The Boyce Papers

THE story of The Boyce Papers: The Letters and Diaries of Joanna Mary Boyce, George Price Boyce and Henry Tanworth Wells really begins during the Second World War. In 1942, Hitler, in furious retaliation for the British bombing raid on Lübeck on 28 March, which had all but destroyed the ‘Old Town’, launched a series of raids aimed, not at strategic industrial targets in England, but at historic cities famed for their beauty and their architecture. ‘The English’, he reputedly told Goebbels, ‘belong to a class of human beings with whom you can only talk after you have first knocked out their teeth.’

The first bombing, of Exeter on 23 April, was followed by Bath, on 25 April and 26 April, York on the 28th, and Norwich on the 27th and 29th. The artist John Piper was sent to record the aftermath of the raids on Bath, and one of his most dramatic images shows the jagged scar in an elegant Georgian crescent where a house had been wiped out by an incendiary bomb.

The house, 42 Somerset Place, belonged to Alice Joanna Street, the elder daughter of Joanna Boyce and Henry Wells. She was then 82 years old, and widowed. The bomb had actually fallen on the house next door, but a strong wind caught the flames and whipped them across to the untenanted attic of Alice's home. Roused by their neighbours, she and her daughter Marakita, their maids and their ‘billettees’ escaped unharmed, but though Marakita went back inside to recover what she could, many of their treasures were destroyed. These included not only pictures – a rare collection of Italian primitives, some early works by Edward Burne-Jones and Millais, an important watercolour by Turner and the many paintings and drawings that Alice had inherited from her parents – but also the letters, diaries and other materials that make up The Boyce Papers.

For Alice it must have been a terrible shock. Ever since her mother's early death in 1861, her father had determined to create a memorial to her memory. He had spent many hours trying, and in his view, failing, to build the kind of monument to Joanna that would not only cement her reputation as an artist, but also as an exemplary human being.