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Borthwick Newsletter - May 2024

Posted on 30 April 2024

Welcome to the Borthwick's May newsletter.

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

Exchange of letters between Seebohm Rowntree and John Bowes Morrell concerning the purchase of Askham Bog as a nature reserve, May 1944 [Papers of John Bowes Morrell, JBM93/2/1]

What’s New?

The campus has been positively brimming with wildlife lately, from ducklings and goslings spotted on the university lake, to baby rabbits on the grass verges and, most recently, a litter of fox cubs. University Photographer Paul Shields captured this incredible photograph of one of the cubs not too far from the Borthwick (and tastefully matching our orange colour scheme).

In between all the wildlife-spotting, the Borthwick’s had another busy month of enquiries, document orders, visits, classes, accessioning, cataloguing and conservation, with enquiries coming in from all over the UK, as well as Australia, America, Canada, South Africa, Germany, Ireland, New Zealand and Spain.  For the vast majority of our international researchers, our online catalogue is the first port of call and so we were thrilled to receive a lovely piece of feedback from a researcher in April, who wanted us to know they found our catalogues especially well organised and straightforward and easy to use.  This is testament to the work of all our staff, past and present, who have spent so many hours recording and updating information about our collections to make our online catalogue, Borthcat, as detailed and useful as possible. But you don’t have to take our word for it, you can have a browse for yourself. 

In addition to our usual new accessions and catalogues (detailed below), we’ve also been putting some processes together in April to improve our reprographics and modern media copying services. You may not be aware that the Borthwick is able to make copies of sound recordings from our archives, as well as documents, maps and photographs.  This work is carried out in a specially equipped modern media suite and covers 1/4" reel-to-reel tapes, audio cassettes, Digital Audio Tape, minidiscs, compact discs, and vinyl and shellac records.  Contact us for further information.

New Accessions

In April we took in two substantial accessions.  The first was the archive of dramatist and television director Ian Curteis, which comprises 115 boxes of material dating from 1949 to 2020.  Curteis began his career as an actor with Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop in the 1950s before moving into television, where he became a script reader for the BBC and Granada Television.  He became a trainee director at the BBC in 1964 but in the late 1960s he switched to a career as a television dramatist, writing for serial dramas such as ‘The Onedin Line’ and ‘Z Cars’ alongside his own, original material, much of which had a historical theme. Curteis wrote ‘Philby, Burgess and Maclean’ in 1977, based on the infamous Cambridge ring of spies, then ‘Churchill and the Generals’ in 1979 and an eight part series on King George IV, ‘Prince Regent’, in the same year.  His 1986 drama ‘Lost Empires’ starred a young Colin Firth alongside Laurence Olivier. Another piece, the 'Falklands Play', was originally scheduled for production in 1985, but eventually broadcast in 2002. At the time production was cancelled, Curteis blamed a "liberal conspiracy" at the BBC.  The archive includes Curteis’ personal diaries, as well as scripts, correspondence and notes for a wide range of productions he wrote or directed - and some that never made it beyond the page - making it an excellent addition to our broader Writing and Performance Collection.

We also took in a large accession to our Methodist Church archives, including records relating to more than twenty local chapels and their respective circuits.  Our existing Methodist collection begins in 1785 and continues to the present day, covering 71 chapels in York and the surrounding area.  The new accession adds a substantial number of records relating to church property, poor relief, and religious education for children, as well as chapel meeting minutes and registers. 

One particularly interesting addition is a baptism register which appears to collect together all Methodist baptisms in York from the 1880s onwards.  In addition to the usual information about the name of the child and parents, the register also notes the original parish of baptism and it’s a little unclear whether this means they were baptised in a Methodist chapel in that parish, or whether they were baptised in the Church of England parish church.  No doubt we will discover more about this, and about the rest of the addition, as we continue to box list the contents.

New Catalogues

Number of archival descriptions on Borthcat on 1st May 2024: 134,480

We added three new archive catalogues to Borthcat in April.  The John Bowes Morrell Archive is the smallest of the three, coming in at one small box, but it represents only a fraction of the material we have on Morrell across the Borthwick’s collections.  As someone involved with the Rowntree company and trusts, the Civic Trust, and the foundation of the Borthwick and the University of York, it is hardly surprising that Morrell looms large in our archives, but this small group of records does a pretty good job of covering the highlights.  It includes letters relating to Morrell’s Rowntree company shareholdings (Morrell was Finance Director), to his friendship with Seebohm Rowntree and the role they both played in the creation of Yorkshire Wildlife Trust, to Morrell’s dreams for a Yorkshire Folk Park that never came to be, and finally, with the inclusion of papers relating to his 90th birthday celebration and the obituaries written upon his death, it reflects his long and celebrated career in the city and the esteem in which he was held.  You can read more about J.B. Morrell and see the other records we hold for him on Borthcat.

Coming in second at three boxes is the archive of the Bee Farmers Association, formerly known as the Honey Producers Association of Great Britain.  The Association was founded in 1935 to represent the commercial beekeepers of the UK and promote the sale of domestic honey by standardising output and prices.   Past members include A.L. Rowse and Alec Wilfred Gale, founders of Rowse Honey and Gale’s Honey respectively, and the Association would become the first organisation to create a bee farmer apprenticeship to support the future of the industry.  The archive includes meeting minutes and information about membership and the history of the Association, but the longest running and most fascinating group of records has to be the BFA Journal, known as ‘The Bulletin’.  The archive includes copies from 1955-2011 (with some gaps) and each issue includes news, articles, advice and copies of the most recent meeting minutes. They provide a fantastic overview of all the ways in which British beekeeping has changed over the past half century and more, as well as being a valuable source of information for budding beekeepers in the future.

Finally - and winning by quite a margin - is the archive of Dame Christian Howard, comprising 22 boxes and covering her work from the 1930s to the 1990s.  It seems fitting that Dame Christian’s catalogue should be completed this year, as it was exactly 30 years ago in 1993 that the first women were ordained to the priesthood of the Church of England, a cause which she supported for most of her life.  Born in 1916 at Castle Howard, her family’s ancestral Yorkshire home, Dame Christian had a deep religious faith from childhood.  Although she did not attend university, as was usual for girls of her class, in 1943 she gained a first class Lambeth Degree (a degree conferred by the Archbishop of Canterbury) and from 1943-1945 she taught divinity at a girls’ school in Chichester.  Having lost her parents in the 1930s and two of her brothers in the war, she returned to Yorkshire in 1945 to tend to the family estate while her surviving brother, the heir, completed his university studies.  

It was from this period onwards that she became heavily involved in the life of the Diocese of York and particularly the cause of women’s work in the church.  She was appointed Secretary of the newly established York Diocesan Board of Women’s Work in 1947, a post she held until 1979, as well as serving as Secretary for Lay Ministry.  Dame Christian strongly supported the expansion and professionalisation of women’s church work, whether as parish workers, readers, or deaconesses, but her vision for the future of the church always included the eventual admittance of women to the priesthood.  Her archive covers a broad range of her activities in the diocese, but chief among these are the records of her work for the Board of Women’s Work, her involvement in the diocesan consultations on the ordination of women, and her work for the Movement for the Ordination of Women (MOW), all in support of this cause.  Dame Christian backed up her arguments for ordination with extensive scholarly research and this can be seen in numerous articles, reports, and in her 1987 pamphlet ‘Can Women Be Priests?’, for which we hold the drafts, final version, and related correspondence.  

Happily, Dame Christian lived to see the successful 1992 vote in favour of the ordination of women, and to celebrate the first ordinations.  Her archive is a rich resource for understanding not just the many decades of work that went into that achievement, but also the contributions women like Dame Christian had long made to the Diocese of York and to the life and vigour of the Church of England as a whole.

Borthwick Out and About

We mentioned last month that our Access and Engagement Archivist Laura Yeoman would also be featured on ‘The Food Chain’, a BBC podcast looking at life in a chocolate factory. We’re pleased to say that the podcast is now available to listen to on the BBC website.

We also wanted to share some blogs with you that were written by a group of undergraduate students from York St John University who joined us for a placement last year.  The group were working on the archive of the Joseph Rowntree Theatre Trust which runs the Joseph Rowntree Theatre on Haxby Road, York.  The theatre was built by the Joseph Rowntree Village Trust (now the Joseph Rowntree Foundation) in 1935 to serve as a recreational facility for the workers at the Rowntree factory as well as for the people of York more broadly.  The archive was deposited with us in 2022 and, thanks to the hard work of the students, has now been fully box listed and is in the process of being catalogued. You can read three blogs about the students’ experience of working with the archive on the York St John University History blog. And while we're on the subject of the Rowntrees, Professor Catherine Hindson had written a fascinating blog for the Rowntree Society looking at the life and contributions of Gulielma Harlock, Joseph Rowntree's private secretary and something of a 'Jack of all trades', drawing on some of our Rowntree family and trust archives.

Finally, Collections Information Archivist Sally-Anne Shearn will be giving a talk to the Fishergate, Fulford and Heslington Local History Society on the 11th May, looking at John Bowes Morrell’s lost dream of a Yorkshire Folk Park.  Incidentally, if you happen to be in York you might want to pop along to the Treasurer’s House where the National Trust has a display of some beautifully carved mediaeval timbers that were taken from a house at the bottom of what is now Parliament Street.  The house was one of a number of buildings that Morrell hoped to rebuild in his Folk Park. Today a small number of timbers, carved with faces, are all that remains and they are well worth a look.

Archive of the Month: York Minster Library Parish Magazine Collection

What is it? In the 1980s York Minster Library sent a letter to all parishes in the modern Archdeaconry of York requesting back issues and future editions of their parish magazines. 85 parishes complied, resulting in the surviving collection which dates from 1863-2013.

Where can I find it? A collection level description can be viewed on Borthcat and a full list of magazines is available upon request.

Why is it Archive of the Month?  Parish magazines are too often overlooked as a source for family and local history.  If you’re looking for your ancestors, or researching the local area, you tend to turn to the parish registers, the records of the parish council or poor relief records.  But if you’re looking to find out more about a local parish and its community in the late 19th and 20th century, you could do worse than check for surviving parish magazines.   Magazines were usually printed on a monthly basis and provided a mix of local news and nationally syndicated articles and stories.  You can find information on baptisms, marriages and burials, the progress of parish sports teams, membership of the choir, community fetes and festivities, household tips, and local comment on national news, chronicling the changes (or lack thereof) that shaped a community over time.  'Men may come and men may go," writes the editor of Bishopthorpe and Acaster Malbis parish magazine in 1907, 'but Acaster goes on for ever. We pursue the even tenor of our way, and leave others to fight and squabble.'

And speaking of changes, the serialised stories that featured in the magazines to the 1940s  are themselves a fantastic and often very entertaining social history resource, capturing as they do the changing social mores and literary fashions.  With titles like ‘What Happened at Flaunce’, ‘The Hidden Garden’, and ‘Is Love Dead?’ these stories could run over several issues of a magazine, keeping readers on the edge of their seats to discover what happened next.  Whilst the earlier serialised stories tended to be quite formulaic and heavily moralistic, later stories mixed the morals with mild sensationalism, adding unsolved mysteries, crimes, and romantic drama - albeit always with a good dose of religious faith.  Whether you’re researching your family or village history, or you just want to know what happened at Flaunce, you might well find what you're looking for in our extensive magazine collection.

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