All posts by svenjakunze

New catalogues: Papers of A.J. Ayer and Papers of Ruth Pitter (or: Everything is connected)

20th century, Humanities, Modern, Newly available (2019), Women, , , , , , , , , , , ,

At first sight, they don’t have much in common: A.J. Ayer (1910-1989),  a philosopher known for his promotion of logical positivism and close association with humanist ideas who  enjoyed socialising at clubs in London and New York, and at college dinners in Oxford, and Ruth Pitter (1897-1992), a poet deeply rooted in natural mysticism and spirituality, who preferred a much more reclusive life in a Buckinghamshire village.

However,  Ayer and Pitter have a connection, not only through the fact that their respective papers both share an archival home in the Bodleian’s special collections.

Both were regular contributors to the BBC talk show The Brains Trust in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and they actually met and talked, at least once, as this letter from the papers of Ruth Pitter confirms:

‘Fan mail’ received by Ruth Pitter after her appearance on The Brains Trust of 28 May 1957, with retrospective comment by Pitter.  MS. 7154/3.

The ‘other prof’ whose name Ruth Pitter could not remember when annotating her correspondence in the 1970s must have been Julian Huxley, an evolutionary biologist and zoologist (John Betjeman, the poet, writer and broadcaster, completed the Brains Trust panel for that episode of the programme).

Which questions the Brains Trust discussed in May 1957 we do not know, but any queries about religion, divinity, spirituality, nature and evolution, morals and family values would have sparked a lively debate between Pitter who, inspired by C.S. Lewis’s religious broadcasts and writings, had joined the Anglican Church in the 1940s, on one side, and Ayer and Huxley, both staunch rationalists and secular humanists, on the other.

Ruth Pitter donated her extensive correspondence with C.S. Lewis to the Bodleian Library, and around the same time started sorting and extensively annotating her own papers with view to bequeathing them to the Bodleian. The archive comprises literary papers and other material relating to Ruth Pitter’s career as a poet (c.1903-1983 and some posthumous material), as well as personal correspondence with an emphasis on literary and social letters (1911-c.1988) and personal and financial papers (1897-1988), including material relating to Pitter’s decorative painting business Deane & Forester. Also included are photographs (c.1884-1981), prints, drawings, engravings and watercolours (c.1900-1989), audio recordings of interviews with, and songs and poems by, Ruth Pitter (1981-1987 and n.d.), and material relating to Ruth Pitter which was collected by her friend Mary Thomas (1897-1998).

A.J. Ayer’s papers arrived at the Bodleian in 2004, donated by his son Nick. The material comprises personal and professional correspondence and papers, as well as papers – mainly manuscript and typescript versions – relating to A.J. Ayer’s books, essays, lectures, articles and other (published) works. While the material spans Ayer’s academic and professional life from c.1930 to 1989 and includes some posthumous material, there is an emphasis on material from the late 1960s, the 1970s and the 1980s.

For both collections, online catalogues are now available: Papers of A.J. Ayer and the Papers of Ruth Pitter.

Continue reading →

The Halls on ‘Grand Tour’: Travelling the Continent in the early 19th century (and keeping diaries about it)

19th century, Cataloguing, Humanities, Modern, Spotlight, , ,

Guest post by Katherine Knight
Summer intern at Bodleian Libraries Archives & Modern Manuscripts

Many of us today may be tempted to keep some kind of record of our holidays: but very rarely do we imagine they will survive for another two-hundred years. Thomas Kirkpatrick (‘T.K.’)  Hall (1776-1865) and his wife Elizabeth, née Crompton, did the same as many of the English wealthy in the 19th century: they commenced their own ‘Grand Tour’ of Europe. Passing through Kent to France, Switzerland, and Italy, the couple spent thirteen months from the years 1818-1819 touring the continent, and recorded their individual experiences in seven volumes.

Leaving London on 2 June 1818: The first page of Thomas K. Hall’s diary, and the beginning of a journey.

The spines of Mrs Hall’s journals, Vols. I-III

Interestingly, the two appear to have had very different approaches to how to keep their respective journals. While Eliza Hall kept a mostly meticulous account of her travels, with detail given to the activities of each day, she did find that in busy times she got somewhat carried away with the excitement of travelling – as many of us do with our own attempts to journal. When in Rome, she listed the places visited on each day without description, with the details evidently added afterwards from other records.

When in Rome, see all the sights: A tourist’s busy cultural and social schedule in December 1818. The diary also mentions the Halls meeting Lord Byron in or near Rome.

It is here that having a dual account proves invaluable, as T.K. Hall filled in the details of what was missed with elaborate strokes. While in awe of the wonders of St Peter’s Basilica, he was not, however, impressed that there were no special services on Christmas Day – and, even more surprisingly, believed the Sistine Chapel did not live up to expectations!

This temporary lapse in narrative is surprising, as otherwise Eliza’s narrative is meticulous. Her journal is kept in three blue-bound hardback volumes and is immensely detailed.

‘So large an English congregation so far from home’ – church service in Geneva, as described by Eliza Hall [July 1818].

T.K. Hall, while keeping a studious diary of daily affairs, focused on one thing above all: the accommodation. In a sheet pasted into the front cover of one of his two volumes, we can find a handwritten list of hotels, accompanied by the city and rating. A ‘19th century Trip Advisor’, as one might say – and he seemed to have been hard to please, with most of the hotels being labelled ‘so-so’. His journal also offer some interesting details of life on the road. On the last stretch of the journey, Mr. Hall remarks that there was a slight mishap with the carriage overturning – not an occurrence one would be likely to encounter today, although an illness which threatened to derail the holiday is more commonplace.

From ‘very bad’ to ‘excellent’: Thomas K. Hall’s hotel ratings. How many points out of 10 would equal ‘tolerable’ or ‘indifferent’?

Tours and excursions – on mule, on horse, in boat, on foot

Nevertheless, there are several similarities between the style of the two works, right down to the list of towns and distances between which can be found pasted into the covers of each journal. It is tempting to picture the two discussing their journeys, calculating the distances between and making a meticulous log together. Fittingly, both end on the same phrase: thanking God for preserving them on their pleasant journey through the continent.

Mr Hall clearly liked his lists: 3176 miles from Geneva to Brussels (with a few detours, that is)

In a time before travel photography, it is particularly interesting to see a different kind of holiday picture: two volumes of watercolours and sketches by Eliza Hall of various places around Europe. And the landscapes were continued beyond the pair’s brief holiday: the sketches continue through the years, with landscapes of Wales contained amongst the European memories.

An Alpine view, captured in watercolours by Eliza Hall

Heidelberg Castle, 1819

We have some details of the lives of the Halls – like many at the time, they came from a legacy of sugar plantation ownership. It makes for uncomfortable reading today, but is perhaps not surprising when one considers the expense required to embark upon a thirteen-month journey around the continent. The records of life of the Victorian participants of the Grand Tour must inevitably be laid against the background of such sources of income: indeed, it continues to be the foundation of much wealth even today.

– Katherine Knight, University College
Oxford University Careers Service Summer Internship Programme

The late 1810s and 1820s seem to have been popular time for doing the ‘Grand Tour’:  Just as the Halls, Thomas FitzGerald (1788-1860) set out on travel France and Switzerland in 1818/1819, and he returned to the Continent for a combination of tourism and studies in Italy in 1822/1823. His travel diaries and notes are now in the family papers series of the archive of his granddaughter, the scientist Mabel Purefoy FitzGerald (MS. Mabel FitzGerald 81).

 

New Catalogue: Papers of Louis MacNeice

20th century, Humanities, Modern, Newly available (2018), , , , ,

The catalogue of the papers of the Northern Irish poet and playwright Louis MacNeice (1907-1963) is now available online.

MacNeice studied Classics at Oxford from 1926, and together with Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis, he became part of the circle of poets and writer that had formed around W.H. Auden. His professional life began in 1930 as a lecturer in Classics, but in 1941 he joined the BBC and for the next twenty years produced radio plays and other programmes for the Features Department.

Whilst he also wrote articles and reviews, theatre plays, a novel and even a children’s book, MacNeice is best known for his poetry. Between 1929 and 1963, he published more than a dozen poetry volumes, such as Autumn Journal (1939) – regarded by many as his masterpiece, Springboard (1944), Holes in the Sky (1948), Ten Burnt Offerings (1952), and Visitations (1957). His last poetry volume, The Burning Perch came out just a few days after MacNeice’s untimely death in autumn 1963.

Amongst other works published posthumously were a book entitled Astrology (1964), Selected Poems (1964) edited by W.H. Auden, the autobiography The Strings are False (1965) edited by E.R. Dodds, and Varieties of Parable (1965), as well as the radio/ theatre plays The Mad Islands and The Administrator (1964), One for the Grave (1968) and Persons from Porlock (1969), and the song cycle The Revenant (1975).

(Frederick) Louis MacNeice by Howard Coster,
nitrate negative, 1942. NPG x1624.
© National Portrait Gallery, London.
(CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

The archive at the Bodleian Libraries comprises more than 70 boxes of literary papers and other material relating to Louis MacNeice’s career as a writer, as well as extensive personal and professional correspondence, and some personal papers. Continue reading →

Archival packaging, old and new, or: Of silk ribbons and cotton tape

20th century, Modern, Spotlight, , ,

When material from the archive of Archibald Clark Kerr, Baron Inverchapel – or indeed from any of the Bodleian’s modern archives – is ordered to the Special Collections reading rooms, it will most likely arrive in a greyish blue box, the papers neatly housed in blueish grey folders of the same colour. Sheets of acid-free, calcium carbonate buffered paper to separate leaves, ‘Melinex’ polyester pockets for photographs, folder titles written in 2B pencil, acrylic adhesive labels, a brass paperclip here and there – everything screams (or rather whispers… it’s a library after all) ‘archival packaging’.
BS 4971, the 2017 British Standard for the conservation and care of archive and library collections, is the Holy Grail, and no packaging material not complying with its strict rules shall ever come near our precious documents.

Material from the Edgar Wind Papers in full archival packaging armour. Blue-grey or grey-blue, the colour of the envelopes and boxes is heavily contested.

However, when archives first arrive at the Bodleian, the packaging is quite different: all kinds of boxes, cartons, baskets and trunks are used for transfer, and the papers are likely to still be in the order and condition their creator or collector stored them in – including a wide array of folders, envelopes, pockets, sheet protectors, paperclips, pins, staples, ribbons, cords and rubber bands once used to organize and protect them.

In case of the the Inverchapel Archive, almost all of the correspondence came in bundles. Hundreds, if not thousands, of letters, still folded up inside their original envelopes, sorted in little piles and tied together with pieces of string, cord or ribbon – like these exchanged between Archibald Kerr Clark Esq., then a young attaché at the British Embassy in Berlin, and Mrs. Kerr Clark, his mother in London:

All bundled up: Letters from the Archive of Archibald Clark Kerr, Baron Inverchapel, c.1908. Why are they addressed to Archibald Kerr Clark – find out here.

Whilst it was very helpful to identify runs of correspondence, and match letters with their envelopes, this organisation system had two big downsides: the letters would be difficult to access if researchers had to remove them from their envelopes first, and all the early 20th century silk, cotton, wool, hemp, jute… ribbons and cords are not very likely to be compliant with 21st century BS4971 specifications.

Consequently, quite a lot of time on the Inverchapel cataloguing project was actually spent on pre-cataloguing archival processing tasks: removing all those strings, and the rusty pins and paperclips holding together sheets of paper inside the envelopes, unfolding pages, encasing photographs in Melinex, and not least placing the flattened papers safely in archive standard folders.
After processing more than 80 correspondence boxes, the amount of ribbons, cords and strings removed from the archive was rather impressive:

A rich bounty: Ribbons, cords and strings removed from the Inverchapel material. …We should have tied them all together and measured the result – in ells, obviously!

A lot of pink. But apart from his colour preferences some of those textile fasteners also reveal some of the archive owner’s shopping habits, as these ties, probably re-used from delivery parcels, show:

Fruits and tartan: Some of the strings close up

  • Searcy, Tansley &  Co. Ltd., London – most likely a food delivery. One could speculate if H.M. Ambassador, Lord Inverchapel, had a sneaky takeaway…
  • ALEXANDER MACINTYRE & CO – TWEED AND HOSIERY MERCHANTS – INVERARY AND STRONE. ARGYLL. – Proud of his Scottish heritage, and owner of the Inverchapel Estate near Lock Eck, Clark Kerr would have known where to buy his tweeds!
  • BOOTS THE CHEMISTS – how people carried home their soap and aspirin before plastic bags were invented.
  • G. ADAM & CO., FRUITERERS TO HIS MAJESTY, 42, NEW BOND STREET, W., TELEPHONE 2128 MAYFAIR – only the best apples and pears!

Like those shop ties, most strings and ribbons used for tying up the letter bundles seem to have been repurposed, or, like the many pink cotton bands, were haberdashery leftovers. On closer examination, the big pile of old textile fasteners reveals a remarkable variety of materials and colours:

The closest an ambassador’s archive can get to a rainbow?

But however pretty and colourful those tapes and ribbons may be, they still face the fate and final destination of all* old fasteners which could potentially be harmful to our precious archives – the bin.

Where ties are needed to hold bundles together, there is now archive standard unbleached cotton tape in place. Admittedly, this is less exciting than its colourful historic cousins. But it goes very well with the blueish grey/ greyish blue of our acid-free, calcium carbonate buffered boxes and folders, and most importantly: it complies with BS 4971.

Playing it safe: Unbleached cotton tape for archival use.

*Almost all. Some end up in our Bodleian Conservation colleagues’ ‘interesting pin collection’, where they get a new life in documenting the history of stationary and
help to determine the age of undated documents.

New catalogue: Archive of Archibald Clark Kerr, Lord Inverchapel

20th century, Cataloguing, Modern, Newly available (2018), Social Sciences, , , ,

The online catalogue of the Archive of Archibald Clark Kerr, Lord Inverchapel, is now available.

Archibald John Kerr Clark was born 17 March 1882 near Sydney, Australia, the son of John Kerr Clark (1838-1910), a sheep station owner originally from Lanarkshire, Scotland, and his wife Kate Louisa (1846-1926), daughter of Sir John Robertson, prime minister of New South Wales. In 1889, the family moved to England, though John Kerr Clark later returned to Australia.
Kerr Clark was educated at Bath College, and in France, Germany, Spain and Italy, where he studied languages. In March 1906 he passed the entrance examination for the diplomatic service and started working at the Foreign Office in London.  After adopting Kerr as an additional surname in 1911, he became known as Archibald (or Archie, to his friends and colleagues) Clark Kerr.

Archibald John Clark Kerr, 1st Baron Inverchapel by Bassano Ltd, half-plate glass negative, 19 January 1938. NPG x155214
© National Portrait Gallery, London (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

His first posting as a young diplomat took him to Berlin (1908-1910), and after postings to Buenos Aires (1910-1911), Washington (1911-1914), Tehran (1914-1916) and Tangier (1919-1922), he became deputy to High Commissioner Lord Allenby in Egypt (1922-1925).
He served as Minister of the United Kingdom to Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador from 1925 to 1928, to Chile from 1928 to 1931, and to Sweden from 1931 to 1934, before he was appointed Ambassador and posted to Iraq in 1935.
Clark Kerr was British Ambassador to China from 1938 to 1942, during the Second Sino-Japanese War. As Ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1942 to 1946, he was key to shaping the Anglo-Russian relations during the Second World War – most famously, by convincing Churchill to return to talks with Stalin during their meeting in Moscow in August 1942.

A senior British Diplomat, he attended many of the Allied wartime conferences, including the ‘Big Three’ conferences in Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam. He worked with the  Allied Commission to Romania in 1945/46, and in Spring 1946 was sent on a special mission to Java as a mediator in the tensions between the Dutch government and the Indonesian nationalists.
From 1946 Clark Kerr, now elevated to Peerage as Baron Inverchapel, served as British Ambassador in Washington. In March 1948, he retired from the diplomatic service, but was almost immediately appointed to the new committee on European unity, for which he worked until 1949. He died at Greenock 5 July 1951, and was buried at the Inverchapel Estate near Loch Eck in Scotland.

Archibald Clark Kerr entering the Cecilienhof Palace on the third day of the Potsdam Conference, July 1945. (On the left Sir Alexander Cadogan, Under Secretary at the British Foreign Office).
National Archives and Records Administration, Office of Presidential Libraries, Harry S. Truman Library (Public Domain)

Clark Kerr’s archive comprises his personal papers and correspondence, alongside material relating to his career as a diplomat, from the 1900s to the 1940s. Family papers and correspondence, dating back to the 1850s, document the family history, his parents’ lives in Australia, and Clark Kerr’s connections to family members, especially his close relationships to his mother and to his sister Muriel.
Often, the private and the public overlap: for example, in the many letters exchanged between Clark Kerr and his mother. They corresponded at least twice a week, sometimes daily, and together with personal and family news, they exchanged newspaper clippings and extensively commented on society, culture, politics and international relations in the 1900s, 1910s and early 1920s.
Similarly, Clark Kerr’s correspondence with colleagues and friends, such as Harold Nicolson, Vita Sackville-West, Eustace Percy, Alice Drummond-Hay, Robert Boothby and  Gerald Villiers, and with British and foreign aristocrats, such as the German Kaiser’s sister, Sophie Duchess of Sparta (later Queen Consort of Constantine I of Greece) and Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon (later Queen Consort of Georg VI and Queen Mother), paints a vivid picture not only of personal contacts and relationships, but also of the times and social circles the correspondents were living in.

Also available is the online catalogue of the working papers of Clark Kerr’s biographer Donald Gillies, who published Radical Diplomat: The Life of Sir Archibald Clark Kerr, Lord Inverchapel, 1882-1951 in 1998.

Now available: Full catalogue of the Archive of Iona and Peter Opie

20th century, Cataloguing, Modern, Newly available (2018), Social Sciences, , , , ,

The full catalogue of the Archive of Iona and Peter Opie is now available online.

In addition to the previously published sections on the Children’s papers and covering correspondence and the Opie working papers and material relating to the Opies’ publications, the updated catalogue now also covers the Opies’ professional correspondence, personal papers, and material related to collecting children’s books and childhood ephemera.

Fieldwork: Iona and Peter Opie in the playground

The professional correspondence series contains letters about nursery rhymes and childlore received by the Opies from the general public, as well as their correspondence with researchers, academics, authors, bookseller, collectors, cultural and heritage institutions, the media, and other contacts and enquirers. It also includes general correspondence with the Opies’ publisher, Clarendon Press, later Oxford University Press, and with professional organisations, such as the Anthropology Section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, which Peter Opie was president of in 1962/63.
The extensive correspondence with Doreen Gullen, the Opies’ long-term research collaborator and friend, covers both professional and private topics. The series also contains the Opies’ address books, which link each correspondent to a unique reference number – those reference numbers were then used to manage and track the enormous amount of incoming information. The address books often also record background details on the Opies’ correspondents and their activities.

The personal papers feature correspondence with family and friends, diaries and notebooks, memorabilia, writings and other biographical material, mainly relating to Peter Opie. This material was transferred to the Bodleian Library in various tranches in the 1990s, when Iona Opie was sorting through her late husband’s papers, selecting and annotating material for a future Opie Archive. Although it covers most of Peter Opie’s life from his childhood in the 1920s through to his death in February 1982, there is a strong focus on his young adulthood and his early career in the late 1930s and in the 1940s, reflected in particular in his correspondence, scrapbooks and notes, as well as in the papers relating to his early autobiographical publications such as his first book I Want to be a Success (1939).

The collected material series brings together historic childhood and children’s book ephemera, collected by the Opies, and papers about their book collecting activities. Whilst some of this material was found with the Opie Archive, other sections were transferred from the Opie Collection of Children’s Literature at the Bodleian Library. These include manuscript books, historic notebooks and diaries by children or with references to childhood, drawings and illustrations, printed ephemera and merchandise relating to children’s books, as well as exercise books and other school ephemera from the 17th to the 20th century.
The Opies’ book accession diaries, covering their book collecting activities from the 1940s to the 1980s, are part of this series, and so is a large collection of antiquarian booksellers’ catalogues, dating from the 1910s to the 1990s. Not least, there is some material which the Opies took over from other children’s book collectors, such as the working papers and collection lists of their friend Roland Knaster who died in 1979.

Boxes in the Opie Archive: Before…

 

…and after sorting, careful repackaging, labelling and barcoding.

Overall, the Opie Archive now contains 362 boxes – MSS. Opie 1-362, the result of 18 months of surveying, researching, arranging, sorting, flattening, paperclip removing, repackaging, labelling, barcoding and cataloguing.

More than 24,000 leaves of children’s papers and covering correspondence were individually numbered (‘foliated’) in preparation for the future digitisation of the material.
Simultaneously, the collection became (in-)famous with our Conservation colleagues for containing many exotic and challenging-for-safe-storage items, such as Indian panther bones, a 1920s Eton schoolboy cap, friendship pins, grass samples, and 1970s crisp packets.

Inspired by the descriptions of children’s rhymes and games in Opie working files, we, the cataloguers on this project, regularly lapsed into reminiscences about our own playground rhymes, games and crazes in the 1980s and 1990s (who else remembers French Skipping or Pogs?), and occasionally even broke out into bouts of clapping games, with lively ensuing debates about how the correct version of each song should go – “Em Pom Pee” or “Em Bam Bee”, that is the question!

Requests by readers to access the material had to be juggled with a tight cataloguing schedule – and many boxes were moved back and forth between the archives work areas and the Weston Library reading rooms. It was encouraging to see how much the Opie Papers were already in use, and the many questions researchers ask us about the content and structure of the archive then helped to inform our cataloguing strategy.

Midway through our cataloguing project, in October 2017, we received the news that Iona Opie had passed away, at the age of 94. Although saddened and disappointed to have lost the chance to meet her in person, we nevertheless felt privileged to have got to know her through her correspondence and working papers. We particularly admired her tremendous ability to organise, and distil meaning from, the immense volume of data gathered by her and her husband, while simultaneously building warm and long-lasting relationships with a vast network of correspondents.

In his 1969-73 accession diary (now MS. Opie 316), Peter Opie notes that “the age of the computer is coming”, foreseeing that this may one day facilitate a more thorough organisation of the vast amount of material he and Iona amassed over the years, and ponders the use future researchers might make of their collection, once it has been thoroughly sorted and catalogued:

“And although Iona […] and I will never be able to make use of all the material we have assembled, nor can see even to what use it may be put, I am beginning to think we can be confident that, provided it survives, it will be appreciated by somebody some day.”

The completion of the cataloguing project feels like a good step forward to fulfil Peter Opie’s ‘prophecy’, and we are happy (and indeed a little proud) to have a played a small role in the Opies’ big endeavour. Now it is over to you, the readers, to explore the wonderful resource Iona and Peter Opie created for the research of children’s traditions, nursery rhymes, children’s literature, games and play – and to the put it to innovative and creative uses.

Svenja Kunze & Sarah Thiel

The Opie cataloguing project was generously funded by the Wellcome Trust.

The Wellcome Trust Research Bursaries scheme funds individuals working on
small and medium-scale research projects that focus on library or archive collections
supported by a Wellcome Trust Research Resources Grant – such as the Opie Archive.

Please visit the Wellcome Trust website for further information.

The UK Web Archive: The Easter Rising Collection

20th century, 21st century, Humanities, Modern, Web Archives, , ,

Three years ago, the Bodleian Libraries, the Library of Trinity College Dublin, and the British Library started planning a collaborative web archive collection. Looking at the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising in 2016, the idea was to identify, collect, and archive, websites that can contribute to an understanding of the causes, course, and consequences of the pivotal event in modern Irish history. The Easter Rising 1916 Web Archive, as the project was called, aimed to reflect the diverse ways in which the Irish and British states, cultural and educational institutions, as well as communities and individuals engaged with the Easter Rising and its legacy in the centenary year. This meant that we set out to include a wide range of online material, such as official commemorative websites, the websites of museums, archives and heritage institutions, traditional and alternative news media websites, community websites, blogs, social media and even online shops.

The Easter Rising Web Archive featured in exhibitions and events at the Library of Trinity College Dublin and at the Bodleian Libraries

Starting in summer 2015, project curators in Dublin and in Oxford collected websites from the Irish and from the UK web domains, and from the domains of countries where the Irish diaspora have a strong presence, predominantly the USA. Our colleagues at the British Library provided the technical and curatorial infrastructure. By December 2016, the end of the collection period, the Easter Rising Web Archive had grown to more than 300 ‘seeds’ – comprising websites, individual online items such as news articles or event pages, or social media feeds.

Continue reading →

The Braun Family Archive: Second edition catalogue now available

20th century, Cataloguing, Humanities, Modern, Newly available (2017), , , ,

The second edition of the catalogue of the Braun Family Archive is now available here.

More than 50 boxes – MSS. Braun 168-221 – have been added since the first catalogue was published in February 2015. In addition to the papers of, and collected by, Thomas Braun and his parents Konrad and Hildburg Braun, the archive now includes a collection of family verse and writings, as well as correspondence, personal documents, writings, memorabilia and photographs of Gerhard Braun, his wife Anneliese and daughter Ruth.

Gerhard Braun (1893-1946) was Konrad Braun’s elder brother. By profession he was an obstetrician and gynaecologist. As a young man he served as a medical officer in the First World War and then as an American POW. In 1927 he married Anneliese Finster (1901-1996), and adopted her daughter Ruth (‘Rüthli’, 1926-1999).

Braun family photo, c. 1931

The Friedmann-Brauns, c. 1931: Gertrud and Felix Friedmann-Braun with Ruth, at the back Konrad, Hildegard, Johannes, Anneliese and Gerhard Braun. – Photo: Braun Family Archive

Due to the Friedmann-Brauns’ Jewish ancestry, the family faced discrimination and persecution under the Nazi regime. After losing his posts in the public health system and seeing his previously successful practice limited to private patients and the to Jews only, Gerhard Braun was arrested in the course of the November pogrom in 1938 and taken to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he was detained for five and a half weeks. He was released in December 1938, on condition that his family paid a large sum in tax and that he emigrated.

12-year-old Ruth was sent ahead to safety in England in late 1938, staying with family friends – Curt and Hilde Sluzewski who had had already emigrated from Germany – in London. Gerhard and Anneliese followed in early 1939. Since they had been forced to leave behind most of their possessions, and Gerhard Braun was forbidden to work, the family, for more than three years, was reliant on the generous support of Marcel Wolfers, a merchant in the China trade.

Gerhard Braun was detained as an ‘enemy alien’ at the Huyton internment camp near Liverpool for several months in 1940. Only from 1942 was he able to practice medicine in England, as a junior hospital doctor in Birmingham. However, his health had been seriously impaired by his mistreatment at the hands of the Nazis and he died in 1946, at just 52 years of age.

Gerhard Braun at the piano

Gerhard Braun at the piano. – Photograph by permission of Christopher Braun

Anneliese and Ruth Braun eventually moved from Birmingham to London, where they shared a house in Golders Green until Anneliese Braun’s death in 1996. Mother and daughter were extremely close, and together they were known as ‘the Pummels’ to family and friends.

Anneliese Braun was an amateur writer since her youth, and some of her poems and short stories had been published in German newspapers before 1933. Even before coming to England in 1939, she had begun to write in English as well, and later she also translated works by other writers, including Monika Mann, Ruth Tenney (Marcel Wolfer’s wife) and Veronica Erdmann-Czapski, with whom she was friends.

Ruth Braun, having attended Birmingham Theatre School as a young woman, also had a lifelong interest in drama and music – in many ways, following the family tradition. Her ‘adopted grandfather’, Felix Friedmann-Braun (1861-1934), had been a brilliant amateur pianist in Berlin, and his four children grew up in a prosperous, cultured family with many links to leading literary, musical and artistic figures in Germany.

Poster for a recital by Hildegard Braun in Berlin, 1918. The Bechstein-Saal, a chamber music hall with more than 500 seats, had been opened 1892 with a series of concerts by Johannes Brahms, Anton Rubinstein and the like. Hildegard Braun certainly was in good company! – Photo: Braun Family Archive

Daughter Hildegard was a successful professional singer, the youngest son, Johannes, an actor. Konrad Braun was a keen amateur violinist and played in a string quartet with friends (Curt ‘Slu’ Sluzewski, amongst others), while Gerhard had inherited his father’s talent as a pianist. Gerhard also composed short pieces of music, such as birthday serenades for Ruth, and set to music verses by his wife Anneliese and poems by Ruth Tenney. Some of his compositions survive in the archive (MS. Braun 221), and together with a collection of family verse compiled by Thomas and Christopher Braun (MSS. Braun 168-169), these give a wonderful glimpse of the important role that music, literature and writing played in the Braun family’s life – as a profession, as a pastime and for pleasure, and not least, as a source of a sense of identity, dignity and hope in times of hardship.

A song written down for Konrad Braun “von seinem Papa” – by his father, Felix Friedmann-Braun, 1911. – Photo: Braun Family Archive

Poem written by Konrad Braun for his wife Hildburg’s 30th birthday on 14 May 1940. Just a year earlier, they had emigrated from Germany to England to escape persecution by the Nazis. The poem was published 63 years later, transcribed and translated by their son Thomas Braun, in The Oxford Magazine, No. 216, 2003. – Photo: Braun Family Archive

Find out more about the Braun family story, and about the archive, here.

The Braun Family Archive was donated to the Bodleian Library by Christopher Braun, London, in several tranches between July 2010 and May 2017, together with a grant towards the cost of preparing the catalogue.

Now available: Catalogue of the Archive of Sir James Gowans

20th century, Cataloguing, Medical, Modern, Newly available (2017), Sciences, , , ,

The Archive of the immunologist Sir James Gowans  (b.1924) is now available (online catalogue).

James Learmonth ‘Jim’ Gowans, after obtaining his medical degree from King’s College Hospital in 1947, came to Oxford on a Medical Research Council Studentship to work under Howard Florey, and was awarded a DPhil in 1953.

During the 1950s he did pioneering work on the life cycle of the lymphocyte, establishing that the small lymphocyte continuously recirculated from the blood to the lymph and back again, and that this cell was at the centre of immunological responses.
In 1962 he became Henry Dale Research Professor of the Royal Society at the Dunn School of Pathology, University of Oxford, and from 1963 he was also Director of the Medical Research Council’s Cellular Immunology Research Unit at the Dunn School.

In 1977 Gowans left his research career to become the Secretary of the Medical Research Council and during 10 years in office oversaw, or was involved with, a number of major projects and initiatives, notably the establishment of Celltech as a company to develop biotechnology research into commercial opportunities, folic acid trials to prevent the development of neural tube defects, the Rothschild proposals for the reorganisation of medical research funding in the UK, the setup of the Voluntary Licensing Authority for Human in-vitro Fertilization and Embryology, and MRC AIDS Directed Programme.
From 1989-1993 Gowans was the Secretary-General of the Human Frontier Science Program, Strasbourg.

Alongside his posts at the Medical Research Council and the Human Frontier Science Program, and after his retirement, Gowans was a consultant and advisor, non-executive director or trustee for a number of companies, organisations and charities, including the World Health Organization Programme on AIDS, 3i – Investment in Industries, the Tavistock Trust, the Charing Cross Sunley Research Centre, Synaptica, EICOS – European Initiative for Communicators of Science, St. Christopher’s Hospice, General Motors Cancer Research Foundation.
Amongst many awards he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1963, and knighted in 1982.

The archive mainly comprises professional and scientific correspondence, and related papers such as briefing papers and reports, relating to all stages of Gowans’s career, as well as general (personal) correspondence, papers relating to awards, honours and memberships, conferences and visits, publications, and selected photographs.

The material was catalogued with the generous support of Sir James Gowans.

#WAWeek2017 – Researchers, practitioners and their use of the archived web

20th century, 21st century, Digital archives, Event, Modern, Web Archives, , , , ,

This year, the world of web archiving  saw a premiere: not only were the biennial RESAW conference and the IIPC conference, established in 2016, held jointly for the first time, but they also formed part of a whole week of workshops, talks and public events around web archives – Web Archiving Week 2017 (or #WAWeek2017 for the social medially inclined).

After previous conferences Reykjavik (2016) and Arhus (RESAW 2015), the big 2017 event was held in London, 14-16 June 2017, organised jointly by the School of Advanced Studies of the University of London, the IIPC and the British Library.
The programme was packed full of an eclectic variety of presentations and discussions, with topics ranging from the theory and practice of curating web archive collections or capturing whole national web domains, via technical topics such as preservation strategies, software architecture and data management, to the development of methodologies and tools for using web archives based research and case studies of their application.

Even in digital times, who doesn’t like a conference pack? Of course, the full programme is also available online. (…but which version will be easier to archive?)

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