Greenwich's Georgian Sandwich

The National Maritime Museum has just announced that it has acquired the personal papers of John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich (1718-92). The cost to the museum of £725,000 was well over three times their annual acquisition grant, and the sale was only achieved with a substantial donation of £430,000 from the National Heritage Memorial Fund. In possession of the family since his death, and in recent years available only with difficulty to scholars, this personal archive of some thirty feet of shelf space will now be widely available at the museum at Greenwich. It should make a difference to Sandwich's reputation, while the first substantial biography of the earl is to be published in 1993 – the author, Nicholas Rodger, has used the papers extensively.