The Culmer family are believed to have originated from the island of Kulmer, on the south eastern coast of Sweden. British descendants spell the name with a "C" and seem to have made their fortune in Kent, England, during the 16th century. Other descendants are to be found in North America.

The descendants of Gurth prospered in East Kent and Canterbury, coming into lands that were kept in the family for generations and their were many soldiers and mariners amongst them.

It was Charles Culmer, the son of Waldemar of the nineteenth generation who built the stairs for the fishermen of Broadstairs, Kent in the year 1350. The stairs, from which Broadstairs derives its name have survived to this day and were first repaired by Richard Culmer over three hundred years after their original construction.

Richard Culmer was the son of Sir Richard Culmer by his first wife and was born in 1640/1. Sir Richard Culmer was the eldest son of Sir Henry was born in 1612. His father, also a son of an Henry Culmer, was born around 1574/5 and had married to a Mary Baldwyn in 1602. He was created a Baron by King James in 1630, but died in 1633.

Richard was buried in the parish church of Monkton, on the Isle of Thanet. Of his legacies was the endowment on Broadstairs of an area of six acres of ground for the poor of the parish. The name survives to this day as ‘Culmer’s Allotment.’

In Richard Culmer’s day, the little village of Bradstowe was entirely surrounded by farmland’s and such roads as their were, existed as mere tracks to, and between these farms. In wet weather they became quite impassable and therefore troublesome to the local craftsmen and traders, whom more and more came to rely on good roads to get about.

Richard had been educated at Oxford and established himself as a Puritan Minister of some note. He obtained, for a while in 1643 the living of the parish of Chartham, where he became immediately unpopular. As a General under Cromwell he became notorious, and was so disliked that the parishioners of Harbledown protested that they cared not which minister served them, so long as it was not “Cromwell’s Blue Dick” as Culmer was referred to, because he would refuse the traditional colour of the Parsons black gown, preferring to wear a blue one.

He so alienated his Parishioners that ‘any local lies in the district for years to follow were known as “Culmers news.” He had been known to have despised William Laud, who was, it must be said, himself quite unpopular in the nation as a whole, but who had committed Culmer to the Fleet for refusing to read ‘the Book of Sports’ after services in Church, this being an accepted entertainment for the parishioners who otherwise had little access to reading.

Archbishop Laud, in fact referred to Culmer as ‘an ignorant person and with his ignorance, one of the most daring schismatic’s in all that country.’ Already disliked he delighted in his promotion as a Commissioner to oversee the demolition of superstitious (Catholic) monuments, and set about his task at Canterbury with enthusiasm, so much so that his parishioners would openly flock to attack him regularly, to the extent that soon he had to carry out his task with Cromwell’s Soldier’s to protect him.

Culmer made use of a guide book of the times, to the Cathedral to hunt down and destroy ‘many window ~ images’, ‘Idol’s of stone’ and ‘seven large pictures of the Virgin Mary.’

For his services to Parliament he was offered the living of the parish of Minster in Thanet in 1644, where his parishioners had locked the church against him at his ordination, when he attempted to break in to the church he was mobbed and beaten. So despised was he that the parish refused to pay tithes to support him, but then offered his arrears if he would but go away!

He later found himself under arrest in London, and asked why he had destroyed the figure of Christ in the Cathedral windows, and not that of the Devil, he merely replied that Parliament’s orders were for the removal of the same and made no reference to Satan.

Described as ‘odious for his zeal and fury’ he survived in his position until shortly before the Restoration of Charles II. With the death of Cromwell, he may have foreseen the return to a monarchist State, for he moved to Holland in 1660, having been ejected from the church.

He had married in 1639 to Miss Beeson, and again twenty years later to a Dutch woman, the widow Mrs. Bocher of Haarlem in Holland, the country in which he died in 1669.

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