2110-5-10-1

[L.S. Amery]

SLOANE 1543

112, EATON SQUARE , S.W.I.

l2th January, 1932

My dear John,

I wish to lodge two complaints against you.

One that you were responsible for making me spend the best part of two days in connection with the making of one of the worst speeches I have made, and two that you were responsible for the production of a book called ''The Blanket of the Dark" which unnecessarily caught my eye as I was by way of sitting down to some work which I wished to do over the weekend, with the consequence that the work is still undone, in fact still caught in 'the blanket of the dark'. However, I will confess that I enjoyed the hours spent on your story very much.

Was it at Elsfield, or where, that I recently read read a book by an Australian Professor called McLaurin (I think), giving the medical aspect of Henry VIII and sundry other personages in history'?

I have got somewhere, but cannot lay my hand on, some old notes of the doings of the Amery family in and around Oxford between about 1150 and 1370. One of them Roger Amery, was the original donor of the lane on which Oseney in 1204 I think Abbey was built. Herrington seems to have been their headquarters, and they conducted a long dispute with the citizens of Oxford as to who had the right to collect Market Tolls in Oxford, settled ultimately by the arbitration of the King of Germany (then on a visit to the English Court.) Like the "Bunns", the Amerys then seem to have settled down to some centuries of undistinguished but distinctive existence.

Yours ever, JSA [J.S. Amery M.P.]

John Buchan Esq. C.H.M.P. Elsfield Manor, Near Oxford.

*The only person of any note after 1400 who was of Amery descent in fact was Walter Raleigh