History of Imray, Laurie, Norie & Wilson

Imray are the oldest nautical publishing house in Europe and our history involves most of the strands of chart publishing in Britain.

Three London companies, Imray and Son, R H Laurie and Norie & Wilson amalgamated in 1903 to form Imray Laurie Norie & Wilson. Their individual histories are traced in our "family tree."

Norie & Wilson
William Heather's firm, which used the Little Wooden Midshipman described in Dickens' Dombey and Son as his trade sign from about 1795, descended from Mount and Page, chart publishers, who were active at the beginning of the eighteenth century.

Heather's successors, by way of Heather and Williams (1798), included JW Norie, the mathematician, whose Nautical Tables were first published in 1806 and are still used today, and Norie & Wilson from 1840.

Left :J.W. Norie

Imray and Son
Mount & Page are also the ancestors of the Imray part of Imray Laurie Norie & Wilson. Their successors included John Hamilton Moore (1763), author of The Practical Navigator and hydrographer to the Duke of Clarence.

Right: Imray Family Tree, to 1903.

Below: J.W. Nories shop at 157 Leadenhall Street.1840.
R H Laurie
The Laurie line extends back to 1670 and John Seller, embracing Sayer and Bennett (1770) and Laurie & Whittle (1794) who were very active as sellers of charts, prints and books.
Sayers' catalogue extended to over forty-five pages and his ancestors were involved in chart publishing for a good many decades before the emergence of the Admiralty in 1795.

From 1903 Imray Laurie Norie & Wilson had offices in the Minories in the City of London and they remained there, publishing and selling nautical works to the merchant fleets of the world, through the twenties and thirties. In 1939, the imminence of the Second World War led to the evacuation of the offices to St Ives near Cambridge where the company is still based.

Until the early fifties the company contrived to produce Blue Back charts for the whole world, a list of special charts for deep sea fishermen, extending to the White Sea, Iceland and Newfoundland, and a list of books for navigation.

The first coloured yachting charts appeared in the 1930s and today we specialise in publishing an outstanding catalogue of charts and guide books for yachtsmen.

The list of yachting charts is extensive, covering the British Isles, northwest European waters, the Caribbean Islands, Atlantic Islands and the Mediterranean. Our pilot books cover the same areas and also some of the more far flung cruising grounds that are now visited by yachtsmen.
The list of our own publications is supplemented by charts and books that we distribute for other publishers including the United Kingdom Hydrographic Office.

The Little Wooden Midshipman

`East India House...anywhere in the immediate vicinity there might be seen pictures of ships speeding away full sail to all parts of the world; outfitting warehouses ready to pack off anybody anywhere, fully equipped in half-an-hour; and little timber midshipmen in obsolete naval uniforms, eternally employed outside the shop doors of nautical instrument-makers in taking observations of the hackney coaches.

Sole master and proprietor of one of these effigies - of that which might be called, familiarly, the woodenest - of that which thrust itself out above the pavement, right leg foremost, with a suavity the least endurable, and had the shoe buckles and flapped waistcoat the least reconcilable to human reason, and bore at its right eye the most offensively disproportionate piece of machinery...’

From Dombey and Son Charles Dickens