publication of Professor J. K. Wallenberg’s two works on the place-names of Kent has made the publication of the English Place-Names Society’s Kent volume both more difficult yet easier, and more imperative yet less urgent.
   Increased co-operation with other bodies was one of the characteristics that marked the Society’s work between the wars. The new local committees concerned with town and regional planning, for example, regularly turned to the Society for advice, and often invited the Society to nominate a member of the committee. Today, planning is recognized as being far more complex than was realized in the 1920s, and the County Council has now become the planning authority, but the mutually useful connection between planning and archaeology established thirty years ago continues. In the field of ecclesiastical architecture Diocesan committees were set up to advise the Bishops’ consistory courts on the granting of faculties, and although the Society has never been officially represented on these committees, some of our members have, from the first, served upon them, and the Diocesan committees have cordially recognized the nature of the Society’s interest in their work.
   It was in 1937 that the Society received perhaps its most
munificent gift, the Twisden family portraits and papers. By his will, Sir John Ramskill Twisden, 12^th and last Baronet, bequeathed certain family portraits to the National Portrait Gallery, and the remainder to the Kent Archaeological 

Society. The Society were able to arrange with the East Mailing Research Station, the purchasers of Bradbourne Hall, which had been the home of the Twisdens since 1656, that the portraits should remain there, and the National Portrait Gallery thereupon generously returned the portraits specifically bequeathed to them, so that the collection might remain complete in its most appropriate setting. Beginning with Roger Twysden (circa 1587) and ending with Sir John Ramskill Twisden, the last of his line, they form a fascinating series of portraits of a family which has, at times, been prominent in Kent history. The Society are fortunate to have received so rich a legacy, and fortunate in the friendly co-operation they have had from the Research Station, who have bestowed upon Bradbourne the affectionate care that the building seems always to have elicited from its occupiers. Would that some of our other country houses were assured of an equally happy future!
   By 1939 the Society could look back with a good deal of satisfaction over the last twenty years. That it had achieved so sound a position was largely the work of its Officers during the inter-war years. Both Lord Conway of Allington, who was President from 1923 until 1937, and Sir Reginald Tower, who then held the office until his death in 1939, played a notable part in the deliberations of the Society.      G. C. Druce

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