished after his death and published in 1924.

A Lewisham circle

He was at Colfe’s Grammar School between 1874 and 1880 — the school refounded by Abraham Colfe, vicar of this parish for forty-seven years, whose wife’s memorial is on the wall inside. Duncan then wrote the history of the school, wrote its song in 1897, and started The Colfeian, said to be the first old boys’ magazine in the country. He also compiled Colfe’s Grammar School and the Great War, 1914–1919.

He helped found the Lewisham Antiquarian Society and was a life member of the Kent Archaeological Society. So the man who wrote the history of this church was educated at the school its vicar founded, and then wrote the history of that too.

His father, Leland Crosthwait Duncan, had come to London from Ireland in 1851 and settled in Lewisham after marrying; the family were Dublin people, and his great-grandfather had been a governor of the Bank of Ireland.

The father was not a stranger to this church either, which is worth saying because it is easy to picture Duncan as a researcher who happened upon the parish. When the organ appeal went out from the vestry on 6 October 1881, L. C. Duncan signed it as a member of the Board of Finance and gave five pounds — his name a few lines above Augustus Legge’s, the vicar who became Bishop of Lichfield. Leland was nineteen, and eleven years off publishing the history of the building his father was helping to pay for. That appeal is on the music of St Mary’s.

Seventy-five years without a stone

He was buried at Hither Green Cemetery. This parish’s churchyard had been closed to burials since 1856, so it could not have had him.

The grave had no headstone until 1998. On 19 September that year, seventy-five years after his death, the Lewisham Local History Society unveiled one in black granite, paid for by Old Colfeians, the council, several local history groups and surviving members of his family. It reads: Colfeian, historian and photographer.

The man who spent his life copying the inscriptions off other people’s graves, so that they would still be readable when the stone was not, lay under an unmarked one for three quarters of a century.

What we owe him, and what to watch

Duncan is not neutral and he is not infallible. He was writing in 1892 with the assumptions of 1892, he sometimes spells the same man two ways in a single book — Lowth and Louth, on the vicars of Lewisham, is his — and where he supposes something he generally says so, which is a courtesy later readers have not always returned. Where this site says “Duncan supposed” or “Duncan thought”, that hedge is his own and it is kept deliberately.

What is not in doubt is the scale of it. The parish’s own papers burned in the vestry in 1830 and a great part of the registers went with them. Almost everything this site can say about the parish before that date exists because a civil servant spent forty years reading other archives to put it back.

Elsewhere on this site

His 1892 book is the source behind the tower and the bells, the medieval parish, the vicars of Lewisham, the monuments and the vicarage. The school he attended and then wrote up is on the schools and the almshouses, and the fire that made his work necessary is on the history pages.