Category Archives: Newly available (2018)

New Catalogue: Papers of Louis MacNeice

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

New catalogue: Shrimpton’s Oxford Caricatures

The online catalogue of Shrimpton’s Oxford Caricatures is now available.

Thomas Shrimpton & Son published and sold photographic reproductions of commissioned or submitted original caricatures from their premises at 23-4 Broad St., Oxford, from 1868-1901, their shop window display seemingly their only advertising strategy, there being no evidence of them ever having produced a catalogue or list.

Image of Shrimpton & Sons shop window

Shrimpton & Sons shop window, with Benjamin Jowett, Vice-Chancellor and Master of Balliol College and three beadles as sandwich men advertising publications for sale, 1884. 8 recognisable caricatures are on display and are held within collection. G. A. Oxon. 4º 417, fol. 1050.

The caricatures were primarily intended for undergraduates and drawn by undergraduates, portraying the trials and tribulations of undergraduate life, as well as the delights, as seen from their perspective. Images are immediate and inventive, and often quite irreverent. Certain individuals received special and frequent attention, their identification, despite (thinly) disguised attempts to conceal their names through clever or simplistic wordplay, were only too obvious to University members. Many caricatures lack a proper caption or title, relying solely upon a pithy phrase, quotation or misquotation to assist the viewer. Some allusions are obscure or meaningless at first sight, but with thought and research their message or humorous allusion has been revealed.

The subject matter includes many aspects of University life, notably University and religious personalities. Other subjects frequently covered are ritualism, politics, aestheticism , ‘town and gown’ confrontations and women, especially allusions to their becoming full members of the University. The imagery is invariably humorous, witty and inventive, covering local (University), as well as, national events; many display learned quotations from classical authors and contemporary poets. Throughout the publishing history distinct series were produced, notably ‘Great Guns of Oxford’ (Nos. 1 – [70]) and’ Our Public Schools’ (Nos.1-27), generally representing an individual in their familiar setting, though always done humorously.  In all there are 1214 images. The 7 albums which comprise the collection would appear to represent the complete set of caricatures published. This set, together with the one in the John Johnson Collection, are the only known ‘complete sets’. I have made every attempt to identify individuals (500+), including caricaturists, locations and events in order to produce a fully comprehensive catalogue. Where appropriate, contextual notes have been added and quotations cited. The locations of the (few known) surviving, original caricatures are provided within the catalogue description.

The heyday of the publishing history of the ‘Caricatures’ in terms of output and inventiveness was 1868-84, after which new publications became increasingly erratic. There was probably a combination of reasons for this, but its long demise may well have started in earnest when Thomas Shrimpton died in 1885 aged 79. Perhaps its commercial potential was already waning. Even so they had become an Oxford institution, known by all at the University at the time and remembered fondly by many for years to come. The importance of these caricatures is not only the number of individuals represented (some of whom may have no existing likeness elsewhere), but also the context in which they appear, alluding to events which would, perhaps, be otherwise completely forgotten.

Until now their full extent could not be fully appreciated. Now, for the first time, this wonderful, visual resource for the study of various aspects of Oxford University life in the second half of the nineteenth century, has been fully catalogued.

Colin Harris

An archive in exile: Arturo & Ilsa Barea

By Eva Nieto McAvoy

Arturo and Ilsa Barea’s archive and library have been kept in a terrace house near Finsbury Park for the past 40 years. Their niece Uli Rushby-Smith inherited this large collection in the 1970s and has taken upon herself the daunting task of looking after the estate and ensuring that the Bareas’ legacies are kept alive by promoting several new editions of their work. It was through Arturo Barea’s biographer Michael Eaude that I came into contact with Uli, the terrace house, the papers and the books in 2011. I was interested in writing a PhD thesis on Arturo Barea and having access to the archive was a wonderful oportunity. Aside from researching for my thesis ‘A Spaniard in Hertfordshire: The Intellectual Exile of Arturo Barea’, I catalogued the papers and, in the process, became personally involved in this wonderful story. When I first arrived, about twenty boxes of articles, letters, drafts, newspaper cuttings and scrapbooks belonging to Arturo and Ilsa, and several walls covered with the books of five generations (from Ilsa’s parents to her great nieces) were awaiting me. The results of the organizing and cataloguing can now be enjoyed by users for the Weston Library, the new home of Arturo and Ilsa Barea’s papers.

Photographs in the archive, photo by Sonia Boué

Photographs in the archive, photo by Sonia Boué

The Bareas started their exile homeless, but also paperless and bookless. They managed to bring over a case with personal and family documents and some photographs from their previous life in Spain. But that’s about it. For the most part, this archive is an exile’s archive: written in exile, built in exile, read in exile and kept in exile until today.

I have to confess that my weekly visits to the archive, working in the nostalgic living room furnished with Biedermeier cabinets, with walls full of books and magazines, blue china and netsuke that belonged to Ilsa, overlooked by the solemn presence of Barea’s grandfather clock, are still my favourite part of the research. Each letter or photograph has a story behind it and more often than not, Uli has filled in the blanks with her memories of Arturo and Ilsa.

Arturo Barea (Badajoz 1897 – Faringdon, Oxfordshire 1957) was a Spanish writer, literary critic and broadcaster. A socialist and active member of the UGT (the Socialist trade union) during the Spanish Civil War, Barea was the head of the Press Department of the Republican Foreign Office in Madrid, dealing with foreign press correspondents such as Ernest Hemingway or John Dos Passos. During this time, he met and married his second wife, the Austrian socialist Ilsa Barea (née Ilse Pollak), his life-long companion, collaborator and translator.

Ilsa & Arturo in their garden

Ilsa & Arturo in their garden

In 1938 Barea and Ilsa left Spain for France and then England, where they arrived in March 1939. It was during his early years in exile that Barea became a well-known contributor of articles and short stories to Horizon, Time and Tide, the New Statesman, the Times Literary Supplement and Tribune, aside from contributing the essay ‘Struggle for the Spanish Soul’ to Orwell’s wartime series Searchlight Books. He was also a regular broadcaster for the BBC Latin American Service under the penname ‘Juan de Castilla’. Barea is the author of the autobiographical trilogy The Forging of a Rebel, which was first published in English by Faber&Faber (1941-1946) and edited by T.S Eliot. The trilogy was an immediate international success and was translated into nine languages during the forties. The Spanish edition came out in Argentina in 1951 and it was only published in Spain in 1977 after Francisco Franco’s death. Barea never returned to Spain and became a British national in 1948.

Ilsa Barea (1902-1973), née Pollak, was a socialist political activist, journalist and translator. Born in Vienna into a liberal family, Ilsa was politically active early on, particularly in the areas of propaganda and education. She was a member of the Austrian Communist Party initially then later the Austrian Social Democratic Party. In 1936, she was employed by the Press Department of the Republican Foreign office in Madrid. During this period of the Spanish Civil War, she met Arturo Barea. They were both working as censors at their headquarters in the Telefonica (the title of her serialised novel published in the Austrian Arbeiter-Zeitung in 1949). After the death of her first husband, Leopold Kulcsar,  in January 1938, Ilsa married Arturo and together they fled Spain.

While in exile, Ilsa continued supporting the Spanish Republican struggle by publishing articles in Time and Tide, New Statesman, Times Literary Supplement, and Tribune. In August 1939 she joined the BBC Monitoring Service in Evesham, translating broadcasts from German and Spanish alongside Ernest Gombrich, George Weidenfeld, Martin Esslin and Anatol Goldberg. She was an exceptionally gifted linguist. Later her work focused on evaluating foreign writers, translating many of them for English and American publishing houses. She also broadcast for the BBC on a number of subjects.

Vienna. Legend and Reality (Secker and Warburg, 1966)

Vienna. Legend and Reality (Secker and Warburg, 1966)

Ilsa was a close collaborator of Arturo’s, influencing his work in many ways. Her most important contribution was the translation of his trilogy The Forging of a Rebel into English, praised for its quality in many reviews. The legacy of her father, Valentin Pollak, a well-known Viennese teacher and educationalist, was carried on in Ilsa’s work as a teacher herself and interpreter for Labour Parties and Unions across Europe. She became a British national in 1948, but after Arturo’s death in 1957, she returned to Vienna regularly, spending the last years of her life there. She is the author of Vienna: Legend and Reality (1966), a social and cultural history of the city.

Arturo and Ilsa shared a life of letters until his death in 1957; he wrote; she wrote and translated what he had written in Spanish into English. Snooping around the couple’s papers I can imagine them in their cottage in Eaton Hastings, working at their shared desk piled with papers threatening to tip over while listening to the radio in the background and having endless discussions about politics in several languages as they shared the house with a mixture of family members and friends from different places. It is precisely this mixture of languages and intellectual traditions which has a very strong presence in the archive and the library.

It is overall surprising to find a comparatively small proportion of material in Spanish – letters and documents in English, German, French, Danish and even Swedish open a window onto an important period of European history. The archive is an important repository of Spanish culture in exile, but also of Austrian culture and, even more importantly, of the internationalism that permeated the anti-fascist struggle of the Second World War and the anti-communist struggle during the Cold War.

The Forge, The Track and The Clash (Faber & Faber, 1941, 1943, 1946)

The Forge, The Track and The Clash (Faber & Faber, 1941, 1943, 1946)

Some of the most important holdings in the archive are the original and annotated typescripts of Arturo and Ilsa’s work like Arturo’s La Raiz Rota, Ilsa’s Vienna, as well as their many short stories, articles and even unpublished poetry by Ilsa. Sadly there is no typescript of La forja de un rebelde, but only a few chapters in French and the first two pages of La forja in Spanish, probably from 1938.

Arturo and Ilsa’s papers are hard to separate. Aside from their close intellectual collaboration, she often wrote letters on his behalf, particularly when they first arrived – many of them explaining Arturo’s limitations with English. But Arturo could read in English, and the number of British classics in their library gives credence to a biographical note of 1941 which explained “that his spoken English is still atrocious, but he is beginning to appreciate Jane Austen”. There is an incredible articulation of Spain and Britain in Barea’s work and in the archive and library. On the shelves we can find Don Quijote de la Mancha sitting quite comfortably next to Tristram Shandy. Letters to Cyril Connolly and John dos Passos are written in Spanish and are mixed with those of Arturo to his family back in Madrid. As expressed in one of Barea’s obituaries, he served as an “interpreter between two different civilizations and ways of life”.

Uli tells us that the Bareas spent most of their time writing letters and reading newspapers and magazines, ranging from the Manchester Guardian to Picture Post. All of these activities have left traces in the archive as well. Apparently, one of Uli’s jobs was to help them read through the morning papers, to cut out all the news relating to whatever topic they were writing about at the moment and to paste the clippings in scrapbooks – all of which are also in the archive.

Throughout their careers, Arturo and Ilsa wrote book reviews and articles about the literature and authors of their homelands. They also had an important role in promoting, and often translating into English, Spanish authors such as Camilo J. Cela and other writers in exile like Guillermo de Torre, Ramón J. Sender, Esteban Salazar Chapela, Francisco Ayala or Max Aub. After Arturo’s death, Ilsa continued this work as a translator from Spanish and German, but also as a reader for British publishing houses, as an editor, and as an interpreter, particularly for trade unions. We can find most of this paperwork in the archive, aside from around 12 boxes of correspondence that traces Arturo and Ilsa’s work and life in exile.

Arturo Barea broadcasting for the BBC Latin American Service

Arturo Barea broadcasting for the BBC Latin American Service

The archive also illustrates Barea’s relationship with Latin America. Articles for the Argentinian newspaper La Nación, around 650 of the 850 broadcasts he wrote for the BBC Latin American Service, fan-mail to “Juan de Castilla” and details of his 1956 trip to Argentina, Chile and Uruguay – including airplane tickets and a record of all the vaccines he needed.

Arturo’s past as a non-intellectual also sneaks into the archive in rather unexpected ways. One of his major projects was to design a bookshelf system that could be assembled and dismantled by anyone in order to adapt to different spaces and uses, decades before IKEA had the same idea. Drawing on his previous experience in a patent agency in Spain, Arturo tried to patent his design. The shelves still stand in Uli’s living room, more than 60 years after Arturo first built them.

Today, the Bareas’ archive is arguably still in exile. The donation to the Bodleian is an important step in assuring access to its holdings for future generations of scholars – although researchers will now miss Uli and her partner Eugene’s wonderful meals and conversations. One question that comes to mind is why not send the holdings back to Spain, as has happened with other Spanish Republican exiles’ libraries? The return to Spain is often seen as a reconciliation following the injustice of the years of expulsion.

Several reasons are behind the decision to donate the archive to the Bodleain. The cosmopolitanism of the holdings; the fact that Arturo’s work is difficult to separate from that of his wife, which represents a whole chapter of Austrian culture in exile; and the fact that the transnational character of their work might be best represented in Britain, as an example of the internationalism of the war and post-war periods. It is also a much needed reminder of how Britain’s (often reluctant) hosting of European exiles resulted in the political, cultural and social contributions of Europeans to British culture and politics.

Most importantly, it is undeniable that Ilsa and Arturo started their exile struggling to overcome the violent loss of the life they were forced to leave behind. In 1956 Arturo still felt that ‘la patria se siente como un dolor agudo’ – the homeland feels like an acute pain. But Ilsa and Arturo were also able to embrace exile as a new beginning, a new life together in a foreign land that soon became home.

Archives, libraries, books and scrapbooks can help exiles keep links with their homeland, but can also ground them to their new homes. Arturo and Ilsa’s archive is testimony to this. If, in Adorno’s words, “To those who no longer have a homeland, writing becomes home”, the archive is already home and it belongs here, in Britain more than there, in Spain.

New catalogue: Archive of Dame Louise Johnson

The online catalogue of the Archive of Dame Louise Johnson is now available.

‘[T]he moment comes when you actually solve a problem—it may be quite a small problem—but for a few moments you stand there and think “Nobody else knows this but me”.’ – Dame Louise Johnson

RESEARCH

Never one to shy away from a challenge Dame Louise Napier Johnson (1940–2012), biophysicist and structural biologist, spent her long career solving many problems; mostly in the field of structural enzymology that she helped create.

One of the first she solved was when she, David Phillips, and Charles Vernon described the enzyme lysozyme and how it bound its substrates at a special meeting of the Royal Institution in 1965. This was at a time when structural biology was in its infancy and lysozyme was the second protein and first enzyme to have its structure elucidated. It was also the first time that the mechanism through which enzymes worked on a structural level was described.

Notes on the structure of lysozyme.

Notes on the structure of lysozyme.

This was more than just an interesting theoretical exercise; it had far reaching implications and showed that understanding structure could help in understanding biological processes. Its practical application to drug discovery changed the face of pharmaceutical research. By the 1970s pharmacological researchers were using rational drug design and looking at protein receptors and their properties and binding potential. Knowing the structure of molecules, they could look for potential binding sites and postulate possible interactions. They could then look for analogues or ‘build’ new molecules specific to targeted binding sites.

She went on to tackle larger and more complex proteins like ribonuclease S and glycogen phosphorylase, but the tools of the time meant that it was a long hard slog. In order to examine these proteins they had to be crystallised to achieve high resolution images. These crystals did not last long and in the early days of structural biology protein structures were studied using diffractometers that took days to record data sets, often going through several crystals at a time.

DIAMOND LIGHT SOURCE

Needing faster and higher resolution data acquisition she turned to synchrotron radiation, which at the time was used primarily for studying purely physical phenomena. She championed the use of synchrotron radiation in the life sciences and was heavily involved in plans for the construction of a third generation synchrotron, Diamond Light Source, in the UK.

Breaking ground for the 250m long x-ray imaging and coherence beamline.

Breaking ground for the 250m long x-ray imaging and coherence beamline.

She came on board Diamond as the Director of Life Sciences because she believed that good research needed good infrastructure and support. She was heavily involved in planning and testing the beamlines, spearheaded a collaboration with Imperial College London to build the Membrane Protein Laboratory and secured funding for the Harwell Campus for visiting researchers.

Robotic sample changers on the MX beamlines.

Robotic sample changers on the MX beamlines.

Her tireless work saw the number of researchers working in structural biology at Diamond rise to its current 40%.

But she didn’t just support researchers with funding and facilities. While Director she continued as head of the Laboratory of Molecular Biophysics where her sympathetic management and light hand brought the best out of her research group.

LABORATORY OF MOLECULAR BIOPHYSICS

In 1967 Johnson joined David Phillips at the newly founded Laboratory of Molecular Biophysics at Oxford University; succeeding him as department head in 1990. Johnson was a constant in a department which endured considerable turnover of staff. The nature of Johnson’s field was very dynamic and it was common for researchers to move to and from other institutions regularly throughout their careers. One of twenty senior staff in 1975; by 2000 she was the only one remaining.

As head, she supervised around 80 people with an outside grant income in 2000 of almost £7 Million; overseeing a successful graduate programme while maintaining a nurturing environment for students and staff alike.

She routinely organised over 50 in-house and general research seminars annually. Many of them focused on the laboratory’s very productive output. Between 1995-6 alone, more than 30 protein and virus structures were solved. She trained a generation of Oxford crystallographers; as evidenced by the plethora of Protein Data Bank entries (including many forms of glycogen phosphorylase and cell cycle CDK/cyclin complexes) deposited by her lab; and kept the department running smoothly when they inevitably departed.

Johnson endeavoured to be a role model for other women. It was source of pride for Louise Johnson that of the six senior faculty members in her laboratory, three were women. She was also a trustee of the Daphne Jackson fund for scientists returning to research after career breaks. In September 2007 a symposium was held in her honour to recognise her continuing achievements and contribution the University.

– Emily Chen and Sean Macmillan

CREDITS

The archive of Louise Johnson came to us through the Saving Oxford Medicine project which sought to discover and catalogue collections relating to Oxford that have had an impact on the medical sciences. These papers were kindly donated by Professor Elspeth Garman and Johnson’s son Umar Salam.

New catalogue: Archive of Archibald Clark Kerr, Lord Inverchapel

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

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.


Opie Archive: Working papers and publications material now available

The catalogues of two further series of the Opie Archive have now been completed and are available to search online here. Series B comprises the Opies’ working papers and research materials, while Series C consists of material relating to the Opies’ publications.

The first part of the working papers series contains a collection of 239 subject files, stored in 105 boxes (MSS. Opie 47-151). Compiled by Iona Opie, in the days before Excel spreadsheets, this series of subject files represents a large, analogue database of all the Opies’ research materials, which formed the basis of their published works. The files cover a range of topics, such as nursery rhymes, children’s songs, games and playground lore, as well as their historical, literary, sociological and geographical context. They contain research notes and drafts, extracts of material written by children in response to the Opies’ school surveys, newspaper cuttings, journal articles, letters from the Opies’ many correspondents, photographs, postcards and other ephemera. The subject files were added to over a number of years, largely from the 1940s to the 1980s and -’90s, although several files also include older collected material, such as extracts of material on children’s games gathered by A.S. Macmillan in 1922 and sent to the Opies by his daughter.

The Opie working files are housed in their original ‘Loxonian’ binders from circa the 1940s-1950s, which will be of interest to any connoisseurs of vintage stationary. These ingenious hardcover binders come with laces, much like shoe laces, which hold the sheets in place, and are then fastened at the front with metal spiral clips.

As far as possible, the arrangement of the files aims to reflect the Opies’ own original file order, based on their numbered or alphabetical file titles; otherwise the files are arranged chronologically, according to the publication date of the various Opie books to which the files relate. However, not all of the material collected by the Opies made it into their published books. For instance, some of the collected songs, rhymes and jokes contained in the ‘Improper’ files in MS. Opie 61, are surprisingly bawdy, and certainly could not have been included in a book like The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren back in 1959. Nevertheless, even those relatively innocent verses that did make it into this book, were too strong for some; a few amusing newspaper clippings from 1966, contained in MS. Opie 75, tell of a substitute teacher who was reprimanded after scandalised parents complained about the ‘saucy’ verses he had read aloud from the Opies’ Lore and Language book to a class of 13-year-old pupils.

Some unexpected items found inside some of the subject files included a Kellogg’s Crunchy Nut cereal box from the 1990s with a Humpty Dumpty ‘spot the differences’ puzzle on the back, contained in a file on nursery rhymes, a ring tab from a tin can in a section on ‘projectiles’ within a file on children’s activities, various football and baseball trading cards, some 1970s crisp packets, a 1980s ‘friendship pin’ created using a safety pin and colourful beads, to be worn attached to one’s shoe laces or lapel, and even some samples of grasses, from the 1960s, which children used to bind together in clusters to create miniature trees. The grass samples, which were stuck down under a sheet of cellophane, were duly examined by our Conservation department, but were fortunately pronounced safe, in archive preservation terms.

[1960s grass samples, and a 1980s ‘friendship pin’ – two unexpected items found in file ‘Activities D-G’, MS. Opie 145]

Additional material, also relating to the Opies’ work and research, which did not originally belong to their pre-existing collection of subject files, was added onto the end of the Working Papers series, but in a separate sub-series (MSS Opie 152-168). This includes material on children’s books, further research notes, scrapbooks, newspaper cuttings files, and even the Opies’ library tickets and bibliographical notes, which show the vast number of books they consulted in the course of their research.

The fruits of all this research can be seen in Series C of the Opie Archive, which contains material relating to the Opies’ publications. This material shows how Peter and Iona’s published works took shape, including manuscripts, corrections, paste-ups, and proof copies, as well as correspondence with publishers, concerning the process of planning and producing their books. The reception of these books, once they were finally released into the world, is documented in the press cuttings of book reviews, carefully saved up (one imagines, with some pride) by the Opies. Aside from their books, other Opie productions are likewise included in this series, such as various articles, lectures, exhibitions and broadcasts. Moreover, any Opie enthusiasts will be particularly interested in the tantalising glimpse of further Opie works which might have been, offered by papers relating to book proposals and publishing projects which were never realised.


Please be aware that work on the remaining Opie Archive is still ongoing, and parts of the archive will continue to become temporarily unavailable whilst preservation and cataloguing work is being carried out. We aim to accommodate urgent researchers’ requests for access wherever possible, however, if you do need to consult uncatalogued material from the Opie Archive before June 2018, please ensure that you contact us with as much advance notice as possible, so that we can advise on the availability of the material in question and make any necessary arrangements.


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

The Shāhnāmah of Ibrāhīm Sulṭān – Available Online from Digital.Bodleian

VIEW IBRĀHĪM SULṬĀN’S SHĀHNĀMAH ONLINE
The Shāhnāmah – Book of Kings (or King of Books) – is an epic poem written in Persian by Abū l-Qāsim Firdawsī of Ṭūs. Completed in about 1010 CE, the book is composed of some 60,000 verses which narrate the history of Greater Persia from mythical beginnings until the Arab conquests of the 7th century.

Said to be the longest poem ever to have been written by a single person, the significance of Firdawsī’s Shāhnāmah to the Persian-speaking world can be compared to that of the works of Homer to Greece.

No manuscript copies of the Shāhnāmah survive from the 11th or 12th centuries, and only two from the 13th century are still extant, but many copies from the Timurid and Safavid periods are preserved in Library collections today.

Three of the grandsons of Tīmūr (Tamerlane) are known to have had lavish copies of Firdawsī’s Shāhnāmah or Persian Book of Kings made for them. The Shāhnāmahs of Bāysunghur, Muḥammad Jūkī, and Ibrāhīm Sulṭān are preserved in the Golestan Palace, Tehran, the Royal Asiatic Society, London, and the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford, respectively.

Left: Shamsah showing inscription dedicated to Ibrāhīm Sulṭān. (MS. Ouseley Add. 176, fol. 12a). Right: Ibrāhīm Sulṭān holding court outdoors. (MS. Ouseley Add. 176, fol. 1b).

Thought to have been made in Shiraz sometime between 1430 and Ibrāhīm Sulṭān’s death in 1435, this copy of the Shāhnāmah is known for its exceptional miniature paintings and exquisite illuminated panels.

The manuscript was acquired by Sir Gore Ouseley, a Diplomat and Linguist, during travels in the East in the early 19th century, and came into the Bodleian in the 1850s along with many other of Sir Gore’s collections. It is now preserved as MS. Ouseley Add. 176.

Ibrāhīm Sulṭān’s Shāhnāmah is now digitally available online via Digital.Bodleian. Recently, its sibling Muḥammad Jūkī’s Shāhnāmah was published online by the Royal Asiatic Society; both in good time for Nawruz or Persian New Year on 20th March!

REFERENCES

Abdullaeva, F., & Melville, C., The Persian book of kings : Ibrahim Sultan’s Shahnama (Treasures from the Bodleian Library). Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2008.

Beeston, A. F. L., Hermann Ethé, and Eduard Sachau. Catalogue of the Persian, Turkish, Hindûstânî, and Pushtû Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library . Oxford: At the Clarendon, 1889.

Robinson, B. W.,  A Descriptive Catalogue of the Persian Paintings in the Bodleian Library. Oxford: Clarendon, 1958.

The Bodleian Libraries would like to thank the Bahari Fund for helping to make this digitization project possible.

New Catalogue: The Archive of Hilary Bailey

The catalogue of the archive of Hilary Bailey is now available online here.

Hilary Bailey (1936 – 2017), was a writer and editor whose career spanned many decades and genres. Her early output largely focussed on science fiction, with many of her short stories, including The Fall of Frenchy Steiner (1964), published in the science fiction publication New Worlds during the 1960s, and during this time she also co-authored The Black Corridor (1969) with her then husband, the science fiction writer Michael Moorcock; Bailey served as editor of New Worlds from 1974 to 1976 .

Her social circle contained a number of science fiction writers who were fellow contributors to New Worlds, including Graham Hall, another science fiction writer and editor of New Worlds whose papers are also included within the archive.

Hilary Bailey’s post-New Worlds output tended not to fall under the genre of science fiction. Her first solo full length novel, Polly Put The Kettle On (1975), was the first Polly Kops novel she wrote, and the character would later feature in Mrs Mulvaney (1978) and As Time Goes By (1988) – novels focussing on a woman in London through the 1960s to the 1980s.

Indeed, much of Bailey’s work had a focus on women, including her retellings and sequels of classic novels – including Frankenstein’s Bride (1995) – an alternate telling wherein Victor Frankenstein agrees to build the monster a wife rather than spurning the suggestion and Mrs Rochester (1997), which imagines Jane Eyre’s life a number of years  into her marriage to Edward Rochester. Women were also the focus of her historical fiction novel, The Cry From Street To Street (1992), which imagined the life of a victim of Jack the Ripper and Cassandra (1993), a retelling of the fall of Troy. She also authored a biography on Vera Brittain.

Draft artwork for the book jacket of As Time Goes By (1988)

Her most recent work ranged from the speculative fiction Fifty-first State (2008), a novel set in the then near-future of 2013, looking at politics within the United Kingdom, to imagining Sherlock Holmes’ sister in The Strange Adventures of Charlotte Holmes (2012).

The archive comprises a large amount of correspondence both personal, with family, friends and other writers and professional, with publishers and literary agents, as well as artwork for book jackets, early draft manuscripts for novels and assorted miscellanea.

Bailey’s archive also includes a small series at the end consisting of correspondence and draft writings belonging to Graham Hall (1947-1980), a friend of Bailey’s and fellow New Worlds contributor, editor, science fiction writer and general science fiction enthusiast. As Hall’s writing career was cut short by his death in 1980, aged just 32, his name is perhaps not as easily recognisable as those of his correspondents. His correspondence contains interesting information regarding science fiction enthusiasts in the 1960s, from Hall’s early involvement with fanzines and hopes to compile bibliographies for the work of more well-known science fiction writers, to his involvement with the scene and time as editor of New Worlds. Hall’s illness and death are chronicled in Michael Moorcock’s novel, Letters from Hollywood (1986).

New Conservative Party Archive releases under the 30 year rule

Top-level strategy papers that detail the Thatcher government’s efforts to secure a third term are among papers newly-released by the Conservative Party Archive for 2018. The previously-restricted documents, now made available for the first time under the 30 year rule, form part of an extensive series of party papers from the election year of 1987, including drafts of the Conservative manifesto, detailed plans of campaign activities, and election briefings prepared by the Conservative Research Department. This piece briefly examines two such documents from one of the newly-released files [CRD 4/30/7/25], private briefings prepared for the Prime Minister’s election planning meetings in December 1986 and April 1987, to illustrate the research potential of these newly-available collections.

Although the 1987 election ultimately resulted in a second landslide for Thatcher’s Conservatives, the party was far from certain of such an outcome. ‘We believe that the electorate will be in a more questioning mood than in 1983 in the aftermath of the Falklands’, the December 1986 report cautioned, stressing the need for the party to develop and communicate clear plans for the future rather than simply seeking re-election on the basis of past achievements. The changing nature of the electoral map prompted particular concern. Although the Conservatives had opened up a narrow polling lead, the report identified a ‘sharp North-South disparity’, which posed a serious risk to the Conservative position: while the party’s national polling suggested a parliamentary majority of 20, this ‘disappeared entirely and left us in a minority of 2’ when regional variations were taken into account. In an echo of the party’s present-day challenges, the report additionally flagged up the dangers of the growing age-gap in the party’s support: ‘the under 45 group, and particularly first time voters, are still a cause of considerable concern.’

The Conservative Party’s electoral position was complicated by the growing North-South political divide. [CRD 4/30/7/25].

The prospect of a lost majority was still taken seriously on the eve of the election campaign, as the papers prepared for a top-level meeting at Downing Street on 16 April 1987 reveal. Although Party Chairman Norman Tebbit’s paper on general strategy began with the cautious observation that the government were favoured to win ‘with a smaller but working majority’, he warned that ‘the prospect of a hung parliament is attractive to the press and will be promoted by those hostile to us’. To counter this, he urged, the party needed to polarise the issues as far as possible, presenting a Conservative majority as the only alternative to weak or extreme government: ‘Our aim should be to make the supreme issue whether there will be a continuation of Conservative Government or through a “hung” Parliament a Labour administration with Alliance or other minority party support.’

Strategies aside, the party’s election plans also give a fascinating insight into how the party sought to understand and reshape its image going into the election. Discussing the party’s loss of support during the middle of 1986, the CCO Campaign Plans document warned of a ‘a growing perceived conflict between the two important themes of “Calvinism” or “individual responsibility” on the one hand, and “caring” on the other […] reflected in serious concerns about unemployment, health care, education and pensions’. Yet the strategy paper also reveals a resistance to any significant change in course: the proposal to organise the Prime Minister’s campaign tours around the theme of ‘regeneration’ is pointedly removed from the draft document in favour of a more individualistic emphasis on ‘believing [in] people’ and ‘personal property’. Similarly on Thatcher’s own image, the paper goes out of its way to reject suggestions that she adopt a ‘soft’ image, instead recommending a campaign focused upon her strengths: ‘leadership, strength and experience.’

Early plans emphasised that the Prime Minister campaign on the idea of ‘Regeneration’, but as the notes in the margin show others favoured a more ideological campaign theme. [CRD 4/30/7/25].

These papers will provide an essential resource for scholars of the 1987 general election and the politics of the Thatcher era, complementing the Conservative Party Archive’s existing collections of published material from the campaign. The Bodleian has also additionally taken receipt of a large donation of previously undocumented files from this period, so it is hoped that the CPA will be able to continue to expand its collections on the 1987 general election in years to come.

Among the new releases is the first draft of the 1987 Manifesto [CRD/4/30/7/29], shown here next to the final version [PUB 157/4].

The material examined in this blog post will be made available from 1 Jan 2018. In addition to papers on the 1987 general election, the list of newly-released papers also includes material on the introduction of the poll tax, the party’s private polling and opinion research, and a wide range of briefings produced by the Conservative Research Department. For a full list of derestricted items, see the CPA website.