The South West Heritage Trust was awarded a grant by the National Archives’ Archives Revealed cataloguing grants programme to enable us to catalogue the family and estate papers of the Cary family of Torquay. The Carys, who lived at Cockington Court and later Torre Abbey for almost 300 years from 1662, were significant landowners in Devon, served as MPs, intermarried with leading West Country families and were active at the royal court. The cataloguing of the Cary family archive is now 3-months in to its 15-month project and what is already apparent is this is much more than the archive of one family. Cary Project Archivist Stuart Tyler tells us more.
Although there are many interesting Cary personal and family papers, including legal papers connected to an 18th century elopement and a 16th century law-changing divorce case (more on those in a future blog post!), this collection’s scope is much wider and will be an invaluable resource for the social history of the people, places and buildings of Devon (Torquay in particular).
Purchasing Torre Abbey in 1662, the Carys subsequently became prominent landowners in Torquay and heavily involved in the town’s growth (particularly in competition with their local rival family, the Palks). Falling farm revenues in the first half of the 19th century threatened the Carys with bankruptcy inducing them to lease out land for the construction of new buildings, hoping to recoup their losses through ground rents, fuelling urban development.
A highlight that has emerged in the cataloguing so far is a set of dozen volumes of architectural plans, covering the 1860s up to the period of the First World War.
Plans of hundreds of properties, many in Torquay, are contained inside. These are mostly private houses, or associated structures like stables, but there are also many civic buildings and public spaces including Torbay Hospital, Torquay’s Old Town Hall, shop fronts in Fleet Street, the Lyceum Assembly Rooms (originally a theatre, then for many years the Central Cinema, now restored to a theatre once again) and many more
Each volume was originally indexed at the front of the book by the Cary Estate Office but now, with the help of volunteers, each individual property and plan is being catalogued in detail, to be made available to researchers for house history, architectural history, studies of urban development and more.
These plans, and the Cary collection as a whole, should be available to search on our online catalogue, and view at the Devon Heritage Centre, by early next year.