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Borthwick Newsletter - March 2025

Posted on 28 February 2025

Welcome to the Borthwick's March newsletter.

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

Retreat Tree Plan: large coloured plan marking the locations of trees in the Retreat grounds and showing in great detail the layout of the grounds and gardens, March 1939. [RET/2/1/24/6]

What’s New?

February was a short but busy month.  We began with a week’s closure for our annual Collections Development Week and we certainly packed a lot into those five days.  As well as an (early) Spring clean of our foam book rests, snake weights and covers for our book sofas, we caught up with our accessions: listing, packaging, and shelving new additions, updating existing catalogues and adding new collection level descriptions to Borthcat where needed.  We also made significant inroads into several ongoing cataloguing projects, including Terry’s of York, the architectural firm of Ferrey and Mennim, and Alcoholics Anonymous GB.  It was a tiring week but a very successful one and you can read more about it on our website.

We also welcomed a new placement student from the university’s Institute for the Public Understanding of the Past (IPUP) who will be delving into the largely untouched archive of the Terry family of York.  The Terrys established the eponymous confectionery company which brought the world the famous Terry’s Chocolate Orange and Terry’s All Gold. The surviving company archive has been at the Borthwick for some years but, until recently, few records were known to exist for the family themselves. This changed in 2023 when a large cache of family letters and photographs was generously gifted to the Borthwick.  The IPUP project will explore the archive in greater detail, pulling out interesting stories and potential avenues for research, culminating in the creation of a website so we can begin to share these insights with a wider audience.

New Accessions

We received 18 accessions in February, 11 of which were additions to our University of York Archive. These include annual reports and administrative records - and five issues of an alternative student newspaper called ‘Yarboo’.  Yarboo was a short lived publication that caused quite a stir on campus in 1984-1985 due both to its satirical content and the anonymity of its creators.  That mystery, at least, has now been solved and one of those creators has written about the newspaper on their own blog and their fond memories of student life in 1980s York.

We also received two new archives.  The first is a rather unusual addition, a collection of maps of the British Isles compiled by the German Army General Staff Department of War Maps and Surveying and found in a disused German airbase in 1945.  The maps cover all major towns and cities, power stations, roads and train lines, and telegraphic and telephone networks and would have been used in the planning of a military invasion, and no doubt in the planning of bombing raids too.

Our second new addition could not be more different, a small file of advertisements for products made by John Mackintosh & Sons of Halifax in the 1930s which will complement the company archive we already hold.  The colourful flyers focus particularly on the toffees the firm was so famous for - the 'King of all Toffies' according to the business card included in the file. 

Although you can no longer enjoy 'Treacle Toffees', 'Extra Creamy Toffee', or the intriguingly named 'Monte Carlo Candy', the Mackintosh legacy is not forgotten.  As well as their famous Quality Street assortment, Mackintosh also gave the world Rolos and the Toffee Crisp - both of which are still made and sold today.

New Catalogues

Number of archival descriptions on Borthcat on 1st March 2025: 138,894

In February we added two new catalogues for our Southern African collections, Cuttings from the British Press on Africa, 1945-1975, and records relating to trade unions and trade unionists in South Africa and Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), 1964-1977, which you can read more about below in our Archive of the Month feature.  

Thanks to our Collections Development Week we’ve also added the catalogues of five parish archives to Borthcat: Rillington, Sand Hutton, Luttons Ambo, Bishopthorpe, and Slingsby - meaning we have now retroconverted 66% of our parish catalogues.  Of the newest additions, Rillington dates back the furthest - the earliest surviving parish register begins in 1638 - but Bishopthorpe has perhaps the more interesting history.   The village was originally known as Andrewthorpe, Thorpe on Ouse, or Thorpe St Andrew after the Prior and monks of St Andrew Fishergate in York built a church there at the beginning of the thirteenth century. 

Around forty years later this prime site just outside of the city came to the notice of Archbishop Walter de Grey who acquired the property from the priory and built himself a palace.  The name ‘Bishopthorpe’ first appeared in 1275 and has remained ever since, and Bishopthorpe Palace - still the residence of the Archbishop of York - has long outlived the original St Andrew’s Church.  Visitors to York can take an easy walk out to the village from the city to see the palace and the picturesque ruins of the old church - not the medieval one in this case but its 18th century replacement which was itself replaced due to flooding.  The present St Andrew’s Church dates to 1899 and you can follow the campaign for its foundation (on a site a safer distance from the River Ouse!) in the parish archive.

Our last new catalogue shares the ecclesiastical theme. The architectural firm of Ferrey and Mennim was founded in 1922 and was based in Minster Yard, York, until the early 2000s. Over their long history they have worked on a large number of churches, chapels, and vicarage buildings and in February we began adding their job files, inspection reports and architectural drawings to Borthcat, dating from 1958-2017. You can explore the catalogue online and more will be added in the near future.

News from Conservation

It’s been a hectic start to the year for our Conservation Department, filled with offsite visits to assess new accessions, handling training for new starters, collaborating with the Digitisation team on setting up a new project, mass ordering of preservation and packaging materials for the department, preparing archives for display, responding to enquiries, flattening probate for reprographics orders and much more. Alongside this, our new group of conservation volunteers have been inducted and made a cracking start, wrapping unpackaged rolls and volumes, cleaning architectural plans and contributing to our sustainability goals by helping us to refresh old boxes for reuse.

A new exhibition on the Treasures of Rare Books was installed in the Burton exhibition cases at the end of last year, which showcases some of the wonderful things that can be found in our Rare Books collections. This month we also started planning for the next display, which will be installed after Easter. Preparing new exhibitions can take months of collaboration between curators and conservators: designing, researching and writing on the one hand, and preparing materials, mount making and creating surrogates on the other.

Borthwick Out and About

In February staff from the Borthwick took part in several Post Offer Visit Days on campus. These events are open to all those who have received an offer to study at the University of York, but who might not have quite made up their minds yet.  The visit days provide an excellent opportunity for us to meet these prospective students, to show them some of our original archives, and to share how our extensive collections could benefit them during their time here.  Over the four visit days in February we met more than 200 offer-holders and their families and answered a lot of questions about what we do  - and, of course, about the archives on display! We have a few more of these coming up, as well as our usual enjoyable round of local history fairs and university open days, so do come and say hello if you happen to spot us out and about - we’ll even have some new Borthwick leaflets and branded pencils soon (as if you needed more reasons to say hi).

Looking forward, records from the Borthwick will be featured at a special event hosted by the Rowntree Society to mark the centenary of Joseph Rowntree’s death in 1925.  The event ‘Remembering Rowntree: Why Joseph’s Funeral was so Remarkable’ will be held on the 1st March at the Friargate Meeting House in York as part of a programme of events throughout the year.  You will also spot some of our records in the Society’s ‘JR100’ list which will be updated throughout the year with photographs, objects, and stories relating to Joseph’s life and legacy.  You can read more about events planned on The Rowntree Society website.

Finally, March will see the completion of a longstanding project at the Borthwick and a trip overseas. In 2018  the Borthwick undertook to conserve a parish register from St John Figtree parish on the small Caribbean island of Nevis.  Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, the work has taken rather longer than planned but our lead conservator Alison Fairburn has now finished her painstaking repair of the register and in March she and Gary Brannan, our Keeper of Archives, will accompany it on its ceremonial return to Nevis.  We will bring you a full report in the April newsletter, along with the work we are doing to explore the legacy of the register - which records the baptisms, marriages and burials of both free and enslaved people - in more detail.

Archive of the Month: Trade Unions, Southern Africa

What is it? Records relating to trade unions and trade unionists in South Africa and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), 1964-1977.

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

Why is it Archive of the Month? 

This small archive was preserved thanks to the work of the university’s own Centre for Southern African Studies (CSAS) which, at its launch in 1972, offered the only tailor-made university course on this region in the UK.  In 1974 the Centre began an extensive documentation project, collecting manuscript and printed material relating to the cultural, political, economic and spiritual life of nine different countries in Southern Africa. 

‘Trade Unions, South Africa’ captures a central theme of the collection, the emergence of organised opposition to racist white minority rule, in particular through the work of the labour movement.  Historically, trade unions in both countries had been controlled by white workers, but increasingly the Black majority workforce were pushing for better and more equitable representation, a leveraging of economic power that inevitably had links to broader demands for political freedoms and an end to racial discrimination.  

The archive includes a selection of records relating to this long and difficult struggle for recognition.  You can read reports, meeting minutes and memoranda from the 1970s for both the African Trade Union Congress (ATUC) of Rhodesia which represented Black African workers, and the rival Trade Union Congress of Rhodesia (TUCR) which represented predominantly Europeans.  There are also papers of the Associated Mine Workers of Rhodesia setting out the complaints of colliery workers and the very real dangers they faced - a detailed report on the 1972 Wankie Colliery Disaster in which 426 miners - 390 of them Black - lost their lives, is included in the file. 

For South Africa, there are the speeches and memoranda of South African trade unionist Lucy Mvubelo - who joined the Garment Workers’ Union of African Women in the 1940s and spent the next forty years fighting for the rights of workers and against Apartheid.  Mvubelo was the first Black woman to be elected to the National Executive Council of the Trade Union Congress of South Africa and in 1973 she was awarded World Woman of the Year for her work.  ‘If White South Africans were to experience our difficulties and problems they would have as strong trade unions as we have among the African people,’ Mvubelo wrote in 1973. The trade union movement gave Black workers the means to amplify their voices and demonstrate their collective strength and these papers offer a small but fascinating window into what they achieved.

We’ll be back in April with more news and events from the archive.