Admin History | The Revd John Melville Guilding (1830-1898) was vicar of Reading St Laurence 1874-1898 and a keen local antiquarian, whose most important work was the editing of the Reading Borough minutes up to 1642. He was born in St Vincent in the Grenadines in 1830, and was ordained priest at York in 1853. He died in Reading in 1898, and his heirs donated his papers to Reading Public Library. G W Smith was a collector of manuscripts who lived in Caversham in the 1930s. |