How to scare an archivist

June 16th, 2011

The papers of Neil Kinnock, former Leader of the Labour Party, now Baron Kinnock of Bedwellty, were the most daunting thing I’ve ever faced as an archivist. They lurked in our strongroom, frightening anyone who went near them: 937 boxes of mainly loose papers, in no particular order!

Enough to scare anyone, you’ll agree. However, somehow or other (and I’m still not sure quite how this happened), I ended up facing this archival dragon, quaking in my shoes, with nothing but a pencil and paper to help me. Well, that’s not quite true: there was a boxlist, provided by the brave souls who had gone before me, but as anyone who’s ever tried boxlisting loose papers will tell you, it’s a bit tricky to be definite about giving file titles when there aren’t that many files.

I decided there was nothing for it but to pitch in (keeping my eyes shut half the time, so I couldn’t see what was ahead of me), and start working through the boxes from scratch, just trying to find out what was really in there. Every now and then, to add to the fun, I might come across one half of a file thirty boxes away from the other half, while papers on half a dozen different subjects and dates were generally mixed up together. My unfortunate colleagues got only too used to hearing wailing noises and indistinct cursing coming from my end of the room: eventually even I got tired of hearing myself mutter “What is this doing here?”, and settled for grinding my teeth every now and then.

Then there were the faxes. Anyone working on a collection from the 1980s is likely to hit this problem: the ink on faxes is not very long-lasting, and after a few years may hardly be visible at all. So I ended up photocopying them onto acid free paper on as dark a setting as possible, before the print vanished altogether – and there were a lot of faxes, many of them with all the pages still joined in one big roll of paper. The current record for this is a 37 page fax, all on one sheet (you learn to get quite nimble on your feet, to avoid treading on the end).

I did have the odd break: Kinnock’s speeches, for instance, were more or less together (there were three different sets of duplicates, mind you, none quite the same, but any order was better than none). And gradually, as I grabbed at any order I could see, and imposed one where I couldn’t, things began to come into shape.

The core of the archive is the section relating to Kinnock’s internal reforms of the 1980s and early 1990s: how Labour came back from the electoral disaster of 1983 (when Labour’s socialist manifesto was described by Gerald Kaufman as the longest suicide note in history). When Kinnock took on the leadership, just after the election, the party was being torn apart by the bitter wrangling between the hard left, centre left (led by Kinnock) and the right. By the time he resigned in 1992, to be succeeded first by John Smith, and then by Tony Blair, Labour was ready for power once more.

Then there is the mass of material about the General Elections of 1983, 1987 and 1992, where you can see the party gradually evolving into the smooth electoral machine of recent times, as presentation and spin became more and more important. Add to that a huge amount of correspondence, large sections on the Miners’ Strike and Militant, and papers covering the development of every area of policy, particularly from the general Policy Review undertaken after the loss of the 1987 Election, and the Kinnock Papers become an essential source for anyone studying the recent history of the Labour Party. So, three years on, I have to admit that it was worth it: but the sight of a box full of loose papers still makes me shiver.

Katharine Thomson

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The Discovery and Significance of the George Pitt-Rivers Papers

June 14th, 2011

On 27 June 1940, the Dorset constable arrested one of the county’s most prominent landowners in accordance with orders received from London. The target of the police raid, George Pitt-Rivers, was long known to government investigators for his unusual views and public statements, many of which were seen as supporting Adolf Hitler’s Nazi government.

Only a decade before his arrest, Pitt-Rivers had been a prominent and respected British anthropologist, conducting fieldwork in the South Pacific and receiving praise for his scientific publications. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s he was also closely involved with a wide variety of social reform movements including eugenics and birth control advocacy, in addition to various groups seeking agricultural reform and post-First World War reconciliation with Germany.

Pitt-Rivers in Victoria, Australia, 1910. Reference: Pitt-Rivers Papers, PIRI 22/2, copyright Pitt-Rivers family, reproduced by kind permission.

For more than five decades following his death in 1966, Pitt-Rivers was almost entirely forgotten to historians as one of the many interwar figures who had simply ended up on the “wrong side” of history and subsequently disappeared.

In mid-2009, I contacted the Pitt-Rivers family as part of my doctoral research into the interwar eugenics movement’s international ties. My interest in Pitt-Rivers had been entirely incidental: as I examined existing archival collections from the period I was unavoidably confronted with the Pitt-Rivers name, and it was clear that “Capt. Pitt-Rivers”, as he was often called, was present in many of the high-level meetings I was examining.

Shortly after sending my initial letter, I received a gracious reply from the Pitt-Rivers family giving me access to a private collection of documents housed in the attic of their family home in Dorset. Immediately recognizing the significance of the collection, I contacted Allen Packwood and his staff at the Churchill Archives Centre and now, thanks to their extraordinary efforts, the Pitt-Rivers papers are properly conserved and available for future generations to consult.


Letter from Pitt-Rivers to Oswald Mosley, 1935. Reference: Pitt-Rivers Papers, PIRI 13/1, copyright Pitt-Rivers family, reproduced by kind permission.

The true strength of the Pitt-Rivers collection is its remarkable breadth of content. The oldest documents in the archive date from the late 1910s, when Pitt-Rivers returned to England after being badly wounded in the First World War. There are numerous letters from this era discussing anthropological theory, Frederick Nietzsche, socialism, and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Historians of anthropology will find many letters and unpublished manuscripts of interests, all dating from an era when anthropological methodology was still largely in its infancy. There is also an extensive collection of never-published photographs from the South Pacific, many of which illustrate tribal customs and practices.

The majority of the collection’s materials date from the 1930s, when Pitt-Rivers began to increase his political involvement. There are numerous documents relating to his involvement with the Eugenics Society and various pro-birth control organisations, along with various documents related to pro-agriculture groups. Later documents also relate to Pitt-Rivers’ involvement with Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and other groups including the Anglo-German Fellowship, an organisation seeking to build closer relations between Britain and Nazi Germany. Following his arrest, Pitt-Rivers became one of the few detainees to legally appeal his 18B detention, and a number of items provide important insights into how this controversial government initiative functioned and was legally justified.

Letter from Pitt-Rivers to Clementine Churchill from his internment camp, 1940. Reference: Pitt-Rivers Papers, PIRI 13/4, copyright Pitt-Rivers family, reproduced by kind permission.

The Pitt-Rivers collection provides important new insights into the turbulent decades between the First and Second World Wars, and I am very grateful to the Pitt-Rivers family for making these items available for both my own research and that of future scholars. It is fitting that these important sources now reside in the Churchill Archives Centre, where they can be consulted by anyone seeking to examine the complicated and oft-forgotten dynamics of the time alongside the papers of the era’s leading statesmen.

Bradley W. Hart, Churchill College, Cambridge University

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Lady Randolph Churchill’s sumptuous albums

June 9th, 2011

I’ve just catalogued two bound volumes which had originally belonged to Sir Winston Churchill’s mother, Lady Randolph Churchill, new arrivals at Churchill Archives Centre. Lady Randolph was a fantastically glamorous and extravagant figure – take a look at her dressed as the Empress Theodora to get a flavour of this – and so I looked forward to getting my hands on these two new albums. This was a woman, after all, who had persuaded people to bankroll several financial disasters which had enabled her to showcase her talents – think of her leather bound magazine the Anglo-Saxon Review – beautiful but eye-poppingly expensive to produce and buy which lasted for 10 issues.

Lady Randolph Churchill as the Empress Theodora, 1897. Reference: Churchill Papers, CHAR 28/114/13.

One of the albums (our reference PCHL 1/8) was chiefly used as a visitors’ book at Salisbury Hall, St Albans, where Lady Randolph lived with her second husband George Cornwallis West (born in 1874, the same year as her eldest son). It includes photos of guests in the grounds and signatures recording those who stayed there.

Lady Randolph's visitors book. Reference: Peregrine Churchill Papers, PCHL 1/8.

The album itself is gorgeous, leather bound with gold tooling. This picture shows Lady Randolph’s book plate in design and final form – how splendid to have a book plate featuring your name set to music!

Lady Randolph's visitors book. Reference: Peregrine Churchill Papers, PCHL 1/8.

I also discovered that Lady Randolph had used one page of the book to note down inspirational quotations. How then to define the book in the neutral and accurate (dare I say dry?) terms you expect in an archive catalogue? I was keen to understand for what purpose Lady Randolph had had such a beautiful and expensive book made. Our Conservation department know a lot about book binding so I asked Bridget Warrington, our Conservation Assistant, to come and take a look. When we looked at the spine of the book, Bridget explained that the ‘head’ of the volume (see www.uflib.ufl.edu/preserve/binding/glossary.htm) is slightly longer than the ‘tail’ so we were able to infer which part of this book was originally the front (in this case the page which was used to note down quotations).

You can find the catalogue to these items at the Janus webserver and much more about Lady Randolph in the Churchill Papers.

Natalie Adams

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Mysteries of Churchill’s record collection

April 13th, 2011

Archives are not just about paper, and for me recently, they’ve been all about records. By records, I mean audio recordings popularly known as “gramophone records”, “78s” or even “vinyl”.

We have recently catalogued Winston’s record collection – literally, those discs he kept in his wooden cabinet at Chartwell, the family home. And they are not just his favourite musical pieces, though these are interesting in themselves, but quite a large collection of “instantaneous recordings” of his own voice.

Briefly, these type of recordings (also known as lacquer discs or “acetates”) were used quite extensively through the 30s and 40s and into the early 50s as a means of making instant recordings, eventually superseded by tape recordings.

What is exciting about these is that many are likely to be the only copies ever made or certainly now in existence. They are often copies for or from radio broadcasts, or made during some of his less well known speeches.

Image: WCHL 12/24/20, copyright Churchill College.

This one, for example, seems to have been taken during his speech at Biggin Hill Airfield. Belding & Bennett were a commercial recording company (one of many) who would come out with equipment and blank discs to make recordings for people, on site. We have yet to hear what was said here, as the next stage of this project – digitisation – is yet to come.

One or two of the discs had stumped me in terms of identifying whether they were lacquer (or shellac or vinyl). We were fortunate to have Peter Martland, an expert on historic sound recordings, come and look at some of these. He was intrigued by this one in particular (WCHL 12/24/3).

Image: WCHL 12/24/3, copyright Churchill College.

This is an unusual instantaneous recording in that it is not a lacquer disc but something called an “RCA pre-grooved disk” made of some kind of soft plastic which was literally pre-grooved and the undulations representing the sound recordings were embossed by the recording system so that they were added to the grooves. They were introduced in 1930 and phased out by around 1934, so they are quite rare in themselves. The sound quality is not expected to be good …

Lacquer discs are notoriously fragile as the lacquer layer (cellulose nitrate) is soft and deteriorates relatively quickly, ultimately fracturing and flaking away from the core which is usually aluminium. It is timely that we are undertaking this project.

We have already started the conservation of these, which mainly involves the cleaning of the discs using deionised water and a surfactant. More on this later! This is an essential task before allowing a stylus into the soft grooves of these precious discs.

Sarah Lewery, Conservator

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Release of 1980 Thatcher material

March 29th, 2011

The Archives Centre recently opened up nearly 30,000 pages of Margaret Thatcher’s personal and political papers for 1980. The papers are owned for the Nation by the Margaret Thatcher Archive Trust which has been very committed to supporting access to a rolling programme of openings in the papers (broadly in line with the current thirty-year rule).

Opening modern personal and political papers can be a stressful business, especially when the papers are those of a former Prime Minister, whose legacy remains hugely controversial. Even after their official review and cataloguing, there is always a doubt that an item which should have been closed (for official reasons or to comply with the Data Protection Act) has slipped through the net.

The work of the professional archivist is necessarily procedural. Files must be given references and labelled, boxes marked-up, closed items identified and extracted, catalogues typed, location guides produced, websites and online resources updated. Not least because researchers visiting the Centre expect to order a file and have it retrieved within five minutes, or less. Ahead of a major opening of papers all of these processes, and more besides, must be completed so that everything works perfectly on the day of release. Almost inevitably some of the stages are completed at the last minute as the archivist rushes around, fuelled by caffeine, often rescued by kind colleagues doing last minute proof-checking or box numbering.

Image: copyright Churchill College

To add my normal stress levels, we held a press day ahead of the formal opening of the 1980 papers. This meant being ready three days earlier than otherwise would have been the case. Representatives of the main broadsheet newspapers and other broadcast media all came to our reading rooms looking through the released papers for newsworthy stories. We had prepared a detailed ‘press pack’ of stories pitched at different levels, but there was still plenty of time for the press to find a controversial story of their own in the release.

Image: copyright Churchill College

In the end, our story received good coverage in the broadsheets and a lengthy piece on Radio Four’s “Today” programme. After all my worrying, there may not have been any “smoking gun” stories for the media, but there is plenty for historians and other researchers to work on.

The papers for 1980 were dominated by the poor state of the economy, with almost every indicator headed firmly in the wrong direction and the whole year spent in recession. This first full year of an incoming Conservative government was difficult politically too. There were strains within party and government, registered repeatedly in the files which have been released.

Politically, though, the year is best known for Margaret Thatcher’s conference speech and its backs-to-the-wall mentality, typified in the “Lady’s NOT for Turning” phrase.

Thatcher's U-turn letter

Image: THCR 5/1/4/16, copyright Crown and Baroness Thatcher, reproduced by kind permission.

The text of the speech has long been in the public domain and TV clips of the famous section are still regularly broadcast. What we opened for the first time were the preparatory papers for Thatcher’s all-night speech writing sessions, including her annotations on the drafts produced. We can see the introduction of the famous section by her speechwriting aide Ronnie Millar. The phrase puns on the title of a play – even then a bit obscure, now almost completely forgotten – by Christopher Fry, “The Lady’s not for Burning”. Soundbites are as much born as made and no one in the Thatcher speechwriting team seems to have had an inkling that the phrase would have anything like the resonance it did.

It is generally forgotten, but there is also a section in the speech headed: “Beyond Economics”, which takes up ‘Big Society’-type themes largely discounted or ignored in assessments of Margaret Thatcher’s political rhetoric at the time and since. For this and other reasons, there are obvious parallels between 1980 and 2011, in each case the first full year of a in-coming Conservative administration.

More generally, these private files tell a fuller story of the inner workings of No.10 than those released at Kew by the National Archives earlier this year, because they include the “back office” functions such as dealings with the party and the press, and the vital office of diary secretary, gatekeeper to the PM.

The Margaret Thatcher Foundation and the separate Archive Trust are combining to digitise them all and put the best sections online (see www.margaretthatcher.org). Thousands upon thousands will eventually feature on this site, making Margaret Thatcher’s career (we believe) the most accessible of any political or public figure in history to date.

For further information, see http://www.chu.cam.ac.uk/archives/collections/thatcher/thatcher_home.php and http://www.chu.cam.ac.uk/archives/collections/thatcher/thatcher_opening.php. For press links to the opening of the papers, see the Guardian and the BBC.

Andrew Riley, Archivist

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