Linsday Oliver John Boynton, M.A., D.Phil.

Lindsay Boynton was born on the Isle of Wight on 20 April 1934 and attended a local school before going up to Hertford College, Oxford, to read history. He taught at Leeds University from 1958 to 1966 and in 1962 completed his doctoral thesis, which was subsequently published as The Elizabethan Militia in 1967. Meanwhile, Boynton had abandoned military history in favour of English architecture and furniture and in 1964, assisted by Geoffrey Beard, F.S.A., he was the principal founder of the Furniture History Society and acted as its honorary secretary until 1981. He moved to Westfield College, London University, as lecturer in 1966, and began a study of the Gillow furniture- making family of Lancaster and London. As secretary of the Furniture History Society he successfully campaigned to save the firm's archives from export in 1967 and, following their deposit in Westminster Reference Library, he worked on them, off and on, for the rest of his life. The first of two planned volumes, Gillow Furniture Designs 1760-1800, containing the estimate sketch books and illustrated with photographs by David Williams, appeared in a privately-printed limited edition in 1995, to which many sponsors and subscribers contributed, and a second volume covering 1800-40 was in preparation at the time of Boynton's early death at the age of sixty-one. He was appointed Reader in History at Westfield in 1972 and contributed numerous original articles to learned journals, on furniture-makers and designers such as the wood carver Luke Lightfoot, the Gomm family, the 1601 Hardwick Hall inventory, Thomas Sheraton's drawing book, Chippendale's furniture at Nostell Priory and that of the Worsley family of Appuldurcombe on the Isle of Wight. Boynton pioneered the study of the decorative arts in British universities and developed two innovative interdisciplinary courses at Westfield on the study of furniture and interiors and their relationship to architecture and social life in Britain and Europe. Boynton wrote graphically and elegantly about Georgian society; he loved music and enjoyed good food and wine. His last work, which will appear posthumously, was an essay on the Georgian villas of the Isle of Wight. He died on 12 December 1995.