Out of interest I've looked up today's entry for 14th September:
Died this evening at Livermore Park, near Bury St Edmonds, the Honourable Justice Williams suddenly, in his 70th year.
I think that should be Edmunds, but I don't know if that was Nat's mistake or in the transcription ..... Anyway I wondered where he got the information from and looked in the newspapers of the day. The news first appears in several papers on the 17th - usually in a long obituary notice.
The only simple death notice I could find was in The Times of 17th September:
On the 14th inst, very suddenly at his residence Livermore Suffolk, the Hon. Mr Justice Williams,
one of the Judges on the Court of Queen's Bench
I'm assuming Nat would have added all these death entries after the event - I can't see the death of Justice Williams working its way round all of London by word of mouth on the actual day he died. Most people would only have known about it from reading the papers. Also Nat didn't repeat a death notice in his diary word for word from any newspaper report that I've seen. I wonder what his reasons were for recording the deaths of some people in his diary but not others?
Carole
