Frendsbury

George Payne

In this article, Derek Barnard tells the life of George Payne

Anyone who delves at depth into the history of Rochester will come across the name of George Payne. F.S.A. for it was in 1895 that he published in Archaeologia Cantiana the results of his work in tracing the layout of the Roman town and its walls. This finally settled the vexed question of whether or not the town had actually had walls, a matter of some discussion at the time.

He was born in Sittingbourne in 1848 and as he grew up began to take an interest in the finds of ancient pottery and artefacts, which were turned up daily in the area by labourers digging the brick earth, to meet the unparalleled demand for bricks in the building of London’s underground railway. The labourers began to report their finds to him and he recorded and mapped them. He had attended the local school, leaving early to go into brewing, but his archaeological work was noticed by William Bland of Hartlip Place who invited him to see the Roman Villa he had excavated on his land. He also introduced him to Charles Roach Smith, at that time one of the foremost authorities on Roman and Saxon remains in England. He cast a spell over the boy and George Payne became his most ardent disciple and devoted friend. At the slightest rumour of a find anywhere in Kent he was on the spot, instructing the diggers and recording accurately.

He amassed a fine collection of artefacts and offered it to the local council for display, on refusal it went to The British Museum where it could be better studied. For business reasons he left Sittingbourne in 1883 for Halesworth in Sussex and then Tonbridge Wells. He then came to Rochester where he lived for thirty-three years in a house in the Precinct, which was part of the old Episcopal Palace. His interest in history was then directed at Rochester where the castle keep was repaired under his supervision. He explored the medieval crypts under the local buildings, measuring and recording them, as well as seeking the city walls. The Royal Engineers, in their first revision of their Ordinance Survey maps in 1895 to 1898 used his knowledge of archaeology throughout Kent to ensure the accuracy of their publications. He was again on hand to give valuable assistance when requested on the further revision of 1907, and he also realised that Rochester deserved and should have a local museum to display its history. When he went public with the idea he was well supported by the council and the citizens who responded generously to his appeals for help. The scheme was his own and his unremitting efforts ensured that his museum in Eastgate House was reckoned to be one of the finest in the kingdom.

He became a Fellow of the Society of Antiquities in 1880; the year in which his much acclaimed Archaeological Survey of Kent was published. He contributed papers to the proceedings of that society and thirty-five papers were published in Archaeologica Cantiana on subjects ranging from ‘Roman Rochester’ to ‘The Iron Industry of the Weald’. 

When he died in 1920 his obituary described his thirst for history as ‘no mere by-pass of knowledge to be pursued in a leisure hour, but an all-absorbing study of a lifetime. Certainly at times his friends thought him lacking in a just sense of the proportion of things but within certain limits his antiquarian knowledge was remarkably sound and thorough. He had great strength in discovery, the ‘spade work’ of archaeology. In this direction his services were of immense value and his success extraordinary. He had a wonderful flair for ‘treasure hid in a field’ and his care in excavating and painstaking recording was a lesson to all’.

  On the 8^th June in 1921 a memorial was unveiled in the porch of his museum, Eastgate House, by the Earl of Darnley. This plaque was cleaned and the carved letters repainted by the late Jack Verhoeven on behalf of the City of Rochester Society in 1992. It is well worth another look. 

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