Humphrey Waterfield

4 boxes. This material has been catalogued. Please search the archive catalogue for full details (Ref DHW)

The archive mainly comprises travel journals, notebooks and sketchbooks created by Humphrey Waterfield from 1927 until 1970. It includes journals detailing Waterfield’s wartime experiences with a volunteer ambulance unit in Finland, Africa, the Middle East and France. It also contains other travel journals and sketchbooks kept during journeys in France, Ireland and South America. Several notebooks contain Waterfield’s personal observations and thoughts on a variety of topics and there is one notebook of his own poetry. The archive includes correspondence, photographs, postcards and an exhibition guide. Humphrey Waterfield’s activities as a painter and gardener were the subject of a small display held at the Centre in 2019 – further information about this can be found in the accompanying pamphlet. Additional material concerning Humphrey Waterfield can also be found in the Giles Waterfield Archive housed at the Centre.

The archive also includes a small volume of correspondence belonging to Humphrey’s great grandfather, Thomas Nelson Waterfield. The correspondence was received by Thomas Waterfield in his capacity as an employee of the India Board of Control, exclusively from Francis Folijambe Courtenay, Private Secretary to the Governor-General, Lord Dalhousie, dating from 1848–1857. The letters include discussion of, and reports on, political and social situations in both India and Britain and provide a record of life in British India under the rule of the East India Company.

Derick Humphrey Waterfield (1908–1971) was a British landscape gardener and artist. Educated at Eton College and Christ Church, Oxford, he later studied at Ruskin College and the Slade School of Art. From the mid-1930s he created a six-acre landscape garden called Hill Pasture in Essex, where he also had a studio and house, designed by Ernö Goldfinger, built on the site. As a conscientious objector, he joined a Quaker voluntary ambulance unit and was deployed in Finland, Africa, the Middle East and, lastly, France. His parents died in 1940 and after the war he designed and laid out the garden of their house, Clos du Peyronnet, in the south of France.

Thomas Nelson Waterfield (1799–1862) was a British civil servant; he worked within the India Board of Control as Secretary of the Political and Intelligence Department.