Borthwick Newsletter - February 2021

Posted on 1 February 2021

Welcome to the Borthwick's February newsletter.

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

A Paper by Lord Halifax: "A Record of Events Connected with Anthony Eden's Resignation 19th-20th February 1938", Typescript, with a letter dated 5 March 1938, from Mr. Eden to Lord Halifax, after the former had explained his action in a speech in his constituency, Warwick and Leamington; and thanking Lord Halifax for his help during his Mr. Eden's tenure of the Foreign Office HALIFAX/A4/410/11

What’s new?

While the Borthwick searchroom remains closed to researchers our searchroom team have embarked on a major new project to rearrange the existing lists for our extensive parish record collections and add them to our online catalogue Borthcat. You can read more about the work under ‘New Catalogues’ below, the work is ongoing and with over 200 parish archives we expect to be hard at work at it for a while yet!

We are also continuing to support university teaching. The Borthwick run annual palaeography taught courses for university students and these have continued via zoom, and with the use of a new digital visualiser to share high quality live images of archival documents. Our documents have also been in demand for the Digitised Archive Resources for Teaching scheme, or DART as it is better known. This scheme aims to provide digital images of archives to staff for teaching use, free of charge. Already for Spring term 2021 digitisation staff have provided 2,019 images for modules in Archaeology, History of Art, and History, supporting around 36 students in total. The majority of these were photographed in the run up to Christmas and so could be processed and delivered from home in January. Where original material cannot be accessed for safety reasons, staff work with academics to identify alternatives from amongst our large collection of digitised images. If you are a member of staff at the University of York who thinks DART might benefit your teaching modules, please get in touch!

Finally we are thrilled to announce our involvement in two successful Jane Moody Scholarship projects for 2021. History PhD student Rachel Feldberg will be using the Rowntree Archives here at the Borthwick, looking specifically at the ‘case histories’ or interviews with ordinary men and women in Britain in the late 1940s carried out by social researcher Seebohm Rowntree as part of his research for his book ‘English Life and Leisure’. The 800+ surviving case histories often provide very frank and surprising insights into private lives, in particular attitudes towards sex, gender, and politics, and the project will reinterpret these as ‘talking head’ style monologues to be shared via the Borthwick and Rowntree Society websites in late 2021.

The second project will use the archives of York’s Mount School for girls, the University of York and those of our Centre for Southern African Studies to tell the story of Noni Jabavu, a British-South African writer who attended the Mount School and was a BBC broadcaster, columnist, editor of literary magazine The New Strand, and author of two highly praised memoirs. Led by Janet Remmington, in collaboration with the Borthwick, The Mount School, biographer Makhosazana Xaba, and scholar Dr Athambile Masola, the project will highlight a little known strand of York’s Black history, bringing together ‘archival excavation, biography, scholarship, and the York civic community to illuminate the life and work of this intriguing figure and questions she provokes us to think about today.’

New Accessions

Our closure means we have only received one new accession this month, adding photographs and an accompanying explanation to our York Covid-19 Archive which seeks to collect written, visual and audio materials that reflect the experiences of York residents during the pandemic. If you think you might like to contribute something yourself, you can read more about the York Covid-19 Archive on our website.

New Catalogues

The Borthwick has been the repository for parish records for the city of York and around 20 miles surrounding it since the 1950s. They are one of our most popular collections but staff have long been aware that the parish record catalogues, or more accurately lists, are not ideal finding aids. Before modern archive cataloguing standards were introduced it was the normal practice to simply list records in the order in which they arrived, adding new ones to the end. This practice has left us with a legacy of more than 200 typescript lists with only limited attempts to group records by type, date or function. In 2020 the Borthwick agreed a new arrangement which, we hope, will enable staff and researchers to more easily navigate the parish archives, replacing the PDF scans of the old lists on Borthcat. Our searchroom team have already begun work and you can see an example of the new arrangement here in the catalogue for the parish of Stillington with more to be added soon.

Number of archival descriptions on Borthcat on 1st February 2021: 75,728

Borthwick in the Media

Our Keeper of Archives and Special Collections Gary Brannan was a speaker at this year’s YorkTalks on the 13th January, talking ‘Time Travel for Beginners’ and the value of archival research. You can watch the complete talk on YouTube.

If you’ve been doing your own archival research on the administrative records of the Archbishops of York, you might be interested in the new conference announced by The Northern Way project, which is working to expand our knowledge of the Archbishops’ Registers digitised by the Borthwick. The conference will take place in September and you can read the call for papers here.

Collections Information Archivist Sally-Anne Shearn gave a talk to the Family History Society of Cheshire on the 28th January on the Crewe family and the coming of the railway, using correspondence from the Borthwick’s Milnes Coates Archive to describe dangers and excitement of rail travel in the 19th century. The talk is an expanded version of the Borthwick podcast released in October 2020.

Finally a letter found at the Borthwick in 2018 which gave a rare insight into the early achievements and personality of Lady Charlotte Guest, pioneering translator of Welsh text The Mabinogion, has been included in a new biography by Victoria Owens, published in late 2020. ‘Lady Charlotte Guest: The extraordinary life of a female industrialist’ tells the story of Lady Charlotte’s married life at Dowlais in South Wales, where she took charge of the Dowlais Ironworks after the death of her husband, Sir John Guest, in 1852. The letter had been published in full in the 2018 edition of Morgannwg: The Journal of Glamorgan History.

Archive of the Month

What is it?

Records of Admiral Robert Fairfax

Where can I find it?

The catalogue for the Records of Admiral Fairfax can be viewed on Borthcat

Why is it Archive of the Month?

The Borthwick may not be a place you’d expect to find 17th and 18th century naval records but thanks to the Yorkshire origins of the Fairfax family the records of Admiral Robert Fairfax are split between York and the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich. The two boxes of logbooks, naval orders and papers have been chosen as an example of the Borthwick’s many hidden treasures, which in this case have made their way to our strongrooms from the wooden cabin of an 18th century ship.

Orders received by Captain Fairfax before the capture of Gibraltar, July 1704

Robert Fairfax was born in 1666 and went to sea at the age of 15. His family were Yorkshire gentry, his grandfather William was cousin to Sir Thomas Fairfax, Parliamentary Commander-in Chief during the English Civil War. The young Fairfax was promoted to lieutenant of the ship Bonaventure in 1688 and saw action at the relief of Londonderry in 1689 and the Battle of Beachy Head in 1690, the same year he was given command of the Conception. The ships’ logbooks and papers which survive at the Borthwick date from 1695 onwards when Fairfax, now an experienced captain, patrolled home waters, the Bay of Biscay and the coast of Spain, carefully recording locations, weather conditions and noteworthy events aboard ship. The archive includes the dramatic events of 1704 when Fairfax, as commander of the Berwick, was court martialed along with six other captains for their failure to capture a French squadron off the Spanish coast. All were fully acquitted and Fairfax went on to fight at the capture of Gibraltar and Barcelona, and at the battle of Malaga where his ship, the Berwick, had her masts, rigging and sails destroyed in the fighting.

In 1707 Fairfax was made a Rear Admiral following the death of the magnificently named Sir Cloudsley Shovell, but the promotion was eventually given to Lord Dursley who had more influential connections. Disillusioned with the service, Fairfax subsequently retired from the navy and returned to Yorkshire where he swapped the sea for politics as MP and Lord Mayor of York. He died in 1725. You can find other papers relating to his life and career on the National Maritime Museum catalogue.