Borthwick Newsletter - July 2023

Posted on 30 June 2023

Welcome to the Borthwick's July newsletter.

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

Head Girl’s Handbook: Written by an unknown pupil in July 1939, with additions in July 1941 [Records of the Mount School, York]

What’s new?

Summer really arrived with a vengeance in June and here at the Borthwick we were extremely glad to have our climate controlled strongrooms and searchroom. The campus has been rather quiet as the students finished exams and left for their summer break, but the searchroom has seen an uptick in visitors (we hope not just for the benefit of the air conditioning!), and staff have been kept busy preparing for Open Days, onsite group visits, and the York Festival of Ideas.

Now, as we look forward to July, we are thrilled to announce the start of a very exciting new project that will see the Borthwick become home to one of York’s oldest and most significant archives, that of the Company of Merchant Adventurers of the City of York. The history of the Merchant Adventurers dates back to the 14th century, and if you’ve ever visited the city centre, you will almost certainly have seen their beautiful mediaeval hall on Fossgate, with its distinctive yellow half timbering.

The medieval hall of the Company of Merchant Adventurers of the City of York

Originally known as the Guild of Our Lord Jesus and the Blessed Virgin Mary, in 1430 the guild became known as The Mistry of Mercers, and in 1581 it was granted the status of a Company by Queen Elizabeth I, adopting its present name. The Company’s archive comprises more than 200 boxes of material and has, until now, been stored at the hall, but in July Project Archivist Lydia Dean will oversee its transfer to the Borthwick, where she will begin work on updating the catalogue and making it fully available online, in close collaboration with the Merchant Adventurers. The project will run until November, and will be followed by further promotional and outreach activities to ensure that this valuable resource reaches as wide an audience as possible. We’ll keep you updated on our progress, but in the meantime you can read more about the history of the company and its archive on their website.

New Accessions

In June we took in one new archive, along with two additions. The Vic Hoyland Archive joins our growing collection of music archives, consisting as it does of scores and performance recordings. A native of Yorkshire, Hoyland pursued a doctorate at the new University of York Music Department and subsequently held teaching posts at York and the University of Birmingham. He was active as a composer from 1970 and his work has been commissioned for a wide range of festivals, including Cheltenham, South Bank and York. He has also worked with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, as well as being a founder member of Northern Music Theatre and Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. The archive covers a broad span of activity, from 1970-2014, and, with the link to the pioneering university music department, it makes a very welcome addition to the archives here.

On the subject of the arts, we have also received a substantial addition to the archive of novelist and playwright David Storey, another Yorkshire born creative, whose 1960 novel ‘This Sporting Life’ won the Macmillan Book Prize and was subsequently adapted by Storey for the big screen. The novel marked the beginning of a long and successful career in literature and theatre, and the 25 new boxes include further drafts of his poetry, novels and plays, as well as photographs and press cuttings, dating from 1958 to 2016.

Finally, we were pleased to bring our University of York Archive right up to date with two items relating the York C20 Architectural Gazetteer which was published online in 2022. The project was coordinated by the York Twentieth Century Society and a History of Art lecturer at the university, and it aims to shine a light on the city’s ‘unsung’ and ‘unchronicled’ twentieth century architecture. The new records were transferred to us by a student who worked on the project, one of a number who contributed to the detailed website.

Cataloguing

Number of archival descriptions on Borthcat on 1st July 2023: 123,929

We’ve been fortunate over the past month to have the help of Wiktoria Tunska, a Research Assistant from the English Department, who has been working on making our Rowntree advertising material more widely available. The Rowntree Advertising Guard Books run from 1910 to 1981 and include more than 300 volumes of print advertisements for all kinds of confectionery and household products produced by Rowntree - and sometimes by their competitors too. As well as highlighting the development of the company’s output over time, the guard books provide a window into changing social attitudes, particularly with regards to gender roles and how products were marketed differently to men and women. They’ve long been one of the most popular parts of the company archive but, until now, we have only had a paper index of the contents available in the searchroom. Thanks to Wiktoria’s hard work you can now search the full contents on our online catalogue Borthcat, as well as the contents of our oversize advertising folders, which includes pristine examples of original artwork for promotional campaigns for famous products like Kit Kat, Black Magic and Quality Street. If you follow us on social media, look out for posts showcasing the collection in the coming weeks!

Original art work for a Quality Street advertisement (R/DD/SA/34)

Last, but certainly not least, we’ve made an addition to our Rowntree family catalogue. You can now read descriptions of 49 letters written by Sarah Stephenson Rowntree to her son, Joseph, as well as 2 written by Joseph in return, dating from the 1840s to around the 1860s. The small bundle of letters, much read and long kept, offer a vivid glimpse into the everyday life of a busy and affectionate Quaker family, from Joseph’s childhood through to his first marriage to Julia Seebohm, filled with news of the household and the grocery business at Pavement, of the doings of friends and relations, of spiritual meetings attended and books and visits enjoyed. Particularly touching are the letters Sarah writes to Joseph in 1857 when, at the age of 21, he leaves the family circle to serve a short apprenticeship in London. In between giving him the news from York and commenting on his own doings, Sarah finds time to worry over his health and his clothing. ‘Does thou not also want a pair of good Kid gloves?’ she writes in April, “I would have thee dear not to allow thy self to be shabby, & if any of the stockings or shirts want mending, just put them aside, & I could then mend them for you.’ Familiar as we are with the elderly, bearded Joseph Rowntree, famous for his confectionery business and his philanthropy, it’s rather endearing to read Sarah’s letters and remember that he was once a young man just starting out in the world, with a mother who worried.

Borthwick Out and About

June was a very busy month here at the Borthwick. If you attended the York Festival of Ideas you may have seen us presenting or chairing across multiple events. If you missed us, you can still catch up with our talks (and many others) on the festival’s YouTube channel. Helena Cox, the inaugural University of York Art Curator gave an entertaining introduction to some highlights from the collection, whilst Collections Information Archivist Sally-Anne Shearn reconstructed the history of York’s lost Folk Park, as imagined by John Bowes Morrell. You might also have met us in person at the Family History Show at York Racecourse on the 24th June, where over the course of the day we had a whopping 182 visitors to our stall. If you’re interested in researching your family history, you can find an introductory guide to what we hold on our website, or try our online catalogue Borthcat which now includes a number of name indexes for York hospital and school records through to the early 20th century.

Onsite, we hosted students from across the university for Digital Creativity Week, which allowed them to explore original archival material in order to create digital artefacts for a day long exhibition. We also welcomed more than thirty members of York Civic Trust for an afternoon visit. Keeper of Archives Gary Brannan gave them a behind the scenes tour of one of our strongrooms, after which they were able to view a range of archives in the searchroom, including records relating to the Women’s Land Army in North Yorkshire, original artwork for some of Rowntree’s wartime advertisements, a beautiful 19th century herbarium, and a selection of scripts from the archive of Frankie Howerd, complete with the original suitcase.

Archive of the Month: Records of the Christian Fellowship Trust

What is it? The archive of an interfaith organisation which operated primarily in South Africa and Namibia from the 1960s to the 1990s.

Where can I find it? A top level description of the archive is available on Borthcat and the contents have been fully box listed.

Why is it Archive of the Month?

The CFT was founded in 1964 to build ‘understanding and solidarity’ between countries in Europe and Southern Africa. Its work primarily took the form of sponsoring study visits for individuals in South Africa and Namibia to visit countries like the UK, France, Germany, Switzerland and Holland, as well as return visits to Southern Africa by people in the UK. The CFT strongly opposed the racist system of Apartheid and through its networks it became part of the international anti-Apartheid and pro-democracy movement, acting as a conduit for the exchange of news and information.

A leaflet promoting the new democratic constitution of South Africa in 1994, from the CFT archive

The surviving archive was collated by Alison Harvey, the Secretary of the Trust’s UK Committee, and the bulk of the records comprise detailed reports on the experiences of those who took study tours between the 1960s and the 1990s, offering first hand testimony of life in both Apartheid and newly democratic Namibia and South Africa. Efforts were made to arrange meetings and visits tailored to the interests of individual grantees, and as a result the reports cover areas such as human rights, pastoral care, education, social work, healthcare (including the treatment of AIDS) and youth work in Europe and Africa. The CFT also drew on such connections to arrange visits to Southern Africa by British MPs and the International Commission of Jurists in order to draw wider attention to the struggle for equality and democracy. The archive can make for difficult reading at times, but it is a record of the transformative power of travel and the sharing of ideas and experiences, across faiths, cultures and national borders, that enabled its participants to see the world as it could be, and not as it was.

We'll be back with more news in August.