Clement Christopher Wiles, born 1878, the son of Joseph Pitt Wiles, a Cambridge schoolmaster. He read mathematics at St John’s College, and in 1903 emigrated to South Africa. As a teacher, he was headmaster of Indwe High School and of Graeme College, both in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. He married Marion Gilbert, his cousin, and they had four children. Clement Wiles died at Cape Town on 1 December 1964, aged 86.

Clement Wiles had developed an interest in the history of the Wiles family and accumulated family documents and genealogical information until the 1950s. He traced the Wiles tree to Holywell near Stamford in south Lincolnshire in the early eighteenth century. The sons of Henry Wiles (1729-1815), a gardener at Holywell, all settled in the Caribbean. The eldest, James, settled in Jamaica as superintendent of the Botanic Gardens, and was in due course joined by his brothers Henry and John. All three became plantation owners with enslaved labour. Henry’s children were educated in England, and his son John (1812-1908) entered the Cambridge statuary business of his uncle John Gilbert (who had married Elizabeth Wiles). John Wiles married his cousin Eliza Gilbert, and carried on his uncle’s firm. His fourth son Joseph Pitts Wiles (1849-1929) became headmaster of Warkworth House School in Cambridge, and a Baptist minister in Cambridge and Devizes. He and his first wife Mary Parker had a large family, of whom the eldest was Clement Christopher Wiles.

Clement inherited some of the correspondence of James Wiles (1768-1851) and his brothers, much of it written to their sister Ann in London, beginning in the 1790s, as well as letters and other documents of his grandfather John Wiles, the statuary, and his father, Joseph Pitts Wiles. To this collection he added letters to himself from his mother, his aunt Elizabeth Ann Wiles, his brothers and sisters, and his three elder children. To many of the letters he appended explanatory notes, either on separate sheets of paper, or in pencil on the documents themselves. He reduced the length of some items (mostly of twentieth-century date), carefully noting in each case the number of words that he had excised. In his later years he compiled a hand-written volume entitled ‘Family letters and records 1690-1956’, incorporating an introductory survey, transcripts of all the original documents and of his notes, a detailed index of names, and a genealogical table.