[A small archive of her books, photographs and related ephemera].

£3,000 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

A small family archive of materials related to pioneering female explorer, writer and Royal Geographical Society member Violet Olivia Cressy-Marcks, née Rutley, later Fisher (1895-1970), largely collected by her brother Lieutenant Commander Reginald Vincent Rutley (1910-1962), and thence by descent. Cressy-Marcks (as she was generally known, even after her second marriage) was from an wealthy British family, and caught the travel bug after leaving school early to drive lorries in Italy during the Great War. With support from her mother (to whom her first book is dedicated), by the time she was twenty she had made extensive self-funded expeditions from Alaska to Java, through Tibet and Kashmir and beyond. In 1922 she was elected as a member of the RGS. She would go on to travel “overland from Cairo to the cape in 1925, and Albania and the Balkans (1927-8), and spent the winter north of the Arctic circle travelling by sledge from [Sapmi] to Baluchistan (1928-9). Eventually credited with travelling in every country of the world, she was keen to have a scientific grounding to her travels, and was a fellow of the Royal Asiatic and Zoological Societies” (ODNB). Present in this collection are a group of postcards sent to her eldest son William Cressy-Marcks (1922-1945) as she travelled through Eastern Europe and the Balkans, with descriptions of her travels and instructions to save them for an album. She also sent a fine group of photographs from her trip to Egypt, Syria and the Nea

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