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Borthwick Newsletter - April 2024

Posted on 27 March 2024

Welcome to the Borthwick's April newsletter.

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

Minutes of talks held 21-24 April 1989 at Mells Park House, Somerset. Includes manuscript note (in Michael Young's hand) of a proposed agenda for the weekend's discussions and copies of covering letters from Young to Rudolph Agnew and the company Chairman.  Discussion topics include: the forthcoming elections in South Africa and Namibia; the likely position and behaviour of F.W. de Klerk as new State President and the possibility of instituting 'talks about talks'; the Democrat Party; Angola and Namibia; the release of Mandela, ANC ceasefire and the exchange of political prisoners; and the international dimension. [Michael Young Archive, YOU/1/1/7]

What’s New?

It looks as though Spring is finally on the way.  The daffodils have been brightening up the campus for the past few weeks and the blossom has started to make an appearance on the trees outside the library.  It seems fitting that March saw a lot of new arrivals - an impressive eight new accessions, two new art exhibitions, a new blog, and a new member of staff, Joseph Bounds, who joins the Ancestry team.  The team have been working for several years now on digitising thousands of our genealogical records for inclusion on Ancestry.com, including colour scans of our parish registers, and we enjoy getting to hear some of the more unusual names that turn up! 

March has also been particularly busy in the searchroom with more than 500 enquiries over the course of the month and more than 70 visitors to the searchroom and microform room.  In addition we’ve welcomed weekly undergraduate and postgraduate classes, giving students the opportunity to get hands-on experience with original archival materials relating to their courses.  We are always keen to find ways to share our archives more widely but we are also aware that not everyone has the time or opportunity to visit us in person.  To that end, we continue to work on improving our digital resources, and you can read about our ongoing work on a bigger and better Digital Library in a new blog by Digital Preservation Archivist Dorothy Waugh.  Watch this space!

New Accessions

We received six additions to existing archives and two new archives in March.  Among the additions were 13 boxes of material relating to closed branches of the Women’s Institute in North Yorkshire, dating from 1921-2007, including administrative records, scrapbooks, photographs, and even a member’s invitation to a 1965 Royal Garden Party.  We added some recent parish magazines to the parish archive of Dunnington, and some additional church surveys to the archive of The Arts Society.  A particularly interesting addition was made to the architectural archive of Pace and Sims who were known for their work on ecclesiastical buildings in particular.  Dating from the 1940s-1970s, the addition comprises 3 boxes of diaries, travel notebooks, photographs, sketches, correspondence and press cuttings relating to the work of George Pace, referencing his design work on Ibadan Cathedral in Nigeria, as well as his work on the cathedrals at Llandaff and Chester.  

One of our two new accessions also relates to architecture, albeit of a medical kind.  We received a small file of papers from a person who worked for the NHS, comprising leaflets about the opening of York District Hospital in 1977 and the hospital’s Maternity Unit in 1983, as well as articles about the design and construction of the hospital, as featured in Architects Journal in 1977.  

Finally we were very pleased to be gifted 3 boxes of material relating to St Margaret’s School for Girls, York.  The small archive has been put together by the St Margaret’s Girls Association, which is made up of former pupils, and it contains a beautiful folio of photographs and written memories of former pupils, together with additional historical information and a school scarf, beret, tie and set of school badges.  St Margaret’s was located on Micklegate and operated from 1905 to 1968.  You can still see the Georgian house used for the school, and a plaque commemorating it, at number 54 Micklegate, known as Garforth House.  We look forward to learning more about St Margaret’s in the future.

New Catalogues

Number of archival descriptions on Borthcat on 1st April 2024: 134,017

In March we added the full catalogue for the parish archive of Crayke.  The archive dates back to 1558 and the earliest record is a parish register kept by a series of rather chatty vicars who, in addition to recording baptisms, marriages and burials, also found time to note the death of Queen Elizabeth I and the accession of King James, the ‘supposed’ fathers in the cases of illegitimate births, and their rather negative opinion of Quakers, referred to as that ‘damnable Heresie’.  Interestingly, Crayke might only be 13 miles from the city of York but the parish and manor came under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Durham until the 1830s, when it became part of the Diocese of York.  The archive contains drawings of the Coats of Arms of the See and Chapter of Durham and documents relating to the rights of the Bishop ‘in his Manor and Park of Crayke’ in 1606.   

We have also updated the catalogue of the Harewood West Indian Archive, adding in a series of boxes which were transferred to the Borthwick from West Yorkshire Archive Service, Leeds. The additional material relates to the Lascelles family plantations in Barbados, Jamaica and Tobago, worked by enslaved Africans in the 18th and 19th centuries.  It includes financial records, correspondence and reports, land deeds, information about crops grown, and a topographical map of the island of Barbados, dated 1846.  

News from Rare Books Collection and York Minster Library

From Byrd to Ballads: The latest exhibition in the Old Palace, York Minster  is on the outstanding collection of music held in the Library and Archives. Star items include a unique edition of William Byrd’s Gradualia; a chapbook The Cries of York, that reveals the sounds that people heard walking through York over 200 years ago; and lost musical fragments preserved in medieval manuscripts, evidence of early recycling. The exhibition also features items from the Minster Library’s collection of c.1,500 ballads.

The ballads have recently been the focus of a research project by the University of York’s Music Department, through which previously unknown songs have been discovered within the collection. Each of the ballads on display tell their own entertaining, comical, or heartbreaking story; all reveal something about the people who came together to sing them. The exhibition is free and open to the public from now until the end of June 2024. Opening hours:  Monday to Thursday 9.30am to 12.30pm, and 1.30pm to 4.30pm. The Old Palace is accessed through Dean’s Park. For more information contact collections@yorkminster.org. 

Borthwick Out and About

In March University Art Curator Helena Cox oversaw the launch of two new exhibitions on campus, both of which are open to the public.  The first, on the 1st March, was ‘Creative Encounters’ - part of a project run by the Humanities Research Centre in 2022-2023, with support from the Enhancing Research Culture Fund. One branch of this project was Visual Talking Points, whose goal was to capture something of the research in Arts and Humanities at York in a form that would lead to conversations. The work was led by Alexandra Gushurst-Moore, and she brought local artists into departmental research meetings within the Faculty of Arts and Humanities and asked them to create work (without limitation!) that responded to the current research and research culture. The final artworks were then installed at the HRC display space in the foyer, the installation was led by Art Curator Helena Cox in collaboration with the wonderful Estates Team, namely Ian Harrington and Mark Thorpe. There is hope that some of the artworks will be acquired into the university art collection in the future.

During the launch event, Alexandra and Helena led a discussion roundtable with the artist, giving them the opportunity to showcase their work. The launch was well attended by members of the university, students, as well as the general public. The exhibition artists include: Lincoln Lightfoot, Boxxhead, Amy D'Agorne, Rob Burton, Katie Lewis, Jade Blood, Joanna Lisowiec. You can come and see their work in the HRC foyer in the Berrick Saul building (link to google maps).

The ‘Creative Encounters’ launch was followed, on the 14th, by the launch of the ‘Through a Bird’s Eye View: Looking at Perspective’ exhibition, opened by the University Vice Chancellor Charlie Jeffrey.  Curated by students from the Department of History of Art, the exhibition uses pieces from the university’s own collection and can be viewed in the Spring Lane building on campus (link to google maps).  You can also learn more about the art collection on our website.

We celebrated International Women’s Day with a thread on social media highlighting photographs of women’s sports teams in our archives.  From the girls’ cricket team at the Mount School, in 1898, to the sports teams of the Rowntree and Terry’s factories in the early 20th century, and the regular hockey competitions at The Retreat Hospital, there is a long history of women’s sports in York.  We even found a photograph of the Rowntree’s ‘girl cricketers’ getting to meet the Australian Women’s Cricket Team on their visit to England in 1937 as part of the second series of the Women’s Ashes! 

In addition, our archives were featured in an excellent blog by Chris Corbett, Community Engagement Officer for Teesside Archives.  Chris delved into the life and work of the Marvellous Maureen, better known as Maureen Richardson, a very determined environmental campaigner from Teesside who received valuable support from the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust in the 1970s.  The JRRT archive includes details files about Maureen’s work and h+er own accounts of the challenges she faced as a ‘campaigning housewife’ (as one newspaper dubbed her), at a time when women’s concerns were too often and easily dismissed.  

Looking forward to April, on the 10th our Keeper of Archives and Research Collections Gary Brannan will be speaking on connecting students and institutional mental health collections at a Royal Historical Society conference on ‘Museums and Beyond: Public Histories of Mental Illness’.  We are particularly fortunate at the Borthwick to have a very rich collection of mental health archives and rare books, you can browse our psychiatric hospital records on Borthcat, or read more about our medical Rare Books here.  Access and Engagement Archivist Laura Yeoman will also be featured on ‘The Food Chain’, a BBC podcast that should be available to listen to on the BBC website from the end of March.  Laura is discussing the early development and marketing of the Toffee Crisp chocolate bar, first produced by John Mackintosh & Sons of Halifax in 1963 and later manufactured by Rowntree Mackintosh.  As well as the archives of the Mackintosh and Rowntree companies, we are also fortunate to have the records of John Henderson, the Mackintosh employee who played a key role in its creation.

And finally, on the subject of chocolate, there’s still time to get a ticket for Drama at the Cocoa Works, a talk given by Professor Catherine Hindson for The Rowntree Society on the 13th April.  The talk, which examines the history of theatre at the Rowntree factory and model village of New Earswick, will take place at the New Earswick Folk Hall and features archives from the Borthwick’s extensive Rowntree collections.

Archive of the Month: Clifton Hospital Archive

What is it? The surviving records of Clifton Hospital, York, a psychiatric hospital which closed in 1994. Formerly the county asylum.  

Where can I find it? The complete catalogue is available on Borthcat.

Why is it Archive of the Month?  

Clifton Hospital is the second largest of our psychiatric hospital archives, dwarfed only by The Retreat.  However, unlike The Retreat, Clifton was a public hospital, founded in 1844 as the North and East Ridings Lunatic Asylum and intended to house ‘pauper patients’, that is, those patients who could not afford private asylum fees. Instead their care was paid for by the public via the Poor Law Unions.  For all that The Retreat may have left more records, Clifton was in every way the larger institution. At its peak in the 20th century, The Retreat had some 250 patients, Clifton had 560 by 1870, rising to more than 1,100 by the 1950s, and its buildings covered a large estate to the north of the city.  

The term ‘Lunatic Asylum’ is a difficult one today; appearing in horror films and novels as much as in factual documentaries and historical studies.  We are very fortunate then to have such a rich and detailed collection of records for a hospital like Clifton, covering every facet of its existence from the first architectural plans to the appointment of staff and the records of its patients - allowing us to sort the fact from the fiction.  In the century and a half that Clifton was open, attitudes towards, and treatment of those with mental illness changed enormously, as did the provision of medical care as a whole, especially after the creation of the National Health Service in 1948.  The effects of these changes can be traced throughout the Clifton records, as the institution moved from a Victorian asylum to a more modern psychiatric hospital.  

However, as interesting and important as these broader changes were, it is the individual stories that tend to draw people to Clifton Hospital Archive.  The patient case books contain the medical notes of thousands of men, women and, occasionally even children and teenagers, who passed through Clifton’s doors between 1847 and 1994, and all the pre-1924 case books are fully open to the public..  Thanks to the work of our brilliant volunteers, most of them have been indexed and the names and basic biographical details of many of the patients can be viewed on Borthcat under the listing for the respective volume.  The case books often record detailed histories upon admission, along with physical descriptions of the patient (with occasional photographs) and then brief accounts of their progress and a record of their eventual transfer, discharge or death.  The details can vary widely and the records are, by their nature, often challenging, but they are also unique and may, in many cases, be the most detailed information that survives about the person in question outside of the census; certainly the most personal information.  As such, they continue to fascinate - as evidence of the central work of the hospital and as fleeting glimpses, however difficult, of the lives of individuals we might otherwise not know at all.

We’ll be back in May with more news and events from the archives.