Harry Herbert Margary, M.A., M.I.C.E., M.I.E.E.

Harry Margary (HM to his colleagues and friends) was born in 1913 and attended Wolverhampton Grammar School before graduating in business studies from Manchester University. He then went on to Cambridge to take a degree in engineering and another in chemistry and was elected a member of the three major engineering institutions: civil, mechanical and electrical. Margary’s first job at Metropolitan Vickers ended on the outbreak of war when he left to join the Royal Navy but, too good a research scientist to serve at sea, he was directed into the Royal Naval Scientific Service. In 1947 he was posted to the Admiralty Research Laboratory in Teddington where, with a wife and two small sons, he bought a house, though suburban life did not appeal to him.. The results of Margary’s research were tested in Weymouth and, between the laboratory and the coast, he came upon Lympne Castle, a fifteenth-century fortified manor house, to which the family moved in 1962. No sooner had he arrived than Margary became a school governor, a parish councillor and a Shepway district councillor as well as a member of innumerable local committees. He opened the castle to the public and it soon became a centre for local functions and parties, and also a central part of his, and his family’s, daily life. Towards the end of the sixties the research laboratory was attracting the attention of management consultants, and the resultant increase in paperwork was anathema to Margary. At Lympne he had been working in his spare time on techniques for copying and reproducing seventeenth and eighteenth-century maps, his first publication in1968 being A Topographical Map of the County of Kent, in Twenty-Five Sheets, by Andrews, Dury and Herbert, 1769; followed in 1970 by John Norden’s Sussex, 1595, jointly with the Royal Geographical Society. Confident that there was a market for such facsimiles, accompanied by detailed academic notes, Margary took early retirement in 1971 to devote himself to their production and to the further exploitation of the castle. In the same year he undertook the secretaryship of Imago Mundi when the journal’s editorial and production were moved to England from the Netherlands. This was a thankless task since precarious finances meant almost certain closure but Margary persevered and finally turned the tide in 1975, having entrusted printing to the Kentish firm, Headley Brothers, who produced his facsimiles. Margary’s scientific expertise, his boundless enthusiasm and increased leisure enabled him to reconcile the complex printing technicalities with the challenging range of original material on which Imago Mundi depended. He was also the vital link between the editor, the late Eila Campbell, and the printer, and through their harmonious efforts the journal’s future was assured. Again with Eila Campbell, Margary served as editorial advisor for the newly-founded Map Collector from 1977 to 1983. Close involvement with Imago Mundi continued until 1994, though he relinquished the offices of secretary and treasurer in 1983. Throughout this time Margary’s own publishing projects flourished and became more ambitious. He collaborated with the Guildhall Library and the London Topographical Society to bring out, between 1977 and 1983, five volumes of facsimile plans covering all the original large-scale surveys of London from the Copperplate Map of c. 1553 to Stanford’s Library Map of London of 1862. Probably his most commercially successful publication was the A to Z series, which arose from conversations with Ralph Hyde, FSA, of the Guildhall Library. The first, A to Z of Elizabethan London, appeared in 1979, followed by Restoration London (1992), Georgian London (1982), Regency London (1985) and Victorian London (1987), all published in association with the Guildhall Library with excellent introductions, notes and indexes. They continue to sell very well and were translated into Japanese in 1998. Margary’s most ambitious publication was The Old Series Ordnance Survey Maps of England and Wales, Scale 1 inch to 1 mile: a reproduction of the 110 sheets of the Survey, which came out in eight hard-backed folio volumes between 1975 and 1992. When the project was first mooted in 1972 by the late Brian Harley and others, it was estimated to take five years to complete; in fact it took twenty, but the volumes are flawless. Amateur though he may have been, Margary was a perfectionist. In the freezing attic studio at Lympne, wearing a Jermyn Street shirt and an old comfortable cardigan, he supervised the photography of the maps on his huge1910 Hunter Penrose plate camera, unshakeably good-humoured whatever the calamities and disappoinments. Sheets would be photographed and re-photographed again and again if necessary until the perfect negative was produced. Margary’s last work was The A to Z of Georgian Dublin, a finished copy of which was delivered to him on a summer’s day at Lympne shortly before he died there on 18 August 1998.