In the spring of 1967, Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper, then the Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Oxford, wrote to me to ask if I would assist Dr Pearl in her work by transcribing Walter Yonge’s diaries held (in Additional Mss.18,777-18,780) in the Manuscript Department of the British Museum at that time. I agreed and it was settled that I would be paid £150 per volume by the History Faculty of the University. I duly transcribed the first of these volumes in 1967 and the remaining three by 1973. I was not her “assistant” in this task but undertook it myself. I did not, moreover, keep copies of the first three volumes. In mid-1975, I read in The Times Higher Education Supplement that she was preparing the Yonge volumes for publication. But nothing happened. By 1984, seventeen years after I had transcribed the first volume and eleven years after finishing the last one I was puzzled by this failure to proceed and, having asked several academic friends if they th...
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