In our latest column from Godaming Museum, Curator Alison Pattison writes about an unexpected link between a kitchen range and Trinidad.

In 2012 Godalming Museum was given a Victorian kitchen range which had been discovered during renovation work on a cottage in Chiddingfold.

It was in poor condition and, despite being the smallest type of range, with only a single oven and no water boiler, was a large object for the museum to cope with.

But it had an attractive cast iron oven door marked C F Weston, Godalming, and I could see just how it would look on display, alongside other 'kitchenalia' from the collection.

Research by volunteer Ann Laver established that Charles Frederick Weston ran an ironmongers on Godalming High Street, in the building now occupied by Dyas, from 1869 to 1900.

For the next seven years the range sat reproachfully in the museum store, in pieces and taking up a lot of space, while we gathered support and funding for a major refurbishment of the museum's local history galleries.

Then Godalming Round Table made a generous donation which enabled us to send the range off to social history conservator George Monger. It came back looking wonderful and was installed in the new galleries, which opened in the summer of 2019.

During lockdown we had an enquiry from Susan Taylor, a local member of the Philatelic Society of Trinidad and Tobago. Did the museum know anything about the Weston family? Their Godalming address had caught Susan's eye as she studied a presentation on the Britannia Stamps of Trinidad by fellow member Nigel Mohamed, which featured two covers sent from Trinidad to the Westons by Henry Prestoe.

Susan and Nigel established that Henry Prestoe was the brother of Mrs Charlotte Weston.

Born in Andover in 1842, he was the son and brother of gardeners. Henry went to work at Kew Botanical Gardens and then, in 1864, obtained the post of Superintendent of Trinidad's Royal Botanical Gardens.

While there he catalogued the plants cultivated in the Gardens from 1865 to 1870, presented a paper on the Ramie fibre plant to the Trinidad Scientific Association and, in 1880, welcomed Princes Albert and George, the first members of the royal family to visit Trinidad. A bamboo, Arthrostylidium Prestoei, is named after him.

How thrilling it must have been for the Weston family in Godalming to receive his letters, and it is almost equally exciting for philatelists to discover a Prestoe-Weston cover today. The postage, postmarks and stamps on these early envelopes make an important contribution to our understanding of postal history.

Susan Taylor and Nigel Mohamed have just published a fascinating article on this subject in the British West Indies Study Circle Bulletin and would love to hear if anyone knows of any further examples of the Prestoe-Weston correspondence which might add to the story. Any information sent to the museum will be forwarded to them.