Borthwick Newsletter - October 2022

Posted on 30 September 2022

Welcome to the Borthwick's October newsletter

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

October 1957: The visit of Queen Elizabeth II to U.S.A. enclosing printed Order of Service of Dedication of the War Memorial Chapel, Washington Cathedral, 20 Oct 1957. [Hickleton Papers, HALIFAX/A2/278/61/4]

What’s new?

It’s the start of the new academic year and campus is starting to come alive again as we welcome new and returning students after the summer break. We’re really pleased to be able to once again support teaching on modules across several subjects this term and are looking forward to sharing our collections with this year’s cohort of under- and postgraduates!

Work on the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust cataloguing project continues apace. Over 100 boxes of material have now been listed and repackaged, comprising some 1,150 individual files dating from the 1940s to the 2010s. The work has turned up some fascinating files relating to the earliest days of organisations such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, while the trust’s political files are something of a ‘Who’s Who’ of influential figures in British politics. There really wasn’t much in the way of political and community activism that the JRRT weren’t involved with - not to mention offering practical financial support to anti-Apartheid and democratic causes overseas, from Southern Africa to the Soviet Union. To date, one of the most interesting features of the archive are the frequent references to the Trust’s central London property at 9 Poland Street. The Trust made office space available there to all sorts of organisations from right across the political spectrum in the 1970s and 1980s, with the building becoming known as the Counter Civil Service. Conservatives, socialists, liberals and environmentalists all rubbed shoulders there, sharing kitchen and copying facilities, which must have made for some lively discussions!

New Accessions

Over the past month, we’ve had a number of new additions to our existing archives, with new material being added to the University Archive, the papers of Frankie Howerd and several parish record collections.

We were very excited to receive an addition to the Clifton Hospital Archive, comprising five patient case books covering 1847-1928. The generous gift of these records reunites them with the existing archive and fills some gaps in the series of case notes. Needless to say, we're delighted that these records have come to us and we are looking forward to indexing them, adding their details to Borthcat, and making them available once they’ve undergone some conservation work. More to come in a future newsletter!

We also received a small but fascinating addition to our Rowntree collections this month, in the form of the Kitching Banknote. This item is a single banknote from La Banque de la Martinique, which was retrieved from the ruins of the town of Saint-Pierre, following the eruption of Mount Pelée in 1902. The banknote was found by C.S.Kitching, an employee of Rowntree & Co who was travelling to the company’s recently purchased cocoa plantations in Dominica.

New Catalogues

We’ve recently retroconverted and added to Borthcat the finding aid to one of our most frequently used collections, the York Diocesan Faculty Papers. The papers record alterations, repairs and renovations to the physical fabric and contents of church buildings and churchyards and can contain letters, drawings, and architectural plans. They can tell researchers about a wide range of changes in church fabric including alterations to pews and seating, stained glass, memorial tablets, organs, and pulpits. They provide us with evidence for the impact of changes in doctrine on church arrangement, the adoption of technical innovations in churches and can also give us insights into social connections within a parish. In addition to this series, you can also find faculties within the records of individual parishes, and summaries of them in the Faculty Book series we hold. For more information on the collection, please have a look at our research guide to the faculties and church fabric.

Number of archival descriptions on Borthcat on 1st October 2022: 109,063

We’ve been able to resume work on adding the work of our volunteers to Borthcat too - this time with the addition of more than 1,600 indexed entries to the Bootham Hospital Admission Book, 1802-1825. Over the next few months, we’ll be adding more entries to this series so please do check back here to see how we’re getting on! This is the result of the amazing work of our longstanding volunteers from the York Family History Society and we can’t thank them enough.

News from Rare Books

More incunable news from the rare books collection, this time a York Minster book which took a trip to Manchester to have some multi spectral imaging carried out. The book is a 1495 edition of Le Blason des toutes armes, a book on heraldry printed in Paris. There are only two known copies of this edition; the other is still in France.

The binding on the York copy is particularly interesting, comprising layers of manuscript material including early French verse which we haven’t yet been able to identify. I’ve got images if there are any French romantic scholars out there who’d like to take a look. It also has mediaeval playing cards used as a stiffener in the binding.

We wanted to know if there had ever been a leather cover over the paper and hoped that MSI would identify glue residue that couldn’t be seen with the naked eye. The imaging team at John Rylands were incredibly generous in putting aside a day to do the imaging, and prepare a report on the results. Breaking news is that it doesn't appear that there is any residue so it looks as if the paper binding is the original binding of choice. There are very few 15th century books with this sort of binding still intact so exciting stuff!

We need to do some further work on the book to stabilise the paper covers which have a tendency to flake off. I would also like to take it to the University of Mainz who have a CT scanner for books which would mean we could look at the manuscript in more detail.

Borthwick Out and About

One of the star items of the University’s Art Collection has just gone on loan as part of the Art of Colour exhibition by Tennant’s Auctioneers. Sidney Nolan’s ‘Central Australia’ from 1950 became part of our collection thanks to Lord Kenneth Clarke, who was University of York Chancellor between 1967 and 1978

The non-selling exhibition runs between 14th and 18th October. On Monday 17th October, our Art Curator Helena Cox will be giving a talk about the University's Art Collection as part of the exhibition. You can find out more about the exhibition and talk, and book tickets, via the exhibition website.

Archive of the Month: Papers of Catherine Muriel ‘Kit’ Rob

What is it? The archive of North Yorkshire botanist, Kit Rob, covering her work as County Recorder for the Yorkshire Naturalists’ Union as well as her personal collection of Wildflower Society recording diaries and other collected articles and papers on botany in Britain and abroad.

Where can I find it? The catalogue to the Catherine Rob Papers is available through Borthcat.

Why is it Archive of the Month? The papers of Kit Rob have been recently catalogued and give us insight into the life and work of a female botanist at the start of the 20th century. In conjunction with other papers held about Kit here at the Borthwick, they also give us great insight into the woman herself. Kit Rob was a Fellow of the Linnaean Society and a founding member of the Yorkshire Naturalists Trust (now Yorkshire Wildlife Trust). She was also president of the Yorkshire Naturalists Union, for whom she worked as County Recorder for over 30 years. Although botany was her great passion and she was the inspiration behind the founding of the Catherine Muriel Rob Natural History Society in Thirsk, she also became a dedicated and successful breeder of Cardigan Corgis, winning best of breed at Crufts in 1968. Her archive forms part of our wider holdings and collections relating to the environment and natural history, which you can explore through our dedicated website.

We’ll be back with more news next month!