Courtney, Sir Christopher

John Courtney was the son of John Courtney of Wakefield and Elizabeth Bourdenand nee Featherstone of Beverley. His father had been in the East India Company and served a spell as governor of Surat. John Courtney was born in beverley in 1734 and attended Beverley Grammar School before being admitted as pensioner at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1752. He inherited land and property in Beverley and the surrounding area from his grandmother, mother and from his uncle and aunt, Ralph and Margaret Featherstone, and went to live in Beverley. His diaries, which begin in 1759, are thus filled with local information about Beverley elections, the Minster, the Assembly Rooms, the Beverley races, turnpikes, the Beverley Arms, the Beverley Bank, the East Riding Bank, the coffee house at the Blue Bell and so on. All the main local families are included in his gossip; the Legards, the Broadleys, the Barnards, the Gees, the Stricklands - Mark Sykes he calls `an artful cunning fellow'. The elopement of Captain Hotham and Miss Gee in 1792 rates a mention.

On 8 June 1759 he recorded `This day I kept my act in the law schools'; he had been in Cambridge for a while before taking his LLB and the diary is quite good for college talk. He used his legal qualification to manage his lands and property. He was also heavily involved in the local militia (the diary is filled with reference to East Riding militia activities), possibly as a response to the threatening international events that he also recorded. In 1762 and 1763 he was recording his thoughts on the war with Spain, and the French Revolution later gets good coverage. By 1792 he was saying of events in France: `What a terrible tragedy... what savage wretches'. This eventful year also sees him recording tea conversations with William Wilberforce (who rates further mentions through the decade), as well as his thoughts on the slave trade and the publication of Tom Paine's Rights of Man. In 1802 he was recording his thoughts on Horatio Nelson and the Peace of Amiens.

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