Borthwick Newsletter - August 2021

Posted on 30 July 2021

Welcome to the Borthwick's August newsletter.

August in the Archives - delve into our catalogues with this month’s featured description

Group photograph, taken outside The Retreat, of the Belgian family housed by The Retreat in August 1914, The Retreat Archive [RET/1/8/9/14/57, the photograph can be viewed online]

What’s New?

As another month begins, we have some exciting news to share. In July we learned that our application to retain our status as an Accredited Archive Service had been successful and that we have been accredited for a further 6 years. Archive Service Accreditation is the UK standard for archive services, it looks at how we acquire, preserve and provide access to our records and what our plans are for the future. The scheme was launched in 2013 and the Borthwick first applied for, and received, accredited status in 2017 after a lengthy process involving input from every member of staff and an onsite visit from the assessment committee.

In the wake of the significant challenges of the past 18 months, our new application to retain our status had to take into account the impact Covid-19 has had on our service. With that in mind, we were especially proud that the assessors commended us on our effective service delivery and ‘proactive approach’ during the pandemic, and noted overall our positive and considered approach to access and ‘strong strategic focus’. Retaining our accredited status would not have been possible without the hard work and dedication of every member of the Borthwick team, and while we can’t recreate our 2017 cake-fueled celebrations quite yet, we fully intend to do so in the future!

Access has very much been the focus of July. After the excitement of the York Festival of Ideas events in June, the Borthwick has returned to the ‘business as usual’ of welcoming researchers, answering the many daily enquiries we receive, and working on our various ongoing cataloguing projects. Following the changes to Covid-19 restrictions on the 19th July, our guidance and procedures have remained largely unchanged for now and any future changes will of course be announced by us in advance via our social media and our website.

New Accessions

Accessions in July were very much the calm before the storm as we are due to take in several very large additions in August and are already reserving space for them in our strongrooms! But for now, we have added two new Orders of Service books to our Kirkby Wharfe parish records, bringing the archive right up to 2021. We also added a substantial number of administrative records to our Alcoholics Anonymous UK Archive, from the 1980s through to 2017, and covering regions across England and Scotland.

News from Conservation

One of the ongoing tasks undertaken by Conservation staff is ensuring that our collections are adequately packaged. This creates a strong first line of defense against many risks to the archives, providing an environmental buffer, physical protection whilst in storage and in transit, and a barrier to things such as dust and pests. If there was ever a disaster, such as a fire or flood, well-packaged archives stand a much better chance of surviving the experience.

We do have ready-made, standard-sized boxes and folders in archival-quality materials; however we often get items that do not fit into these and require bespoke packaging.

Large clam-style box for over-size volume

This month I have been tackling packaging tasks both simple and complicated. We needed some four-flap folders to fit a collection of lantern slides measuring 83x82mm, so I created a few models to check what the best measurements would be for the slides before mass-producing a larger batch of the folders. We also had a small limp parchment covered notebook that is likely to be frequently requested and needed some light pressure on the parchment cover to encourage it to hold its shape while not in use. A bespoke foredge gripping box was made with a small insert inside to hold the cover in place.

Three small four-flap folders for lantern slides

A finished foredge-gripping box on a cutting mat surrounded by various tools and books

There is a large backlog of archives that require bespoke packaging, and we try and undertake packaging jobs alongside other activities each week.

New Catalogues

The main addition we made to our online catalogue Borthcat in July was by way of an enhancement to the finding aid for St Stephen’s Orphanage in York. St Stephen’s was founded in 1870 to care for poor orphan girls in the city (although it did sometimes admit boys as well). Initially situated in Precentor’s Court, the orphanage later moved to Trinity Lane off Micklegate. Children did not have to be orphans in the strictest sense to be eligible for admission, they had to have lost one or both parents and there was a charge for their upkeep. In many cases this was paid by family, but it could also be paid by an organisation, as in the case of sisters Winifred and Hilda Brooks whose costs at St Stephen’s were paid for by Rowntree & Co after the death of their father, a Rowntree employee, in the First World War. Recently Archive Assistants Lydia Dean and Alexandra Medcalf began indexing the surviving children’s records, and the names of the children admitted to St Stephen’s can now be found listed in the ‘scope and content’ field for each file covering the period 1877-1909. We hope to add more names in due course.

Number of archival descriptions on Borthcat on 1st August 2021: 82,225

Work has also been continuing on The Northern Way project, where the team are indexing our Archbishop’s Registers from 1304-1405. This month we’ve added indexes for some sections of Register 5A (Sede Vacante), as well as sections of Registers 9A and 9B (William Melton) and the Archdeaconry of Nottingham section for Register 10 (Zouche). We’ve got the entries from Register 12 (Neville) ready to be indexed by place, and have added indexes of clergy ordinations from Registers 10A (Zouche), 11 (Thoresby), 12 (Neville) and 16 (Scrope), based on former Borthwick Keeper of Archives’ Professor David Smith’s work.

Over the coming weeks we will be preparing indexes from The National Archives for import into the site, whilst continuing work on the Archbishop’s Registers themselves. The indexes from The National Archives, which do not include images, provide important information from their collections relating to the York Archbishops between 1304 and 1405. You can search the index online at https://archbishopsregisters.york.ac.uk/ and find out more about the project on their website.

We’ll also start work on refreshing the web pages for the site, adding new content from the project and enhanced user guidance. Watch this space!

Borthwick in the Media

July was something of a Rowntree month here at the Borthwick. We began July with some filming in the searchroom for a short video looking at the history of the records behind the project ‘Bringing the Rowntree Leisure Time Interviews to Life’. The project, which we mentioned in an earlier newsletter, is the work of PhD student Rachel Feldberg and it will create a series of innovative digital performances based on interviews with men and women of post-war Britain for Seebohm Rowntree’s study of ‘English Life and Leisure’, published in 1951. Archivist Sally-Anne Shearn, who catalogued the records, was joined by Dr Catherine Oakley of The Rowntree Society to discuss who created the interviews and why, and what they tell us about the rapidly changing society of the late 1940s. We’ll keep you updated on when the videos will be available!

Our Rowntree records also appeared in another video in July. You can spot some of our Rowntree photographs in Dr Michael Weatherburn’s breakdown of the history of work incentives, which he shared on Twitter. Dr Weatherburn looks at the dominance of the American ‘Hawthorn Studies’ of the 1920s which concluded that workers were motivated more by social than by financial incentives. He contrasts this with a less well known 1930s study of the Rowntree Cocoa Works factory here in York which found the opposite to be true, as evidenced by the Rowntree family’s many pioneering employment schemes, from pensions to paid holidays to profit sharing.

Finally we were pleased to supply photographs for the Joseph Rowntree Theatre’s coverage of the 150th birthday of Seebohm Rowntree, celebrating the important role he played in the history of theatre and the arts in York and elsewhere. The anniversary was also covered in the York Press.

From the modern to the medieval - you can now register for the upcoming conference ‘The Northern Way: The Archbishops of York and the North of England, 1304-1405’ which will be taking place on the 23 and 24 September. Drawing on the administrative records of the Northern Province and how they can be used to tell the story of Northern England, the conference will be held online and is free to attend.

And last, but certainly not least, we’re hoping our records will fill in some gaps for a Heritage Lottery Funded funded project on the heritage of Coney Street in York, looking at the craftsmen and women who lived and worked there between 1600 and 1900. The project was created by the owners of ‘Fabrication Crafts’ which is based in a historic Coney Street building rented from The National Trust. You can find out more about the buildings and the people at the link. Coney Street appears in many of our records, including of course the parish records of St Martin’s Church which include some of our earliest parish documents, including a deed of 1271. We look forward to finding out more about the area!

Archive of the Month: Takimaya Fragments Collection

What is it? A collection of rare manuscript fragments donated to the Centre for Medieval Studies here by Professor Toshiyuki Takamiya of Keio University in 2014.

Where can I find it? The full catalogue is available on Borthcat.

Why is it Archive of the Month? The Takamiya Fragments contain some of our earliest and most beautiful records. They were gifted to the University of York by a Professor of Literature who began collecting historic manuscripts during his studies at Cambridge in the 1970s. The result is 3 boxes of ‘fragments’, often single pages from handwritten or very early printed books, as well as 3 complete documents belonging to the famous Paston family of Norfolk. The earliest fragment dates to the 11th century and the latest to the 16th. They are not the most easily accessible of our archives (the fragments are written in Latin, Greek, Italian, French and English) but they are some of the most visually fascinating, including as they do a range of different handwriting, intriguing marginal notes, and, best of all, some of the ‘illuminations’, or hand drawn and coloured illustrations, such manuscripts are famous for.

A particular favourite which often makes an appearance in our Christmas social media is a stunning 15th century illustration of the Nativity in a capital letter, decorated with silver and gilt embellishment.

Detail of the Nativity from a Book of Hours, TAK/3/5

Another 16th century fragment includes a miniature illustration of the Annunciation of the Virgin (when the Virgin Mary was visited by the Angel Gabriel) in gold, red and blue paint. Such fragments are a vivid reminder of the rich material culture of the medieval and modern world.

The Annunciation from a Book of Hours, TAK/3/8

That's all for now but we’ll be back with more news in September!