Borthwick Newsletter - April 2022

Posted on 30 March 2022

Welcome to the Borthwick's April newsletter

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

Plan of the Friends Cemetery at the Retreat, Opened 1855, Surveyed April 1939. This large and fragile plan shows the diagrammatic layout of the grave plots in the Retreat burial ground. Footpaths are marked in red. Within each grave plot is given the number of the plot and name of burial [RET/8/10/4/1 or view the original online]

What’s New?

Spring seems finally to have sprung on campus and we’ve spotted quite a few rabbits on the grassy bank behind the library building (along with the daffodils). It’s been a busy month for new accessions here at the Borthwick, with a particular focus on the local area - from climate change activism in the city to memories of growing up in the villages of North Yorkshire. Our new Art Curator Helena Cox has been continuing her work to highlight the university’s art collection, and behind the scenes staff have been busy box listing and cataloguing, with 1,300 new archival descriptions added to our online catalogue Borthcat.

Our biggest news in March was the launch of our updated and expanded Women’s History Research Guide to mark International Women’s Day on the 8th. The revised guide features sections on Women and Faith, Women at Work, Women and Medicine, and Women and the Arts, with historical overviews, collection highlights and suggestions for further reading. Highlights include recent additions such as the records of the Women’s Land Army in North Yorkshire, and the archive of Dame Christian Howard who campaigned for women clergy, as well as collections like Rowntree's and Terry's of York. We will continue to expand the guide and, as always, we’d be happy to hear suggestions for areas of interest or collections you think have been overlooked.

Photograph of a Rowntree & Co employee hand-decorating an Easter egg

New Accessions

It’s been another very busy month for accessions, with ten additions to the archives. As well as additions to our existing University of York, Yorkshire Wildlife Trust and Community of the Resurrection archives, we’ve also taken in three new ones.

A donor from the United States very kindly gifted us three letters relating to Richard Wood’s visits to the McCloskey General Hospital in Texas in 1945. Wood was the son of the Earl of Halifax, then British Ambassador in Washington, and he had spent a great deal of time recuperating in America after being wounded while on active service in December 1942. The injury caused him to lose both of his legs and while in America he was fitted with artificial limbs, subsequently becoming a patron of the British Limbless Ex-Serviceman’s Association. The new letters give his opinion of the hospital’s facilities, particularly for fellow servicemen who had lost limbs and with whom he met during his visit.

We have also accepted the archive of Extinction Rebellion York, including posters, newsletters, and papers relating to the proposed target for the UK of reaching net zero emissions by 2025. Extinction Rebellion are a non-violent direct action movement working to effect change in the face of the climate emergency, and as such their archive fits well with our broader campaigning collections, including the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust and Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust.

Finally we have added a fantastic local history archive in the form of the Barkston Chronicles Project. The project ran from 2000 to 2001 with the aim of collating local memories, histories and reminiscences in the North Yorkshire villages of Barkston Ash and Sherburn in Elmet. Local residents were interviewed on cassette tapes and the interviews were used to create a publication called ‘Barkston Chronicles: Discovering the families of Barkston Ash’ by Yvonne Whalley, Guy Woolley and Barbara Naylor. As well as the original interviews on cassette tape, the archive includes research notes and written reminiscences and a handwritten memorandum book and pocketbook from the 1920s. These kinds of local history projects are enormously valuable, capturing as they do the spoken memories (and voices!) of small communities that might otherwise have been forgotten. They also act as a useful counterpart to the more formal community records we hold already, such as the parish records of Sherburn in Elmet (which includes Barkston Ash), allowing us to see the real people behind the names in registers and official documents.

New Catalogues

Number of archival descriptions on Borthcat on 1st April 2022: 90,159

In March we added four new catalogues to Borthcat. When dealing with relatively small archives we like to get them listed and online as soon as possible. This is the case for our recent accession from Extinction Rebellion York, which is already catalogued and available to search.

The searchroom team have also addedcomplete catalogues for the parish records of York, St Paul, Bossall, and Kexby. The records of York, St Paul, and of Kexby date to the mid nineteenth century. If this seems like a relatively late date for a parish collection, there’s a good reason for that. Both parishes were formed out of older, larger ones, a not unusual practice in this period. York, St Paul, was originally part of the medieval parish of St Mary Bishophill Junior until 1856 when it was separated and given its own parish church, designed and built by architects J.B. and W. Atkinson of York (whose archive we also hold). The parish of Kexby was, in turn, formed in 1853 from the parish of Catton, Kexby had had its own mediaeval chapel of ease but its parish church, for many centuries, was the twelfth century All Saints at Catton. The chapel was replaced in 1853 by a new church dedicated to St Paul. In the twentieth century the pattern was reversed as Kexby joined with Wilberfoss parish in 1959, and St Paul was replaced with Wilberfoss’ St John the Baptist Church in 2007. Along with the usual parish registers and records of architectural changes to the church and vicarage, the archive includes an invitation to the ‘Final Service and Eucharist’ given at St Paul’s on 24 January 2006.

Borthwick in the Media

In March the story of the university’s first ever Art Curator, Helena Cox, and her exciting plans for the collection was picked up by the York Press who discussed her ‘mission to bring York’s little known art collection to life’. Helena led a campus walking tour for staff, students and the general public on the 15th March, taking in the architecture of the original 1960s campus, and she also spoke about the art collection at the University of York Learning and Teaching Forum on the 18th March. If you’d like to keep up with further developments with the collection, why not follow the @ArtAtYork account on Twitter.

Speaking of keeping up with events, if you’re a University of York student don’t forget you can still apply to take part in the upcoming Digital Creativity Week which will be looking at the history of Stonegate in York, using material from the archives.

Finally, we shared a thread on Twitter in March looking at a particular highlight from a recent Rowntree company deposit. In 1902 the company launched their Suggestion Scheme enabling any employee to suggest improvements to processes and welfare at the Cocoa Works factory. If your suggestion was adopted, you won a small cash prize. The scheme ran for decades and was said to have been the origin of the famous Rowntree Kit Kat chocolate bar. We were therefore thrilled to see that the deposit included several volumes of ‘receipt books’ for the scheme, dating from 1913 onwards and noting names, departments, summary of suggestions and which were awarded a prize. The suggestions included many technical improvements to machinery and processes, but also many non-technical ideas too. Employees made requests for additional mirrors and ‘spittoons’, for nicer toilet paper and for cupboards in which to lock away their packed lunches. Interestingly, there were many suggestions relating to the company’s female employees, ranging from requests for them to wear their hair in braids, to groups of women asking for their own tools and to be allowed to wear trousers at work. Not all of these won prizes, but they definitely show that times were changing.

Archive of the Month: Honesty Girls Club

What is it? The surviving records of a club established by seventeen year old Winifred Rowntree in 1902 to provide education and entertainment for teenage girls in York.

Where can I find it? The Honesty Girls Club catalogue can be found on Borthcat.

Why is it Archive of the Month? While the modern concept of the ‘teenager’ did not really exist at the turn of the 19th century, the records of the Honesty Girls Club show that young people were still in need of their own recreational facilities - albeit with a strongly educational bent. Winifred Rowntree was the daughter of confectioner and philanthropist Joseph Rowntree and his wife Antoinette. Raised in a Quaker family which placed great importance on social service and education, perhaps it is not surprising that a young Winifred saw an opportunity to promote these values among girls of around her own age.

The club originally met in the local Adult School, used by Quakers for adult education classes and lectures, and comprised 24 girls, although by 1916 this had grown to 116. The club was open to girls from 11 to 25, or until marriage, and as its name suggests it aimed to encourage kindness and honesty among its members, taking as its motto an extract from a poem by James Russell Lowell which praised the ‘little kindnesses’ that give happiness and peace. Although it had a President, Vice-President and Secretary, it was largely run by a committee of 12 girls, drawn from the older members.

Membership Certificate of Lily Scott, showing the club's motto

The surviving annual reports show that the club did a wide range of activities - needlework, dancing and games, classes on various topics chosen by the girls, and, of course, hymns and Bible study. Classes offered might include morris dancing, nature study, swimming and gardening, and the girls held annual competitions, such as a Wildflower competition where a prize was given for collecting the widest variety of species. They also worked in the local community, making baby clothes for the poor, running a Christmas party for children from the local workhouse, and even making cradles out of banana crates to be loaned out to new mothers. They also put on an annual public entertainment at the Rowntree family’s Pavilion at Rawcliffe Holt which was featured in the local newspaper and drew a ‘large and appreciative audience’.

Winifred Rowntree tragically died in 1915 at the age of only thirty, but the club survived until 1940, with her widowed husband, Arthur Duncan Naish, taking her place as President. The only reason we have our archive at all is because a member of the club, Lily Scott, preserved her records of membership, which were passed down to her granddaughter and then gifted to us in 2018, preserving a small but vital piece of women’s history in 20th century York.

We’ll be back with more news in May!