Borthwick Newsletter - July 2021

Posted on 30 June 2021

Welcome to the Borthwick's July newsletter.

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

Journal, with photographs, describing birdwatching trips to the ‘The Farne Islands’ in July 1934 and July 1935, and to Skokholm in August 1935. Inscribed 'M. H. Rowntree, Chalfonts, York, or Bootham School, York' [Rowntree Family Papers, RFAM/MR/PD/1/3]

What’s New?

We hope many of you were able to enjoy some of the hot and sunny weather in June. A distinct advantage of working in an archive is being able to stay cool in a heatwave as our strongrooms and searchroom are kept at a low temperature to preserve the records. In fact if you’ve visited us in person you may have noticed that not only is our searchroom distinctly cool, but the windows are also filtered to protect records from harmful UV so if we see visitors squinting at their documents we know it’s probably due to some indecipherable historical handwriting and not the sun’s glare!

We’ve had some more staff changes over the past month as we say a (temporary) goodbye to two members of staff going on parental leave and welcome Mark Haydn and Dr Jessica Lamothe to the team in their place. Mark is joining us as Digital Preservation Archivist. He is returning to York having spent a lot of time in the region growing up, and has previously worked as an Archivist and Librarian in the UK, US and Canada. He has an interest in working with film and video and is looking forward to the opportunity to dig into these collection areas at the Borthwick.

Meanwhile Jessica will be joining our Searchroom team, where she will be right at home with our medieval collections having completed her PhD in late medieval manuscripts. She is currently finishing a qualification in librarianship and has worked in libraries before, but not yet in an archive, so she is excited for the opportunity.

New accessions

We received a number of interesting new accessions in June. After the long pause necessitated by the pandemic, we were pleased to finally be able to take another 26 boxes of social research reports from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. The JRF was founded in 1904 with the primary purpose of building and developing the model village of New Earswick. However from the 1960s their work expanded to cover a wide range of issues relating to social inequality, funding important new fields of research and becoming one of the leading institutional voices on poverty in the UK. The library they created at The Homestead in York contains typescript reports, articles and publications for projects either part or fully funded by the JRF from the 1960s to the 2000s, including pioneering work into life in new high rise flats, divorce and attitudes to single parenthood, housing poverty, and changes to social services. Although the reports will eventually be part of our Rare Books library, the collection will complement the JRF archive we already hold and will provide a rich new research resource in York.

We also accepted two new deposits from the Vernacular Architecture Group to add to their existing archive at the Borthwick. The group was founded in 1952 to further the study of traditional architecture in the UK and around the world. They hold annual Spring Conferences at different locations around the UK and both of our new accessions concern these key events. As well as depositing up to date conference handbooks, the group have also deposited the personal collection of a late member who kept her conference handbooks from the 1970s to 2012, supplementing the already detailed guides with her own notes, photographs, postcards, maps and ephemera, making them truly unique and fascinating documents.

We also received another rather exciting archive... but more details on that one soon!

News from Conservation

When new material for the archives arrives with us, one of the first things we might ask the depositor is “where has this been kept?” Our interest really is what the environment might have been like. Before any new items can be placed in our strongrooms, we need to check them to make sure that they are not going to be a danger to the existing collections. The main risks that new material introduces to our building include mould and pests, both of which thrive in warm, damp conditions.

Some mouldy documents came into the Conservation workshop this month. Fortunately the mould was dry and inactive, but it still needed to be removed from the documents to enable safe access. Mould can be dangerous if we breathe it in, and needs to be cleaned with appropriate protective equipment such as a face mask and gloves. We also make sure we are in a well ventilated room, and are lucky to have a vacuum table on which to work.

Mouldy documents on a perforated air bench, along with a brush, smoke sponge and various spatulas.

The mould is brushed off the paper with a soft brush, and sometimes a smoke sponge. On these particular documents the mould had weakened the paper to the extent that it was very fragile and fibrous, so it required extreme care. It’s a painstaking but very satisfying task!

You can read about mould and archives in a bit more detail on the Borthwick blog.

New catalogues

We added three new complete catalogues in June. The first two are very welcome additions to our health archives - the records of the Purey Cust Hospital and the Purey Cust Trust. The Purey Cust Hospital was founded in York by public subscription in 1914 to provide medical treatment at low cost to those who could not otherwise afford it. However you may notice that the archive predates this. This is because it also includes surviving records of the York Home for Nurses, the first such establishment to provide private nursing with free care for the city’s ‘sick poor’. Thus the earliest surviving records in the archive are the annual reports, financial papers and a news cutting relating to the York Home, followed by the main hospital archive which comprises some 11 boxes of records telling the story of the hospital and its staff. The archive of the Purey Cust Trust complements that of the hospital archive, recording the activities of the charitable trust established in 1950 by the hospital to provide ‘amenities and comforts’ to the sick poor.

You may remember that last month we featured the newly available catalogue of the University of York Archive on Borthcat. In June we added the papers of a lecturer here at the university, Christopher Hill, who founded the Centre for Southern African Studies at York in 1972. CSAS, as it is better known, was a multi-disciplinary centre set up to extend expert knowledge of and research into Southern Africa and from the 1970s onwards it actively collected original archival material relating to that geographical area. The papers of Christopher Hill represent only a small portion of this, comprising material relating to the University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (where he taught before coming to York), visits to Swaziland and Malawi, and political papers concerning Botswana, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Transkei and South Africa. You can also find other archival material relating to Southern Africa in our collections on Borthcat.

Number of archival descriptions on Borthcat on 1st July 2021: 82,039

Borthwick in the Media

The 9th June was International Archives Day and we enjoyed sharing some of our more unusual archives throughout the day. By far our most popular tweet was this colourful and lively image from the scrapbook of the young Laura Hannam, begun in 1819, and now part of the Rare Books collection. The scrapbook is filled with small and wonderfully detailed depictions of daily life in the first half of the 19th century and you can view the whole thing at the university’s digital library.

An illustrated page from the scrapbook of Laura Hannam, early 19th century

One of our staff also posted a guest blog in June on a local history website devoted to the Combe Down area of Bath in Somerset. Henrietta Crewe and Prior Park by Sally-Anne Shearn reveals how letters in our Milnes Coates Archive provide a unique insight into life at a Roman Catholic college outside Bath in the 19th century. Although it has already been linked in this newsletter, please don’t miss our conservator Catherine Firth’s blog on that most pesky of archival enemies, mould!

You might also have seen some of our staff - and certainly some of our archives - at York’s Festival of Ideas. We’re happy to say that videos of many of these events have now been made available to watch on YouTube. Our Rowntree Archives took a starring role in the ‘Rowntree Archives Revealed’ event, looking at the potential of the family, trusts, and company archives. Conservator Catherine also appeared with Emma Lloyd-Jones to demonstrate the satisfaction of a simple binding in this instructional video on how to bind a simple book, and Charles Fonge, our University Archivist, joined the panel to shine a spotlight on black British-South African writer Noni Jabavu, who has important but little known connections to York. Finally, Professor Sue Mendus used some of our archives in her talk on the war poet Philip Johnson, who the city, and especially the Borthwick, know by a very different name.

Archive of the Month: Records of Lady Conyngham's Trust

What is it?

The records of a charitable trust established on the death of Ellen, Dowager Countess Conyngham of Mount Charles to distribute money to a number of causes. These included annuities to be paid to six poor women of York aged over 50, ten poor clergyman, and 12 poor widows of clergymen.

Where can I find it?

The full catalogue of the Records of Lady Conyngham’s Trust are on Borthcat.

Why is it Archive of the Month?

Charitable archives can often be a mixed bag in terms of what has survived. Minute books and financial records are amongst the most common records to find and happily these alone can often provide a very detailed account of how the charity operated and how it spent its money. But sometimes the voices of the recipients of that charity are preserved as well, and so it is with Lady Conyngham’s Trust where detailed administrative records are supplemented by rare survivals of original applications for financial aid. These can be found in the series ‘Application for and Payments of Annuities’ and they begin in 1816, only two years after the foundation of the Trust.

These letters of application were sent in the hope of receiving one of a limited number of annual payments, or annuities, issued by the Trust and in them men and women give details of their lives and struggles. As with any historical document, the applications were created for a particular purpose and as such we cannot know if everything an applicant writes is true, indeed often the application has not been written by the applicant themselves, but on their behalf, in many cases by the local vicar or other reputable citizen. However, even with these caveats, the applications are a unique and rich source of information about the lives of those who might not otherwise appear in the historical record, aside from registers of baptisms, marriages and burials. In the cases of the ‘six poor women’ over 50, they detail how those women had managed to support themselves in the past, the challenges they faced and support they’d received from the community. In the case of Elizabeth Oliver of Fetter Lane, York, in 1817 (above), she’d raised four children and supported her disabled husband by teaching at a small school at Thirsk. Such details are invaluable. They provide another view of York, away from the prosperous main streets and wealthy houses to the crowded courts and alleys where teaching, running a small huckster shop, taking in laundry, or continuing your late husband’s work as a Sexton might be your only means of support.

Stay safe and we’ll be back with more news in August!