Borthwick Newsletter - February 2025

Posted on 29 January 2025

Welcome to the Borthwick's February newsletter.

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

York Medico Ethical Association minute book: Includes regulations of the York Association of General Practitioners, 1842; printed Rules and By-Laws of the York Medico Ethical Association, 1856; lists of members and officers, February 1842-October 1888 [YMS/2/1/1]

What’s new?

Welcome to the first Borthwick newsletter of the new year. It’s a bit of a bumper edition this time, with (almost) two months worth of new accessions and catalogue additions, as well as a new blog, exhibition, and a television outing for one of our parish registers. We are also pleased to announce a change to our searchroom opening hours for 2025. Due to increased demand and following recent feedback from researchers, we are now open by appointment four days a week, Monday to Thursday, 9.30-16.30. If you’d like to visit, you can get in touch with us via email, telephone or letter. Please be aware that Thursday is our usual volunteering day so the searchroom will not be a silent study space and there may be some chatter!

Looking ahead, we’ll be closed from the 3rd-7th February for our annual Collections Development Week. This gives us the opportunity to catch up on important behind the scenes work so that we can keep our collections as accessible as possible. This year we’ll be listing recent parish record accessions and catching up with cataloguing, as well as giving our book rests and document weights a spring clean. You can find out more about what we’ve been up to in the March newsletter so watch this space.

New Accessions

We’ve had a whopping 29 new accessions since the last newsletter, with additions to the existing archives of the University of York, the Yorkshire Gardens Trust, and Alcoholics Anonymous UK. We’ve also boosted our music and performance collection with the archives of two modern composers with links to the university. Electroacoustic music composer Jonty Harrison graduated from York in 1980, and fellow composer David Blake was a founder member of the Department of Music in 1964, alongside Wilfrid Mellers.

Whilst these archives came to us directly from their creators, some accessions take a more circuitous route. In 2023 a 15th century grant bearing the name of King Richard III came up for sale at auction in the USA. It was purchased by the Richard III Society and put on display at the Yorkshire Museum in York in 2024 before making its way to the Borthwick on deposit. The document is an original grant of the lieutenancy of Guines by Richard III to Sir James Tyrrell, dated 22 January 1485 and bearing an intact Great Seal. Exactly seven months later Richard would be dead, killed at the Battle of Bosworth by Henry, Duke of Lancaster, who took the throne as King Henry VII, ousting the Yorkists and becoming the first Tudor monarch.

The 1485 grant to Sir James Tyrrell, photograph courtesy of The Potomack Company

His grantee, Sir James Tyrrell, fared rather better - for a while, at least. He was fortunate to have been in France at the time of the battle and received a pardon from Henry, who restored him to his lieutenancy of Guines. But it seems his loyalties did not change so easily. In 1501 Tyrrell gave his support to Edward de la Pole, a Yorkist claimant to the throne. He was subsequently arrested and executed for treason, another victim of the long and bitterly fought Wars of the Roses. However, Tyrrell does have one further claim to fame. Some years later Sir Thomas More wrote a history of Richard III in which he made the startling assertion that during his interrogation Tyrrell had confessed to the alleged murder of the Princes in the Tower, the young Edward V and his brother Richard, and moreover that his co-conspirator, John Dighton, had corroborated his story. No further evidence for the tale has been found but it adds an intriguing note to a beautiful, if otherwise standard, piece of royal administration.

Finally we were lucky enough to receive funding to purchase a very exciting addition to our comedy writing and performance archives - the joke books of comedy legend Eric Morecambe. The eight volumes, together with loose notes and two photographs, came up for auction in January and we were able to buy them thanks to funding from the Friends of National Libraries and the Friends of University of York Library and Archives.

A page from Eric Morecambe's notebook with ideas for jokes, including their catchphrase 'What do you think of it so far? Rubbish.'

The notebooks are a goldmine of gags, from throwaway one-liners to funny speeches and ideas for comic skits and films with his comedy partner Ernie Wise. The small archive complements the archive of Morecambe and Wise television producer and choreographer Ernest Maxin - capturing the first step of the creative journey from page to screen.

New Catalogues

Number of archival descriptions on Borthcat on 1st February 2025: 137,640

If you’re familiar with our online catalogue Borthcat you’ll know that our Retreat Hospital patient case books and Clifton Hospital patient case books have all been indexed, with the names, ages, and other details of patients fully searchable online from the late 18th to the early 20th century. What you may not know is that you can also see colour scans of all of these case books for free via our JSTOR page. The Retreat archive was digitised through a Wellcome Trust project some years ago, but we are pleased to say we have now added the case books for Clifton (formerly the North and East Ridings Lunatic Asylum) and hope to shortly also add the case books for Bootham Hospital (formerly the York Lunatic Asylum). And if you haven’t used our JSTOR page before, you’ll also find digitised copies of Chapbooks from our Rare Books collection, as well as documents from the Harewood West Indian Archive and the York Visitation Court Books.

The selection of archives currently digitised and available on JSTOR.

Elsewhere we’ve been busy adding new descriptions to our Rowntree Family catalogue in advance of the 2025 Centenary of the death of Joseph Rowntree, the Quaker philanthropist and co-founder of the famous confectionery company. You can find descriptions of letters received by Joseph from his wide circle of friends and relations on Borthcat, covering everything from Quaker belief and the promotion of adult education to accounts of teenage pranks at Bootham School.

Borthwick Out and About

In December Neil Adams from our Searchroom team shared a new blog on the so-called ‘Stillingfleet Tragedy’ of 1833 in which eleven carol singers lost their lives. Neil came across the tragedy while working on the catalogue for the parish archive. The terrible events were recorded not only in the Stillingfleet baptism register, but also in notes and a manuscript history of the parish, enabling Neil to piece together the timeline of the day and its devastating aftermath.

Speaking of parish archives, if you happened to be watching the new series of Lucy Worsley Investigates on BBC 2 on the 10th January you would have spotted a very significant parish register from our collections. The episode examined the famous Gunpowder Plot of 1605 in which a group of Catholic conspirators plotted to blow up the Houses of Parliament. But what you may not know is that the most famous of these, Guy Fawkes, was born and baptised here in York and his baptism is recorded in the first surviving register of the church of St Michael le Belfrey. You can see the register and hear more about the origins of Guy Fawkes in the episode, which is now available to watch on BBC iPlayer.

Lucy Worsley Investigates: The Gunpowder Plot

Last, but not least, if you find yourself in central York why not check out the latest free exhibition at York Minster Library. ‘Loose Connections: York and the Book Trade’ looks at the history of printing in York. It focuses predominantly on the 18th century when printers and booksellers proliferated throughout the city, and uses the often rare and sometimes unique material from the collections of York Minster Library. The exhibition is in the Old Palace and is free and open to the public from now until the end of April 2025. 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.

Archive of the Month: Educational Interchange Council

What is it? The records of the EIC, or Educational Interchange Council, was an organisation set up after the Second World War to promote cultural visits and exchanges between the UK and Europe.

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

Why is it Archive of the Month?

‘Post-war reconstruction’ usually brings to mind the physical rebuilding of devastated towns and cities and the rejuvenation of economies and political institutions, but if peace was to last then the rebuilding of social and cultural ties between nations was arguably just as vital. This was certainly the belief of the Educational Interchange Council, founded in Vienna in 1947 'to promote and assist educational and cultural visits and exchanges of all kinds' between Britain and other European countries in the aftermath of war. It was the brainchild of members of the Society of Friends, or Quakers (among them Richard Rowntree of York), as well as the British Council and others involved in post war relief efforts in Europe. To quote the first Annual Report of the EIC: man does not live by bread alone, and a ‘freer flow of friendship must accompany the freer flow of goods across the frontiers’ in the interests of promoting international understanding and unity, bringing men and women together to share their ideas, their knowledge and their cultures.

To begin with the work was slow, hampered by bureaucracy and confined to exchange visits between British and Austrian students and teachers. 400 Austrians went to Britain in the first year of the programme, with 250 Britons sent to Austria in return. But soon the EIC was able to extend its reach to other European countries such as Germany and what was then Czechoslovakia. By the 1950s the EIC counted Yugoslavia, Poland and the Soviet Union among its exchange countries, and by 1969 visits exchanges were being organised between Britain and twenty two other countries. Participants were drawn from many different walks of life, from students and teachers, to trade unionists, social workers, and doctors, and the EIC offered a range of options to suit. An exchange might take the form of a short one or two week study tour with a mix of lectures and cultural visits and activities, or it might mean six months or even a whole year at a school or university, or working as a teacher or au pair.

Some of the options for Adult Education offered by the EIC in 1949-1950

The surviving archive is relatively small at eleven boxes, but it covers all aspects of the EIC’s work - from its creation and the meetings of its council and committees, through to the scrapbooks, articles and publications detailing its work and the attitudes and opinions of its participants. Nor does the archive survive in isolation. The Borthwick also holds the records of the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust which gave funding to the EIC and whose records cover several Council projects, and the papers of Richard Rowntree, a key figure in its creation. You can read letters and memoranda by Richard about its foundation in the Rowntree Family Papers, placing the EIC in the context of the broader peace work undertaken by the Society of Friends in this period.

The EIC disbanded in the early 1980s but thanks to these records we can learn more about its mission and its impact as it grew from an idea shared by a group of post-war relief workers into an international project spanning more than thirty years.

We'll be back in March with more news and events from the archives!