Just to feed back that I paid the RPS for information on one of my lot, Frederick William Guest. They confirmed he was a member and the addresses from which he paid his subscriptions. The really, really, really weird thing though (which they said they'd look into, but have never got back to me) was that he was still on the register and (presumably) paying subscriptions every year for 28 years after he died!
Curiouser and curiouser, how on earth did that happen. They stop all payments like that when someone dies as a rule.
They finally got back to me, and - basically - they're stumped.
The only thing they've been able to add is that his name is crossed out in the 1920 register, with an annotation "Deceased: T.T. Hora 6.5.20"
Apparently the date is ususally the date the Society is informed of the death of a member, and they assume TT Hora (whoever s/he is!) was the informant.
I now have an image of someone called TT Hora buying FW Guest's old shop and finding 28 years worth of mail behind the door!
The name T.T. Hora didn't mean anything at first until I started digging.
I found two entries for T.T. Hora in the 1906 telephone directory, both at 346 York Road, Battersea: TT Hora, Chemist & Druggist, Battersea 280 and Tudor T Hora, Whisle Photographic Chemist, Battersea 327.
Hora, and particularly Tutor T. Hora, is a sufficiently unusual name that I easily tracked him down on the 1891 census, where his widowed mother is Susanah M Hora: she's a chemist. I then found a marriage between a William T Hora and a Susannah M Page in 1866 - and that's where finally - and convolutedly - there's a connection.
My Frederick William Guest was the second husband of rather strange sounding character, Maria Brown. They married in 1882 and she was widowed for the second time when Frederick William died in January 1892. She then married again, in September 1892, to a James Richard Page, who was a "medical & general label printer" and who printed labels for Frederick William Guest's medicine bottles (according to a newspaper report of a curious deed of separation between Maria and James Richard Page). So I'm guessing there's a connection on the Page side. Siblings? Cousins?
What a tangled web! And it still doesn't explain why T.T. Hora left it until 1920 to inform the RPS of Frederick William Guest's death 28 years years earlier!