Leigh Rayment

Leigh Rayment was a historian who lived in Sydney, Australia. From 2003 he published a growing set of lists, starting with lists of British MPs and members of the House of Lords, these sets grew to include lists of privy councillors, baronets, knights and those given various other honours. It became one of the definitive sources of information on the internet.

Leigh didn't just provide bald details of dates. He livened up the lists with various stories, usually about people who met a sticky end or were the subject of some scandal, some of which ended up changing British law.

In February 2019, Leigh's wife Jean sent an email to some people who had previously been in contact with Leigh:

"I am very saddened to have to inform you of the death of my dear husband Leigh on 1st February 2019. He had an operation for a knee replacement on 3rd Dec 2018 but complications arose and he did not recover. I am so sorry it has taken me until now to give you this news but only now am I able to peruse his emails and inform his correspondents. If I may ask, should you know of any other correspondents on Leigh's peerage website that would need to know of Leigh's death my family and I would be very grateful if you could pass on our sad news."

The website domain expired early in 2020.

Given the usefulness of the site, I have spent some time retrieving the latest pages from the webarchive. It does appear that the latest few archives were not complete, so I have retrieved the latest version of each page that I can find. Also it appears that Leigh maintained a series of Microsoft Excel workbooks from which his webpages were uploaded. This led to a very inefficient set of HTML.

In tribute to Leigh and the amazing work he did, I have uploaded and updated these pages, which you can view here. I have tried to ensure that the lists have a consistent format and, currently, any amendments to names and dates I have made are in grey rather than black type. I have also changed the style in which source material is presented, and tried to add hyperlinks to as many cross-references as I can. I have also replaced his original email address with my own. As a result of tidying up the formatting, even with some additions the sizes of the new files are about half the size of the originals, so should load more quickly. Work on smartening up the pages is continuing (June 2020), as is development of some new ones.

Moving forwards, I will see what I can do about maintaining and updating these pages. Please note these are static files, as opposed to my main site which is dynamically populated from an underlying database.

Happy reading.

Leigh Rayment Pages