Papers of John E. Warmington

Personal papers of Warmington and his mother. Included are diaries, correspondence, certificates, memorial cards, family photographs and papers relating to genealogy and antiques. Much of the correspondence relates to the years spent in the West Indies and includes letters between Warmington and a close friend, Evelyn Laurie, a headteacher in the West Indies.

John Edward Warmington was born in England in 1900 and was educated in Shrewsbury, and at Magdalen College, Oxford. He spent much of the 1920s and early 1930s travelling widely in Britain and Europe. In 1935 he went to live in the West Indies, settling in Barbados, where he bought land and built a house. He moved to Dominica in 1949 but returned to Barbados in 1954. Warmington was of independent means and took an interest in antiques (particularly glassware and Chinese porcelain) and genealogy as well as enjoying his extensive travels. His mother, Mrs. Mary Lily Holroyd (she had married her second husband in 1911), came to live with him in the West Indies in the late 1930s, she died there in 1944.

Bodleian reader's ticket required.

Collection level description created by Marion Lowman, Bodleian Library of Commonwealth and African Studies at Rhodes House.

The library holds a card index of all manuscript collections in its reading room and a handlist is also available for this collection.

Listed as no. 189 in Manuscript Collections (Africana and non-Africana) in Rhodes House Library, Oxford, Supplementary accessions to the end of 1977 and Cumulative Index, compiled by Wendy S. Byrne (Oxford, Bodleian Library, 1978).

No reproduction or publication of personal papers without permission. Contact the library in the first instance.