Borthwick Newsletter - June 2022

Posted on 30 May 2022

Welcome to the Borthwick's June newsletter.

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

Programme for the 1970 University of York Summer Ball, held in June and featuring Fairport Convention, Chicken Shack, Elton John, Terry Lightfoot, and Dr Strangely Strange [University of York Archive, UOY/PP/6/3/3]

What’s New?

If you’ve been in York city centre recently you may have passed a new Borthwick venture! We've been hard at work creating an exhibition celebrating the 75th Birthday of the composer Trevor Wishart, whose archive we hold here at the Borthwick. The exhibition is part of the StreetLife York project, which explores the fascinating history and vibrant future of Coney Street in particular and the city of York and the York New Music Weekend website.

Advert for Trevor Wishart Exhibition

Trevor is one of the world's most respected composers of music for tape and computer, and in a career spanning over fifty years, he has also staged groundbreaking environmental and site-specific pieces, organised community events and projects, authored seminal texts on electronic music, and created books of musical games for children. He has written software for music, composed successful works of experimental music theatre, and become a leading proponent of extended vocal technique. Along the way, he's worked to establish musicians' collectives and composers' associations, staged an opera on a barge on the River Thames with Dame Judy Dench, and been followed by the South African Secret Service for his overt stance against political oppression.

His musical landscape is a little bit unusual. While you'll certainly find orchestral instrumentation in there, you'll also find it populated by wicked wizards, terrifying machinery, screams transformed into birdsong, upside-down bicycles, ice cream vans, talking tape-machines, percussion made from rubbish, gongs that disappear into the sea, airborne bells, exploding tubas, a sentient chest of drawers, sixteen plastic grizzly bears, six mice, two economist parrots, and one spider costume.

Trevor left his archive to the Borthwick in 2011, and this exhibition of images, sounds and film from the archive has been curated by Dr Nicholas Melia and explores the first remarkable twenty years of his career.

The exhibition is free to enter and open on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays between 10:00am and 5:00pm, and on Sundays between 10:00am and 4:00pm until 12th June at the StreetLife Hub, 29-31 Coney Street, York.

New Accessions

Spirit photograph taken by William Hope in York, 1932

We received additions to the University of York Archive and the Julia Pascal Archive in May - as well as taking in three brand new archives. The Borthwick has always been particularly strong in records relating to church and faith and we were thrilled to add the archive of the York Spiritualist Centre (YSC) to our collections. Spiritualism is rooted in the belief that the soul survives physical death and that the dead can communicate with the living under the right conditions. The practice of communicating with the dead through mediums began in America in the 1840s and made its way to Yorkshire in 1853 when an American called David Richmond brought news of this new movement to the town of Keighley. He held several lectures on the subject in the Working Men’s Hall and subsequently Keighley became the first town in England to have its own Spiritualist Society. Spiritualism in York can be traced back to at least the 1870s and in 1899 the Dawn of Day Circle, the precursor to the modern York Spiritualist Centre, was formed. The archive comprises the minute books of the YSC, beginning in 1899, and, most intriguing, an album of ‘spirit photographs’ taken in York in 1930 and 1932 by William ‘Billy’ Hope of Crewe, a well known pioneer of the practice. The 92 photographs are labelled with the name of the sitter and whether the spirit shown in the photograph with them was recognised as someone they knew. It’s a fascinating document, both for what it captures of Spiritualist belief and practice, and for the glimpse it provides of the people of York nearly a century ago.

Our second new archive is a very welcome addition to our music and business collections. The Ann and John Feldberg Archive comprises correspondence, diaries, photographs, books, promotional materials and even a small number of artefacts relating to the John Feldberg Harpsichord business, founded in 1957 in Kent. For over twenty years the workshop made harpsichords, clavichords, spinets, and virginals; many, carefully researched copies of original instruments made using similar materials. Before it closed in 1980 the workshop had produced 272 instruments, with some hired out to such well known venues as the Royal Festival Hall, the BBC and even Abbey Road studios. If you would like to read more about the business, the John Feldberg Workshop website contains a great deal of information, as well as photographs showing instruments under construction, and the beautiful finished products. This new addition is not the first archive we have taken in that relates to the building of musical instruments, we also have the archive of Maurice Forsyth-Grant, which includes records of the organ building firm of Grant, Degens, & Bradbeer Ltd, founded in 1959.

Finally we have added the archive of Hillards Supermarket, a family run supermarket chain based largely in the North of England. Founded in 1885 in Cleckheaton, West Yorkshire, Hillards grew to more than 100 stores before it was acquired by Tesco in 1987. You can read more about it in ‘New Catalogues’ below.

New Catalogues

Number of archival descriptions on Borthcat on 1st June 2022: 93,478

In May we added the working catalogue of Hillards Supermarket to Borthcat. This is what we call a box level catalogue, meaning descriptions have been added of the contents of each box in the archive, in the order we received it. This method allows us to get as much information online as we can about a new archive, pending more detailed cataloguing work in the future. The survival of the archive owes much to the Hillards Archive Project, run from the University of York and supported by a grant from the British Academy of Management, which aimed to gather materials relating to the history of Hillards in order to highlight its place in the development of the British supermarket sector. The Project has an excellent website with a great deal of information about the Hillards business, and its founder John Wesley Hillard who went from an tea apprenticeship in Somerset, via Paris and Ireland to the West Riding and his first small shop in Cleckheaton. The surviving archive dates from 1935 and includes key administrative records, correspondence, newsletters and press cuttings, as well as documentation concerning the hostile takeover bid by Tesco in 1987 which, ultimately, brought the Hillards story to an end.

Borthwick in the Media

As well as the new Trevor Wishart Exhibition on Coney Street, you can also visit the new art exhibition on campus, open Monday to Friday at the Department of the History of Art. ‘Concrete Opinions’ was curated by undergraduate students and explores the history of University of York architecture and life on campus using art from the university’s own collection. Our Art Curator Helena Cox also spoke to the International Council of Museums UK about the university art collection in a presentation on ‘Invisible Museum Communities: Curating in the Digital Age’.

If you’ve been following us on our social media you will have seen a flurry of tweets throughout May for Local History Month, highlighting the many ways you can interact with our local history resources online and in person. Amongst the many resources and events mentioned was our participation in this year’s Digital Creativity Week where material from the Borthwick, as well as York Minster Library, will be used to explore the history of Stonegate in the city at a special exhibition held on 22 June at the headquarters of York Medical Society.

The exhibition is taking place as part of York Festival of Ideas and you can also find us at a few other events in June. On the 11th and 12th June some of our documents will feature in ‘Mind your Manors: Medieval Hack Weekend’ at King’s Manor, where you can join experts to investigate the medieval manor (and possibly win a prize!). On the 19th June, Conservator Catherine Firth will join Emma Lloyd Jones for a hands on workshop on bookbinding; and on the 21st June our documents will feature again at an online talk on The Frankie Howerd Archive by Graham McCann. Finally, Keeper of Archives Gary Brannan will be chairing a panel of talks on ‘New Rowntree Histories’ on the 22nd June, looking at some understudied areas of the Rowntree archives. Some of these events are by ticket only, so please do check the Festival of Ideas website at the links for more information.

Archive of the Month: Mirfield Papers

What is it? The records of the Anglican religious community, the Community of the Resurrection, based at Mirfield in West Yorkshire.

Where can I find it? The catalogue of the Community of the Resurrection archive can be searched on Borthcat.

Why is it Archive of the Month?

The Community of the Resurrection describe themselves as a monastic community. Such a description might conjure the idea of a group of men withdrawn from the world, but this has never been the way of life for this particular order. Founded by Christian Socialists in Oxford in 1892, the Community has maintained a strong commitment to social action and service throughout its history, moving from Oxford to the industrial North and establishing a theological college at Mirfield to offer education and religious training to ‘men without means’.

The House of the Resurrection at Mirfield, taken by Daniel CR and uploaded to wikimedia commons, 2004

Abroad, their commitment to integration brought them into direct conflict with the racist Apartheid regime in South Africa. Having been invited in 1902 to help rebuild the church in the diocese of Pretoria after the ravages of the Boer War, the brethren went on to run schools and to establish St Peter’s Theological College in Rosettenville which offered theological training to Black and white students alike. The brethren openly opposed segregation, most famously through the efforts of respected anti-Apartheid activist Trevor Huddleston, a member of the Community since 1939 and Superintendent of St Peter’s. When faced with having to hand their college over to the government following the passing of the Bantu Education Act, the Brethren chose to close it instead, and from then on the Brethren, Huddleston chief among them, were treated with suspicion, if not outright hostility, by the ruling regime.

The archive at the Borthwick comprises the papers of individual brethren, beginning with founder Charles Gore and his successor Walter Howard Frere who played a key role in the famous ‘Malines Conversations’ which explored the potential for a reunion between the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church. As the Community is still very much active, we continue to receive regular new deposits of material, dated right up to the present. Whilst the vast majority of the material is, of course, related to religious belief, there are some surprising additions. Walter Frere brought with him hundreds of family letters, the earliest dating to 1809, containing interesting references to early 19th century Cambridge and particularly to Downing College, where Frere’s father worked as the Bursar!

Today the Community continues to train new theologians and to play an active role in lay ministry from their centre at Mirfield. You can find out more about their mission and history on their website.

See you in July!