Richard Romney Sedgwick ⁶¹²

  General Notes:

From The Times, January 24, 1972
Mr. Romney Sedgwick, CMG, died on Thursday at the age of 77.
The elder son of Professor Adam Sedgwick, he was educated at
Westminster and Trinity College, Cambridge, of which he became a
Fellow in 1919. From 1949 to 1954 he was assistant Under-Secretary of
State, Commonwealth Relations Office.
Those interested in the history of the eighteenth century owe Sedgwick
a considerable debt. Lord Hervey's Some Materials towards Memoirs of
the Reign of King George II was first published in 1848 in a
bowdlerized transcript by Croker of the mutilated manuscript belonging
to Lord Bristol. The book was republished ast it stood in 1884 but in
1931 Sedgwick undertook a more extensive and more thorough excavation.
Having found a fuller copy of the memoirs at Windsor he was allowed to
bring out a largely unexpurgated but extremely limited edition of it
running to three volumes. John Lord Hervey was for some years
Vice-Chamberlain to the Household and was an intimate of that
formidable woman Queen Caroline: it was his habit to jot down at odd
moments of the day or night, accounts of anything interesting that had
been said or done by the King, the Queen, Sir Robert Walpole or the
Princesses. It was one of his foibles to write of himself in the
thrid person, thus giving his story a perspective or frame. He had a
fine eye for detail and a great thirst for affairs.
Sedgwick published Letters from George III to Lord Bute in 1939 and in
1970 came two large and scholarly volumes in "The History of
Parliament", entitled The House of Commons, 1715-1754.
He married in 1936 to Mana, daughter of Prof T.C. Hodson. They had a
son and a daughter.

  Noted events in his life were:

1. He appeared on the census in 1911 in 2 Sumner Place, Kensington, London.

Richard married Mana St. David Hodson, daughter of Professor Thomas Callan Hodson and Kathleen Elfrida Manby, in 1936. (Mana St. David Hodson was born c 1909 in Hornsey, Middlesex ¹⁰.)