Camdens Worldwide

Compiled by David A Hayes

To mark the 400th anniversary of the death of Elizabethan scholar, William Camden, historical societies and other contributors from as far apart as New Jersey and New South Wales have worked together to chart the spread of Camden as a place name to nearly 50 places in six continents across the globe. This compilation reveals how the Camden name reached so many far-flung locations and it allows contributors to tell the stories of their own communities.

Most owe their names ultimately to William Camden and more directly to either lawyer and politician Charles Pratt or his political son John Jeffreys Pratt. The international influence of these two Lords Camden led to the naming of many Camden locations around the world. Charles Pratt was made a lord while extending his grand house on the site of William Camden’s former home. Rather unusually for the British honours system, although unrelated to William Camden, he called himself after his house - becoming Baron Camden of Camden Place, and also Earl Camden.

The order in which places got their names is briefly summarised in this timeline by John Cottrell
and also in a more detailed Camden Chronology below :

Go straight to Camdens around the world

Meet three men called Camden

The very different men who carried the Camden name forward.

First meet William Camden, born 13 years before Shakespeare, who survived catching the plague as a small boy, to become a school teacher, a respected antiquarian author, Headmaster of a top school and was finally appointed by Queen Elizabeth I to a highly coveted position as a herald, conserving heraldic records and arranging state ceremonies.

You will also meet below Charles Pratt, the 1st Earl Camden: a “short but handsome” man with “fine grey eyes and a genial smile”. The lawyer son of a lawyer in the Georgian era, he became Chief Justice and was widely respected as a champion of civil rights. As a politician, he strongly opposed military intervention in North America and the taxation of colonists without representation - and so was celebrated in up to 30 places in the US that still carry his name.

John Jeffreys Pratt, Charles’s only son, was a politician possibly only through his father’s connections. He became 2nd Earl Camden on his father’s death, after which he rented and then sold Camden Place. He was made Lord Lieutenant of Ireland for three disastrous years, during which clumsy and oppressive government actions, such as the imposing of martial law, resulted in suffering and violence. Re-shuffled and made Minister for War and the Colonies, he then helped Australian settler John Macarthur acquire land for sheep farming in New South Wales, where the Camden name can still be found.

Who was William Camden?

The place it all began…

Camden Place, Chislehurst, Kent, UK

“The first links in the Camden chain”

By Angela Hatton - Camden Place tour team.

The Camden story is at least unusual and possibly unique. It explains how a man, a very talented man but without wife or heirs, came to have his name passed down over 400 years and spread across the globe. This Camden network took root, not in Westminster where antiquarian and herald William Camden was headmaster of the school and librarian for the Abbey, but in a small village in Kent, Chislehurst (now London Borough of Bromley).

It was in Chislehurst that close friend William Heather and his wife Margery nursed Camden back to health following a severe illness. The better air quality reduced risk from the plague, and proximity to the City of London and the Royal Courts at Greenwich was attracting many of the wealthier classes to these green outskirts of London. The Walsinghams at nearby Scadbury were also probably known to Camden. Certainly, it seems he took a liking to the area and decided to build himself a house on 2 acres of land, surrounded on three sides by the common.

We have found no detailed records of that property but, given the character of the man, it seems likely to have been a modest country house, where his study and library would have been a central focus. Local architect and historian, Ken Wilson, produced this illustration of how Camden’s house might have looked. We do know that it was not on the footprint of the current house, which started to be developed in 1717, when a new owner, Robert Weston, bought the old William Camden home. He expanded the site, demolished the original Camden house and began to build a new country seat which he named Camden House. This, then, was the first link that would chain the author of Britannia and the Annals of Queen Elizabeth to what would become that global Camden network.

Without doubt, William Camden left his mark on the world. Besides Britannia and the Annals, he wrote about the Gunpowder Plot, created the first alphabetical list of proverbs, and produced both a Greek Grammar and a guidebook to the tombs of Westminster Abbey. He purchased land in Bexley and the income it generated was used to found an endowed lectureship in history at Oxford – the first in the world. This still continues as the Camden Professorship of Ancient History. In his field he was as significant as William Shakespeare.

By rights William Camden should be buried in Chislehurst. He made his wishes very clear: “to be buried in that place where it should please god to call me to his mercye”. However, his friends had other ideas and he was buried in the South transept of Westminster Abbey, in Poets’ Corner.

Camden’s name and reputation were still strong enough for Robert Weston to name his house after the old scholar who had died almost 100 years previously. Weston tied the Camden name to the house, but it was the next owner, Sir Charles Pratt who was the catalyst for its export around the world. An ambitious and radical lawyer, he had served as Attorney-General from 1757; four years later he was knighted and appointed Chief Justice of the Common Pleas.

Pratt bought Camden House in 1760 and expanded the estate through the purchase of Red Wood, much of which he felled, naming the residue Camden Wood, and by enclosing common land. The site was now over 127 acres. He appointed architect George Dance the Younger and designer James ‘Athenian’ Stuart to start on a 20-year building project to convert the country house into a Georgian mansion. He renamed his property Camden Place. The name it has kept to this day.

Ennobled in 1776 on becoming Lord Chancellor, Pratt took the title Baron Camden of Camden Place. This decision did not pass without comment because it seems that no-one before had ever taken someone else’s name. In the words of Sir Gerald Wollaston, sometime Garter King of Arms, “It is an astonishing thing and without precedent that a man should be allowed to take another man’s surname as his title, but that is what happened.” Lord Camden’s support for American settlers’ right not to be taxed without representation led to over thirty places in America being named after him. His property in north London became known as Camden Town. His son John, the second Earl Camden, as a sometime Colonial Secretary, gave his name to places in Australia.

Back in Chislehurst, Camden Place, the hub of this expanded network of Camden associations continued its own remarkable story. In 1823 owners Ann and Thompson Bonar were brutally murdered by their footman. In 1859 the grounds were ‘invaded’ by 5,000 troops and hundreds of spectators as the estate was the scene of a sham fight. In 1860 the Camden estate changed hands again. This time it was sold to a Nathaniel Strode, trustee to one of Napoleon lll’s early mistresses. He set about a radical transformation of Camden’s Georgian mansion into a French château.

Windows were lowered and shutters, balustrades, urns, balconies, clocks and a coat of arms were added to the house. Magnificent gates from the French Exposition of 1866 were acquired and a new dining wing was decorated with wooden panelling purchased from the Château de Bercy.

Today this room is described as the best French interior in England. Strode’s motives for this significant transformation are unclear but there is much circumstantial evidence to suggest that the purchase and work were orchestrated by Napoleon lll himself, in case a bolt hole in England was ever needed. Not really paranoia for a man who had already been deported once, exiled twice and imprisoned twice, all whilst pursuing his destiny to lead France.

By 1870 Camden Place did indeed have a French flag flying and became the centre of the French court in exile. Queen Victoria and Tsar Alexander ll were amongst the many dignitaries and politicians to visit the house. It was here that Napoleon, France’s first President and last Emperor, died in 1873, following unsuccessful surgery for bladder stones. The picture gallery became a Chapelle Ardente and tens of thousands from France and England paid their respects. Tragically, only six years later the young Prince Imperial was killed in British uniform whilst observing the Zulu Wars. His funeral also left from Camden Place as he joined his father at rest in the small Catholic church of St Mary’s in Chislehurst. In 1888 both remains were moved to Farnborough, Hampshire, where the Empress Eugénie had an Abbey built for the Imperial family.

After Nathaniel Strode’s death, his house was sold to the Willetts, local property developers. The Chairman of the Common’s Conservators, Alexander Travers Hawes, was determined to keep Chislehurst as green as possible. He used a ransom strip, held when Robert Weston had taken a 500-year lease out on part of the common, to allow him to create a stunning lime tree avenue at the entrance of the property. The ransom strip prevented the builders’ moving materials onto the site or providing access for any new households. Access was limited to those living and using Camden Place. Negotiation between Travers Hawes and the Willetts led to a compromise. They could build on half of the land as long as half was kept for recreation. It was 1894, the year when the most golf courses were started in England. William Willett the younger - best known for his proposals for Daylight Saving Time (introduced after his death during World War l) - built himself a house, the Cedars, opposite Camden Park gates. He set about creating a 9-hole golf course, with a smaller 9-hole course for the ladies. Camden Place became the clubhouse and Willett the proprietor. Travers Hawes was still not totally content. Concerned that, whilst the Willetts owned the land, there would always be a risk they would find a way to develop the site, he set about developing a scheme to raise the money to purchase the club. Bought in 1889 bought by members and local residents, it has been Chislehurst Golf Members Owned Club ever since.

Soon after the purchase, the course was extended to 18 holes. It is one of the shortest, most challenging parkland courses – a real test of golf skill. At a luncheon preceding the opening of the club in 1894, Mr A.J. Balfour declared, “You have undoubtedly – it must be evident to everyone who hears me – the best golf club house in existence. I do not suppose that any other club, however ancient or famous, however large the number of its members, has ever been housed in a palace before.” The house has remained largely unchanged architecturally since the Empress Eugénie left Camden Place. It has a wealth of architectural as well as historical heritage that we like to share with visiting golfers and visitors to the house. But there is one feature of the house that lets us return to William Camden. The Jacobean entrance hall, complete with two secret doors and twenty gargoyles, dates from the very early 1600’s, when William was building his house on the site. The panelling was recycled into its current position in the 1760 makeover by Lord Camden, and a new ceiling added. Screws from the panels confirm this timing. Though it may be fanciful and impossible to establish, it is possible the panelling was moved twice, once by Weston from the original house, perhaps to create his main gallery, and later by George Dance to create what was then the back entrance to the extended Camden Place. It isn’t hard to imagine William Camden sitting by these panels working on the Annals of Queen Elizabeth.

More information about Camden Place and visits to see it can be found at www.camden-place.co.uk

 William Camden’s Chislehurst Legacy

By Joanna Friel of The Chislehurst Society.

Painted on the wall over the arches in the Scadbury Chapel, inside St Nicholas Parish Church, are the Royal badges of King Henry VI and King Edward IV. These have been ascribed to William Camden, described by historians in 1899 as his ‘antiquarian enthusiasm leaving its mark on the church walls’. The badges are facing the tomb of Sir Thomas Walsingham IV, who in 1611, purchased a Manor of Chislehurst and it would appear as if the badges were placed there to commemorate the fact that the Chislehurst manor, which had previously belonged to Lancastrians, subsequently to Yorkists and finally to the Tudors, was united under the same ownership, as Scadbury Manor, by Sir Thomas Walsingham. An event that occurred during Camden’s time here.

Camden left £8 to the poor of Chislehurst in his will and £7 to Mr Richard Harvey, Rector at the time. He performed the useful service of transcribing all the earlier parish registers and an account of his literary works is given in the Dictionary of National Biography. In the frieze of the drawing room of Camden House today, is a painting of a long, rather low, building said to represent the house in Camden‘s time, but locals will perhaps remember him more in several of our street names, Camden Close, Camden Grove, Camden Park Road, Camden Way and Lower Camden. Of course, there is also a pub in Bexleyheath, named William Camden. It was the sale of the assets from the manor of Bexley that Camden used to endow the Oxford Chair of Ancient History – something we can all raise a glass to.

The two Lords Camden

Charles Pratt, 1st Earl Camden (1713-1794)
Eponym of place names in England and North America

Contributions from Camden History Society, London.

Charles Pratt was born in 1713, the fifth son of Lord Chief Justice Sir John Pratt. He was only eleven when his father died at their house in Great Ormond Street, Bloomsbury. Charles was educated at Eton and King’s College, Cambridge, then destined for a legal career, entered the Inner Temple in 1728. Called to the Bar ten years later, he became a barrister in the Middle Temple. In 1749 he followed his brother in marrying into the Jeffreys family, and with Elizabeth Jeffreys had four daughters and one son, whom he named John Jeffreys Pratt.

Charles Pratt became a King’s Counsel in 1755. Two years later, with the support of Lord Henley, later Lord Chancellor, and his Eton school-friend William Pitt (the Elder), shortly to be Prime Minister, he entered Parliament as Whig MP for Downton, Wiltshire. In July 1757 he was made Attorney-General and from 1759 he also followed Lord Henley as Recorder of the City of Bath. In 1762, the new King George III sought to remove Pratt from the political field by promoting him to Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, and appointing him to the Privy Council. In 1763, as Chief Justice, Pratt freed John Wilkes, a radical journalist and MP who had been arrested for seditious libel, over an article he had written criticising a speech made by George III. He also supported the awarding of damages to victims of unlawful arrest and condemned the increased use of search warrants. As a result, he was very popular both in radical circles and among the wider public, regarded as a champion of civil liberties and idolised almost as much as Wilkes. Pratt received the Freedom of the City of London, and Joshua Reynolds was commissioned to paint his portrait, which was hung in the Guildhall; similarly, William Hoare painted his full-length portrait for the Guildhall in Bath, on his being granted the Freedom of that City.

Pratt’s town house from 1758 to 1775 was at No.34 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, which, but for demolition and a 1900 boundary change would now lie in the modern borough of Camden. The Pratt family owned two properties in Kent that had been purchased by his father, Bayham Abbey near Lamberhurst, and Wildernesse at Seal near Sevenoaks. In 1760 Charles acquired Camden Place at Chislehurst [3.1] of which he became very fond, and when ennobled in 1765 he took as his title ‘Baron Camden of Camden Place in the county of Kent’.

The champion of civil liberties was not so respectful of the rights of his Chislehurst neighbours, causing resentment by his enclosure of common land. A local folk tale is believed to allude to his lordship’s actions: ’Tis bad enough in man or woman / To steal a goose from off the common / But surely he’s without excuse / Who steals the common from the goose?’

Appointed Lord Chancellor within Pitt’s administration in 1766, he was Speaker of the House of Lords until 1770, resigning after Pitt’s ministry had fallen. Following a speech to Parliament, that he published in the London Magazine in 1768, under the title ‘No taxation without representation’, Lord Camden was a constant critic of Britain’s North American policies, including military intervention, although he did not support full independence. It increased his reputation, gained in the Wilkes judgement, for individual rights, and made him popular with the colonists, resulting in the naming after him, directly or indirectly, of some thirty places in America.

In 1782, aged almost 70, Lord Camden returned to the cabinet, now under William Pitt the Younger, as President of the Council. Then in 1786 he was granted an earldom, an honour he accepted, he said,to please his children. He was also granted a further peerage as Viscount Bayham (after Bayham Abbey), for use as a courtesy title by his son.

Through his marriage to Elizabeth Jeffreys, Pratt had inherited property farmland, the demesne of Cantlowes near Kentish Town, just north of London, and in 1788 he obtained an Act of Parliament allowing him to grant leases for house building on the land. Building work began from 1790 on the new suburb that would soon be known as Camden Town. Earl Camden has been described as short but handsome, with fine grey eyes and a genial smile. He was fond of the theatre, and enjoyed and played music, and was an avid reader of romantic novels. His social circle included David Garrick, Joshua Reynolds and Samuel Johnson, but he was blackballed when he tried to be elected to the Literary Club. He died in London on 18 April 1794, at his town house in Mayfair, and was buried in Kent, in Seal Church near Wildernesse. He was succeeded by his son, John Jeffreys Pratt.

See for interest: Lives of the Lord Chancellors and Keepers of the Great Seal by John Lord Campbell.

John Jeffreys Pratt, 2nd Earl Camden & 1st Marquess (1759-1840)
Eponym of places in Ireland, Alaska and Australia

Contributions from Camden History Society, London

John Jeffreys Pratt was born on 11 February 1759 at 34 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London, the fourth of five children and only son of the Charles and Elizabeth Pratt. Educated, like his father, at Eton and Cambridge University, in 1780 he was elected Member of Parliament for Bath under the organisation of his father. Between 1782 and 1792 he held junior ministerial positions in the government of William Pitt, his father’s childhood friend. In 1785 he married Frances Molesworth, an orphan heiress of Wembury, Devon, and they were given the Pratt family house at Wildernesse in Kent by Lord Camden’s elder brother John. In 1786 when his father was granted an earldom, John Jeffreys was styled Viscount Bayham. When his father died in 1794, he succeeded as 2nd Earl Camden. In 1806 he inherited Bayham Abbey near Tunbridge Wells, and sold his father’s house, Camden Place, and his wife’s manor at Wembury. He and his wife Frances also leased a grand town house in London at 22 Arlington Street, St James’s

In 1795 he was appointed by William Pitt as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. His term of office came at a very turbulent time. He was politically unsuccessful because of his government’s opposition to Roman Catholic emancipation and the policies adopted to quell the unrest, including the suspension of habeas corpus and the imposition of martial law, culminating in the Irish Rebellion. He was withdrawn in 1798 and was followed by the ex-military Lord Cornwallis. Returning to England, he was made Knight of the Garter in 1799 and was briefly, again under Pitt, Secretary of State for War and the Colonies. His War work consisted mainly of managing home defence volunteers, while in his colonial role he assisted an Australian settler, John Macarthur, in gaining land for sheep farming – which resulted in the naming of Camden, New South Wales.

John Jeffreys remained in Pitt’s cabinet until 1812, with two spells as Lord President of the Council. That year he was granted two further peerages, as Earl of Brecknock (after his mother’s ancestral inheritance and Marquess Camden. Through his father, in 1780, he had obtained the Tellership of the Exchequer, a lucrative position for life involving no work and worth £2,500 annually. Parliament had capped payment for new sinecures in 1783, but high taxes and expenditure during the Napoleonic War raised the uncapped Exchequer Tellership’s payment tenfold and it was not until 1817 that the Marquess, under public criticism, volunteered to limit himself to the basic sum. Over the sixty years he received more than £1m of public money, much of which he put into buying farms and land around the two properties in Kent.

In later life John Jeffreys held positions as Lord Lieutenant of Kent and Chancellor of Cambridge University. He died at Wildernesse on 8 October 1840 and was buried like his father, in nearby Seal Church. He was succeeded by his son George Charles Pratt, the 2nd Marquess, who married Harriet Murray, daughter of the Bishop of Rochester (and coincidentally a younger sister of the Rector of Chislehurst.)

A Camden Chronology

1717 Camden House, Chislehurst → Camden Place 1760

1767 Streets in north and east London

1768 Camden, South Carolina

1773 Camden, New Jersey

1777 Camden County, Georgia

1777 Camden County, North Carolina

1785 Camden, Virginia

1787 Camden (Crescent), Bath

1787 East Camden, Ontario

1788 Camden, Delaware

1790 Camden Town, London

1791 Camden, Maine ← Cambden Plantation

1794 Camden Township, Ontario

1794 Port Camden, Alaska

1795 Fort Camden, Co. Cork, Ireland

1799 Camden, New York

1818 Camden Haven, New South Wales

1821 Camden Bay, Western Australia

1826 Camden Bay, Alaska

1830 Camden, Indiana

c.1830 Islas Camden, Tierra del Fuego

In addition to place names around the world, the Camden name lent itself to sailing ships and an eminent learned society. Symbolic elephant references to the Pratt family can still be seen in heraldry and signage.

The Camden Society

By Dr Philip Carter, Academic Director, Royal Historical Society.

Camden Society for the Publication of Historical and Literary Remains (1838-1897)

The Camden Society, was founded on 15 March 1838, at the home of John Bowyer Nichols, parliamentary printer and proprietor of the Gentleman's Magazine. Those present at the founding meeting included Thomas Amyot, secretary of the Slave Compensation Commission, and Treasurer of the Society of Antiquaries; Sir Frederick Madden, Keeper of Manuscripts at the British Museum; the genealogist Thomas Stapleton, Thomas Wright, editor of early texts, and the Revd Joseph Hunter, historian and assistant keeper at the newly established Public Record Office.

The meeting resolved to establish an association ‘for the publication of early historical and literary remains’, to be called the Camden Society: not to be confused with the Cambridge Camden Society, an association for the study of ecclesiastical architecture and antiquities, founded in the following year and known - from 1846 - as the Ecclesiological Society. As noted in the Society’s first published volume, the Camden name was chosen ‘as a symbol of the importance and value of the subjects to which the attention of the Society will be directed, and a pledge that its designs will be prosecuted with zeal, learning, and judgment.’

The new Camden Society was governed by a President and a Council of twelve members, including a Treasurer and Secretary. Membership of the Society was by annual subscription of £1, and an annual meeting was held on 2 May to mark the birthday of William Camden (1551-1623). The Society’s purpose was publication of unedited manuscripts—and from 1839 the publication of editions in translation—as well as the republication of selected scarce printed books. By doing so the Society sought to ‘perpetuate, and render accessible, whatever is valuable, but at present little known, amongst the materials for the Civil, Ecclesiastical, or Literary History of the United Kingdom … in the most convenient form, and at the least possible expense that is consistent with the production of useful volumes.’

Copies of each new edition were sent to members of the Society with remaining volumes offered publicly. The twelve-man Council was originally responsible for oversight of the Society’s membership and the selection of works for publication. From May 1839 it resolved also to read the proofs of each work to ensure standards were being maintained by individual editors.

The early years of the Camden Society saw rapid growth in membership. By Spring 1839, the subscription list neared 500 members each of whom received the first published editions of the Historie of the Arrivall of Edward IV in England, edited by John Bruce, and John Payne Collier's edition of Bishop Bale's dramatic work, Kynge Johan. The first General Meeting, held on 2 May 1839, raised the membership limit to 1000, which was in increased again to 1250 in March of the following year. Prince Albert joined the Society in 1843 and remained a member until his death in 1861. * A number of institutional subscribers were admitted as members of the Society and obtained a set of publications, the first being the London Library in 1842, followed by the Chetham Library, Manchester, in 1850, the Marylebone Public Library in 1854, and the Westminster Public Library in 1857.

The Camden Society's outstanding contribution is Albert Way's edition of Promptorium parvulorum sive clericorum, a multi-volume Latin-English dictionary dating from c.1440. One of the earliest works proposed by the Society, it was only completed in 1865. Other publications were undertaken jointly with the Early English Text Society (founded in 1864). In addition to its annual volumes, the Society’s Council was active in promoting easier access to historical documents. Between 1848 and 1869, it sought to easier access to early wills in courts and district registries, and opposed the imposition of fees for literary searches among wills. In 1865, it successfully advocated the use of photography for making facsimile copies of wills.

Despite these achievements, the Society’s viability as membership organisation soon became, and remained, a source for concern. Within a decade of its founding, the Society saw a decline in subscriptions and, by 1851, membership stood at between 300 and 400, with print runs limited to 750 copies per edition. This decline brought financial difficulties, exacerbated by the early 1880s, on account of a failed project to compile a general index to the Society’s first 100 published volumes. Between the late 1880s and early 1890s membership wavered between 150 and 230, and by 1894 the Society was £95 in arrears from defaulting subscribers.

In 1896 it was suggested that the Camden Society amalgamate with the Royal Historical Society (RHS), an international membership organisation established in 1868 to foster and promote research and the development of the discipline of historical scholarship. Royal Historical Society membership then stood at c.600. It was proposed that a united membership of the two societies would be sufficient to support the annual publication of two Camden volumes and one of the RHS’s proceedings or Transactions. A joint commission reported favourably in 1896 and the Camden Society was absorbed within the Royal Historical Society from April 1897. The merger of the Camden Society with the RHS ensured the continuation of its work.

Since 1897, two volumes of the Royal Historical Society’s Camden Series of primary sources, have been published annually. In 2022, some 380 volumes of Camden texts are available, in print and online, from Cambridge University Press. These volumes— principally relating to British and Irish history, and British activities worldwide—offer scholarly editions of a wide range of sources, ranging from political papers and diplomatic correspondence to professional journals and personal diaries. The archive of the Camden Society (1838-1897), comprising papers relating principally to the management and accounts of the Society, is now part of the Royal Historical Society’s archive at University College London.

Ships

The1st Earl Camden, Charles Pratt, was a member of syndicates supporting trade with India and China. Four ships, ‘East Indiamen’, bearing the Camden title were built for the East India Company (EIC). The first Lord Camden made its maiden voyage in 1766. The captain, Nathaniel Smith, was brother-in-law to the architect George Dance – who remodelled Camden Place at Chislehurst above and whose later plan for Camden Town was abandoned. Nathaniel Dance, a nephew of George, became captain of a second Lord Camden, which made five voyages between 1783 and 1795.

During the Napoleonic Wars, Nathaniel Dance also commanded the Earl Camden, built in Bombay (Mumbai) and launched in 1802. In early 1804 it was the flagship of a large convoy of East Indiamen returning to England from China, heavily laden with valuable cargo. Coincidentally on board the Earl Camden, as a young midshipman, was John Franklin, the future namer of Camden Bay, Alaska. On 15 February 1804, in the South China Sea, the flotilla was tailed by a French war squadron under Contre-Amiral Linois. Commodore Dace ordered four of his ships to run up the blue ensign of the Royal Navy to fool the French into thinking that his merchant ships were more heavily armed British warships. The ruse worked, and after a short, inconsequential exchange of gunfire, the French squadron withdrew, to be chased for two hours by the British merchantmen.

On their eventual arrival in England, their commanders and crew were rewarded for having saved the East India Company and their insurers from bankruptcy. Known as the Battle of Pulo Aura, the engagement was painted by the artist William Daniell, who was to die in 1837 in Camden Town (London). In 1810 the Earl Camden was destroyed by fire in Bombay harbour. A successor East Indiaman, the Marquis Camden built c.1812, was wrecked in the Philippines in 1839.

Smaller ships named Camden included a vessel built in Liverpool in 1760, which in its time brought 150 enslaved people from Africa to dig a canal and carried a total of 1,232 enslaved people from the Gold Coast (Ghana) to Jamaica. Another Camden, built on the Thames in 1799, transported convicts, and later emigrants, to Australia. Its first owner was William Lushington, sometime resident of Camden Place, Chislehurst and owner of the Camden plantation in Trinidad. The Camden built in 1813 in Whitby (Yorkshire, England) became a Greenland whaler, and a sealer of the same name was lost off Patagonia in 1826. The ‘packet’ Camden, built in Falmouth in 1819, carried mail for the British Post Office, and was reputedly named after the 2nd Earl Camden for his contribution to improving postal services. The ship later carried missionaries from England to the Pacific, where on arrival in the New Hebrides (Vanuatu) in 1838, Rev. John Williams was promptly eaten by cannibals. There is more information on Camdens at sea in this supplementary note.

An American ship was captured in 1777 off Cape Finisterre (Spain), by the future British Admiral Samuel Barrington, and named by him Lord Camden. More recently, two ships in the United States Navy have been USS Camden (AS-6, the former Kiel), a submarine tender from 1919 to 1931 and a barracks ship during World War II; and USS Camden (AOE-2), a fast combat support ship, 1967-2005.

Elephants’ heads and heraldry

In deference to William Camden, as Clarenceux King of Arms, we should not overlook Lord Camden’s heraldry which, like the Camden name, has travelled. Usually symbolising great strength or wisdom, the Pratt family emblem is an elephant’s head. Along with a black bar and three stars, three such heads appeared in the arms of both the 1st Earl Camden and his son, the 1st Marquess.

In 1900 the motif was included in the arms of the new Metropolitan Borough of St Pancras, and today serves more strikingly as the crest in the little-used coat of arms of the London Borough of Camden (Latin motto meaning ‘not for oneself but for all’). Elephants’ heads have also crossed the Atlantic, featuring both in the arms of Camden County, New Jersey, and in the badge of the local Roman Catholic diocese.

Back in England, in Camden Crescent, Bath, the doorcase keystones are embellished with elephants’ heads in relief. Similarly adorned in Camden Town, London, is the doorway of ‘Elephant House’, the former bottling store of the erstwhile Camden Brewery (brewers of Elephant Ale). Still trading nearby in Camden High Street, and first opened in 1869, is an Elephant’s Head public house.

In Kent, an Elephant’s Head pub in Seal Road, Greatness, Sevenoaks, adjoining the Pratt’s Wildernesse estate and dating from 1867, survived into the 21st century but now houses a veterinary practice; while another Elephant’s Head is still in business at Hook Green, Lamberhurst, near to Bayham House, the mansion built by the 3rd Marquess Camden in 1870.

Discover where the Camden name was used around the world

Camdens in Britain and Ireland

Camdens in the US and Canada

Camdens in the Global South

Camdens in Australia and New Zealand

With thanks

Many thanks to all the credited contributors around the world who responded so enthusiastically to my invitation to participate. Also to Steve Denford, John Cottrell and Mark McCarthy of Camden History Society for their help and advice; to Lindsay Douglas, Camden History Society web designer; Tudor Allen, Camden Local Studies and Archives Centre; and to Angela Hatton, whose planned William Camden quatercentenary commemorations at Chislehurst were the inspiration for this project.

Information about places without a contributing historical society has been drawn, sometimes verbatim, from various online sources. Notification of any resulting errors will be gratefully received. Please contact the compiler.