I have just returned from Jekyll Island in Georgia, just above its border with Florida. My mission was to visit the Jekyll Island Museum and Archive. The Archive contains the collection of the Jennings Family, wealthy partners in Standard Oil alongside the Rockefeller family. The Jennings family rented Knebworth House in the 1920s and the photographs they took – on glass negatives – are unusual in that they were hand coloured. So, although they are not natural colour photographs, they are the earliest colour photos that exist of Knebworth House and Gardens. They are beautiful, and I hope we can put copies of them on display at the House in the future.
I learnt on the island that the Jennings family contacted the Jekyll family while they were in England and were given a portrait of the man after whom the island was named. In 1733 Sir Joseph Jekyll had contributed £600 toward the founding of the colony of Georgia. The Jennings also discovered that the island’s name had been missing an ‘l’ for a couple of hundred years. This was put right by the Georgia Legislature when they got home.
It is very possible that the introduction to the Jekyll family came through my great-grandfather’s brother-in-law Edwin Lutyens, whose close associate was the garden designer Gertrude Jekyll. Gertrude Jekyll designed our lovely herb garden at Knebworth House. Of course we pointed out that, not only had they got the spelling wrong, but they were now pronouncing the name of their island incorrectly. The Jekyll family pronounce their name not Jek-yll, but Jee-kyll. Somehow I suspect the Georgia Legislature will not be springing to pass legislation to correct this!
Henry Lytton Cobbold
@HenryCobboldKH