Mr. Richard Holworthy, assistant county archivist, retired from the service of Kent County Council on Monday, and on that day received a presentation of a cheque subscribed by about 100 of his colleagues at the headquarters of the county services at Maidstone. The presentation was made by the Deputy Clerk of the Council, Mr. G. Bishop.

Mr. Holworthy had been with the county council for 17 years. He is widely known throughout the country for his work at Maidstone where more than 100,000 documents, as well as probate records, are deposited in one of the most up-to-date county record offices in Britain. Before joining the staff of the county council, Mr. Holworthy was in private practice and was one of the founders of the Society of Genealogists, of which he was a Fellow. At one time, he was genealogical editor of The Connoisseur and editor of the British Archivist. He was founder and first chairman of the Society of Local Archivists and one of the original members of the Council of the British Records Association.

In his retirement, Mr. Holworthy will continue to live at Bearsted.

Richard Holworthy was born 28 May 1885 in St Kilda, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia as Frederick Matthew Richard Holworthy. His parents were Frederick William Holworthy and Sarah Hawkes. His grandfather, Joseph Holworthy, was an Australian merchant born in Holland, who settled in Bromley, Kent, England. Richard appears to have been brought up in Kent and educated at Harpenden.

Richard married Grace Emily Cherry (1883-1933) in Kent in 1910. On the 1911 census, Richard was described as an ‘Importer Canary Island Produce’. In this period, he appears to have been working in trade, perhaps following after his grandfather. Although he moved into full-time work in archives later, we know that he was already involved in genealogy by 1911 as he was a founder of the Society of Genealogists, which was established that year.

Anthony Camp discovered that Holworthy and William Roberts Crow (1878-1962), of Wallington, Surrey, ‘had already offered their support [for a society of genealogists] through the pages of Notes & Queries . . . Both Crow and Holworthy became Founder Fellows and were on committees in the early days of the Society, though Crow resigned his membership in 1920. Richard Holworthy’s letter to Notes & Queries had made it clear that he did not think that the society should be a ‘Syndicate’ or Limited Company and it was not the only time that he and Bernau would disagree.’ Holworthy was active in the Society in its earliest days.

In his history of the Society, Anthony Camp recorded, ‘The first meeting of the Committee on Monumental Inscriptions took place on 31 January 1912 when Richard Holworthy, who had copied the inscriptions at Bromley, agreed to be Secretary. A bibliography of those places already copied was a basic requirement and Holworthy worked on this at the same time as writing to county societies for details of any transcripts of which they were aware but received little response [681]. The Revd Charles Moor took over as Secretary in 1913 and the bibliography then showed that about 1,000 parishes had been copied, the names in the copies received being indexed, as far as possible, into the Consolidated Index. Those copies held by the Society were listed in the Annual Report that year [682].’