Terry’s chocolate apple and other surprises
From records relating to the elusive Terry’s chocolate apple to conversations with Hitler, the Borthwick Institute for Archives is a treasure trove waiting to be discovered.
For over 60 years the Borthwick Institute for Archives at York has been home to some of the country’s most interesting historical documents. Established in 1953, it was set up by William Borthwick, a Bridlington perfumier, who founded the Institute as an archives repository and a research centre for the humanities. As such, the Borthwick Institute played a central part in encouraging the development of a university in York.
Now based on campus, after moving in 2004 from the centre of York to purpose-built premises, the Institute forms part of the University Library and Archives. It exists to preserve unique archival material for current and future generations as well as to support the wide-ranging research needs of the University and local community.
The Institute currently houses one of the most significant collections of archives in the north of England. Collections date from the 20th to the 21st centuries and extend to over a million documents, ranging from parchment manuscripts to paper files, bound manuscript volumes, photographs, maps, plans, playwrights’ scripts, architectural drawings and sound recordings.
Each archive has a story to tell…
The York Diocesan Archive, which forms the core of the Institute’s ecclesiastical collections, includes archbishops’ registers which reveal the devastating impact of the Black Death in 1348–49, visitation court books detailing presentations for witchcraft, and the rich evidence of York church court cases concerning moral offences such as defamation, heresy and fornication.
The probate archive, the largest outside the National Archives, includes the fascinating inventory of Suckling Spendlove, a York grocer, which lists arsenic and gunpowder among his wares in 1689.
The parish records contain a settlement examination of July 1817 which tells the intriguing story of Thomas Walker, a former Blue Coat School boy, apprenticed to a shipowner in Hull, who spent seven years crisscrossing the globe, and was captured and held prisoner in Norway, before eventually making his way home only to end up in York Gaol for debts.
The Borthwick also holds a range of interesting business archives, such as the records of Rowntree Mackintosh, Terry’s, Vickers Instruments and Atkinson and Brierley, architects. The archives of Rowntree’s and Terry’s, the famous York confectionery companies, contain impressive collections of advertising material relating to well-known products such as Rowntree’s KitKat (including the blue wrapper used for the plain chocolate version produced during the Second World War) and lesser-known products such as Terry’s Chocolate Apple, produced between 1926 and 1954, the precursor to the more successful Chocolate Orange.
Among the family and estate archives of the Earls of Halifax survives a record of a fascinating conversation held between Lord Halifax and Adolf Hitler on 19 November 1937, during Lord Halifax’s visit to Germany in the lead-up to the Second World War.
Directly pertinent to the University’s story is an abortive 1647 petition making the case for a university in York over 300 years before the University of York was actually established!
Alumni, friends and members of the public can visit the Borthwick’s archive at any time and the Institute welcomes deposits and gifts of archival material that fall within its collecting policy.
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