Borthwick Newsletter - February 2022

Posted on 31 January 2022

Welcome to the Borthwick's February newsletter

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

Article 'Why I believe in the efficiency of High Wages' by Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree, from System: The Magazine of Business, February 1928. [2 copies'] [RFAM/BSR/JRF/10/2/10]

What’s New?

We’re beginning a new month with the launch of an exciting new project, ‘Fertile Ground: Records of the Women’s Land Army in North Yorkshire’. The Women’s Land Army played a vital role on the Home Front during the Second World War and until now, the only known administrative records of the WLA in the North Riding were those of Winifred Jacob Smith, County Secretary, which are held at the Farming Museum at Murton. To these, we can now add the administrative records and correspondence of County Chairman Lady Celia Milnes Coates, housed at the Borthwick as part of our Milnes Coates Archive.

The records form just one small part of the larger archive of Lady Celia, who lived at Helperby Hall near York, but what they lack in scale they more than make up for in content. The three boxes of files tell the story of how the Land Army was set up and administered in the region, who joined it and why, and the reality of their lives as volunteers in a vital national service in wartime. It includes meeting minutes and memoranda, details of training, uniforms, pay and conditions, and a wealth of notes and correspondence pertaining to individual land girls and their placements on farms and in factories across the region from 1939 to 1950.

Womens Land Army recruitment poster

We are launching the project with a podcast to introduce the archive, and you can also see summary descriptions of the files themselves on our online catalogue Borthcat. More resources will be made available in the future. In the meantime if you would like to know more about the archive, or if you think you might feature in it yourself, please get in touch, we’d love to hear from you!

As we begin one project, we also mark the end of another with the completion of The Northern Way. Funded by The Arts and Humanities Research Council from 2019, ‘The Northern Way: Archbishops of York and the North of England, 1304-1405’, concluded on 31 January. Run by the University of York and The National Archives, with the support of York Minster, the project investigated the political role of the Archbishops of York in the fourteenth century. The principal aim was to make the key records of spiritual and temporal governance more digitally accessible and searchable for free.

The Archbishops' Registers website already featured high-quality digital images of the registers of the archbishops that we hold here at the Borthwick. The images can now be viewed alongside searchable, indexed summaries of all entries from each fourteenth-century register. The site will shortly also include around 3,500 summaries from the many records of government that relate to ecclesiastical affairs held at The National Archives, Kew. A new website front end is also currently in production, which will contain more information about the registers themselves, why they were created, and why they are so useful for researching the medieval period. In the meantime, why not take some time out to explore our project presentations and further resources, covering some of the registers' key themes?

We'd like to thank everyone who has been involved in this ambitious project over the last three years, in particular Professor Sarah Rees Jones, Dr Paul Dryburgh, Research Fellows Helen Watt and Dr Jonathan Mackman, and Research Assistant Dr Marianne Wilson.

New Accessions

We took in a number of additions to existing archives in December and January. These included parish record additions, the script of ‘When Knights Were Bold’ to add to the Frankie Howerd Archive, and a number of handbooks and newsletters to add to the archive of Alcoholics Anonymous UK. We also added a number of photographs to the Daphne Hamilton Archive. Hamilton was the Chair of Yorkshire Gardens Trust and the daughter of Alexander Hamilton who took over the famous nursery business of the Backhouse family in York. The additional photographs include family photographs from the early 20th century and a wonderful formal portrait of Daphne Hamilton as a graduate of the University of St Andrews in the late 1940s.

New Catalogues

Number of archival descriptions on Borthcat on 1st February 2022: 88,342

Thanks to our ongoing work on our parish record collections and the completion of a cataloguing project we added several thousand new archival descriptions to Borthcat across December and January. The largest number of these were added to the Hickleton Papers, the archive of the Earls of Halifax. Although the bulk of the archive has been catalogued at the Borthwick for many years, we are constantly receiving new additions to the family and estate records. January saw the addition of more than forty new boxes of material to the online catalogue, comprising estate papers deposited by Lord Halifax’s solicitors, and additions to the records of the Garrowby and East Riding estates. The estate papers include a wealth of material relating to Lord Halifax’s mining interests across Yorkshire, as well as a fascinating account of the Wood family and Hickleton village and estate from the point of view of a long time member of staff, Clarence Hellewell, who served as Head Brewer to the estate’s own Hickleton Brew House from 1935.

Our searchroom team have also continued to add more complete parish record catalogues to Borthcat, with nine new catalogues and more than 1000 new archival descriptions added in the past two months. These include the York city parishes of St Olave and St John Ousebridge, as well as Coxwold, Copmanthorpe, Birdsall, Seaton Ross, Sherburn in Harfordlythe, Millington and Carlton by Snaith. Of these, Coxwold has some claim to be the earliest church foundation, with a church first mentioned there in an eighth century papal letter, but St John Ousebridge arguably has the varied modern history. The church, which dates to the twelfth century, sits at the bottom of Micklegate and was closed in 1939 when Holy Trinity, Micklegate, superseded it as the parish church of the newly united parish. Since then he has been an Institute of Architectural Study and then more recently a licensed bar called (rather appropriately) The Parish. The very last item to be added to the archive was a description of the church bells dating from 1960, which was found at the Borthwick in 1998.

Borthwick in the Media

In December The Northern Way project team shared an update to the Archbishops’ Registers website - 2,800 entries drawn from the Patent Rolls. The UK Research and Innovation News Twitter also shared again their 101 Jobs That Change the World video, first posted back in August, which features Keeper of Archives Gary Brannan discussing what it’s like to work at the Borthwick and why it matters.

Our biggest news is of course our new podcast introducing the records of the Women’s Land Army in North Yorkshire. Drawing from the archive of Lady Celia Milnes Coates and featuring readings from staff and members of the public, the podcast aims to give a flavour of the material we hold and what it reveals about life in the WLA.

Archive of the Month: Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust Archive

What is it? The Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, or JRRT, is one of three Trusts established in 1904 by the York confectioner and philanthropist Joseph Rowntree. Created as a limited company, rather than a charity, it occupies a unique position among the Rowntree Trusts, with the power to fund or undertake political and non-charitable work.

Where can I find it? The catalogue of the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust Archive can be found on our online catalogue Borthcat.

Why is it Archive of the Month? The JRRT Archive has long been the smallest of the Rowntree Trust archives we have here at the Borthwick, but it’s about to be the largest - thanks to the enormous deposit of additional material made in 2021 which is soon to be catalogued. Whilst the JRRT shares its origins and its founding directors with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, it has always charted its own course, bolstered by the freedom it was given by Joseph Rowntree to carry out non-charitable work. Thus in its earliest decades the Trust oversaw a stable of regional newspapers, for the purposes of countering ‘anti-Liberal’ bias in the press. Its commitment to Liberalism was evident throughout the 20th century, with the Trust becoming a key funder of the British Liberal Party and, indeed, sharing some key personnel with it, including Jo Grimond and Pratap Chitnis.

Part of the recent deposit made by the JRRT

From the 1960s the Trust’s work became even more overtly political, providing financial support for groups campaigning for causes such as devolution, voting reform, civil liberties and the environment. The JRRT archive, past and present, captures the many ways in which British society has changed over the course of the 20th century, and into the 21st, with the Trust ever seeking to understand, analyse, and challenge the status quo. Ranging from the big personalities of the age to the smallest of neighbourhood campaign groups, the contents of the archive’s files of correspondence, grant applications and supporting documentation have yet to be fully explored.

We'll be back in March with more news from the Borthwick!