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Themes Explorers and Adventurers Nobel Prize Winners
Actors and Directors Famous People Places of Interest
Anglo-Saxons and Danes Historic Events Prime Ministers
AONB (National Landscapes) Inventors and Scientists Royal Consorts and Heirs
Artists and Architects Monarchs World Heritage Sites
Composers and Musicians National Parks Writers and Poets

Surrey

Surrey lies in southern England and borders the south-west of London. In 1889 part of the county was incorporated into the new county of London and in 1965 further areas became part of the new Greater London.



 Towns include the county seat of Guildford.

Actors and Directors
The stage and film actor and director Laurence Olivier was born in Dorking in 1907. He directed and starred in several successful film versions of Shakespeare's plays including in 1944 Henry V, Hamlet in 1948 - for which he won an Academy Award - and Richard III in 1955. He also won acclaim for other films such as Wuthering Heights in 1939 and Alfred Hitchcock's 1940 filming of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca. He was married for 20 years to the actress Vivien Leigh.

Laurence Olivier



 The actor Boris Karloff was buried in Guildford in 1969. Born as William Henry Pratt in London in 1887 he immigrated to Canada in 1909. From there he moved to Hollywood where he starred in many classic horror films such as Frankenstein in 1931 and The Mummy in 1932 securing a reputation as Hollywood's biggest star in the genre. He returned to live in England in the 1950s.

Boris Karloff

National Landscapes
(Formerly: AONB or Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty)
Lying just south of Greater London the Surrey Hills form part of the Green Belt which encircles the capital in order to restrict the city's expansion into the surrounding countryside. The National Landscape was one of the earliest to be designated in 1958. It spans the county from east to west and includes some of its most famous beauty spots with Box Hill, the Devil's Punchbowl and Leith Hill - the highest point in the south-east of England - all lying within its borders.



 Spreading across three ancient counties, the major part of the High Weald is found in Sussex, reaching down to the coast at Hastings. Designated in 1983, the area lies between the North and South Downs and contains one of the largest areas of ancient woodland remaining today in England. This woodland includes the Ashdown Forest.

Artists and Architects
The writer and pioneering garden designer Gertrude Jekyll died at her home Munstead Wood near Godalming in 1932 and is buried in the church at nearby Busbridge. She planned many gardens in Surrey where she spent most of her life and over 300 for the buildings of her friend, the architect Edwin Lutyens.

Gertrude Jekyll

Explorers and Adventurers
Walter Ralegh has an obscure connection with the county. Beheaded at Westminster in 1618, Ralegh's head was given to his widow. She lived with their son Carew at West Horsley Place - his manor house in the village of West Horsley - and eventually buried her husband's head under the floor of the local church, St Mary's.

Walter Ralegh
Poetry Archive



 In 1904 Henry Morton Stanley was buried at Pirbright. He was most famous for finding the Scottish explorer David Livingstone in Tanganyika in Africa in 1871.

Henry Morton Stanley

Historic Events

Important Events
In 1128 Waverley Abbey was the first Cistercian abbey to be built in England. The Cistercians were a monastic order founded in France in 1098 in Citeaux in Burgundy. The founders were Benedictines who disapproved of the relaxed approach of their order at the time, and set up the new order to lead a more disciplined and simple life. By the end of the 12th century over 100 Cistercian houses had been established in England and Wales.


In 1215 King John signed the Magna Carta on the banks of the Thames at Runnymede. The King was pressured into signing the charter by rebellious barons who wanted the powers of the monarch legally defined as a control against tyranny. It was therefore a landmark first step in the setting up of a constitution.

 King John
 Magna Carta


Monarchs

House of Lancaster
House of Lancaster
Murdered in the Tower of London in 1471 Henry VI was was not to be given the honour of a burial at Westminster Abbey and so the Yorkist Edward IV had the king buried in Chertsey Abbey. It was not until 1484 when Richard III had the last Lancastrian monarch disinterred and reburied at Windsor Castle in Berkshire.

Henry VI


Nobel Prize Winners

Chemistry
The biochemist Peter Mitchell was born in Mitcham in 1920. In 1978 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for developing a new theory of energy generation.

Literature
The winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1932 John Galsworthy was born at Kingston Hill in 1867.

John Galsworthy



Peace
The pacifist and writer Norman Angell died in Croydon in 1967. He had won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1933 and had written The Great Illusion in 1910 which showed how war made no economic sense for the victors.

 Norman Angell

Physiology or Medicine
The Belgian biochemist Christian de Duve was born in Thames Ditton in 1917. In 1974 he shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with the naturalised Americans Albert Claude and George Palade.



Places of Interest

Cathedrals and Abbeys
Waverley Abbey


Prime Ministers
Prime Ministers

The Earl of Rosebery, Prime Minister from 1894-95, died at The Durdans in Epsom in 1929.

Earl of Rosebery



 Arthur James Balfour, Prime Minister from 1902-05, died at Fisher's Hill in Woking in 1930.

Arthur James Balfour

Writers and Poets
For John Galsworthy see Nobel Prize Winners



 The writer William Cobbett was born in 1763 at the Jolly Farmer Inn in Farnham. The son of a small farmer he taught himself to read and write and later campaigned for the rights of the poor. He died in 1835 and is buried in Farnham.

William Cobbett



 The poet Matthew Arnold was born in Laleham in 1822 and was buried at the parish church of All Saints in 1888.

 Matthew Arnold


Not deep the Poet sees, but wide.
 Resignation (1849)



 Alfred Tennyson died at his home Aldworth near Haslemere in 1892. From 1869 Tennyson had used Aldworth as his second home to escape the summer crowds which visited his home near Freshwater on the Isle of Wight. He had been Poet Laureate since the death of William Wordsworth in 1850 and was himself succeeded in 1896 by Alfred Austin. He is buried in Westminster Abbey.

Alfred Tennyson
 Famous people buried at Westminster Abbey
 Poets laureate


The last red leaf is whirled away,
The rooks are blown about the skies.
In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850)

'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850)



 In 1898 the author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Lewis Carroll died whilst visiting his sisters who lived in Guildford. He is buried in the town.

Lewis Carroll
Lewis Carroll Society



 The author of Brave New World Aldous Huxley was born in Godalming in 1894. He was buried in 1963 at nearby Compton. He had died in Los Angeles on the 22nd November, the same day as the American President John F. Kennedy and the author C.S. Lewis.

Aldous Huxley


"Art, science - you seem to have paid a fairly high price for your happiness," said the Savage, when they were alone. "Anything else?"

"Well, religion, of course," replied the Controller. "There used to be something called God - before the Nine Years' War. But I was forgetting; you know all about God, I suppose."

"Well...." The Savage hesitated. He would have liked to say something about solitude, about night, about the mesa lying pale under the moon, about the precipice, the plunge into shadowy darkness, about death. He would have liked to speak; but there were no words. Not even in Shakespeare.
Brave New World (1932)

... and take to believing, instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere; that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge.
Brave New World (1932)

So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.
Ends and Means (1937)



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Surrey
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Surrey Archaeological Society
Surrey
Record Society
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Exploring
Surrey's Past