Category Archives: Newly available (2023)

The catalogue of the archive of C.F.C. Hawkes – available soon!

Christopher Hawkes (1905-1992) was an eminent archaeologist of European prehistory who made Oxford a centre for archaeological research and post-graduate teaching. This led to the foundation of the Institute of Archaeology in Oxford, of which Hawkes was the first director. His interest in learning about the past started when he was a child, when he visited monuments such as Hadrian’s Wall and Stonehenge, and continued through his time at New College, Oxford, where he took part in excavations at Brecon, Wroxeter and Winchester. After achieving a first-class degree, he worked at the British Museum in the department of British and Medieval Antiquities until he was appointed the new chair of European archaeology at Oxford in 1946. He stayed in Oxford with his second wife, archaeologist Sonia Hawkes, and continued to publish for many years after his retirement in 1972.

This collection comprises his personal and professional papers, including correspondence with colleagues and former students. His working notes show the wide scope of his work and include illustrations and drawings completed in his distinctive style.

 

Lt. Col. Charles Pascoe Hawkes (1877-1956) served in the Northumberland Fusiliers, 1900-1920, and was a barrister at the Inner Temple from 1902 until 1950. He was a political caricaturist, drawing for Granta, Cambridge University, and for the Daily Graphic. A keen traveller and an avid documenter of his adventures, his collection includes photograph albums titled ‘Kodakings in divers places’ and sketchbooks from his trips to Scotland, Europe and North Africa.

This collection will be available soon.

Catalogue of the archive of C.F.C. Hawkes

The catalogue of the archive of Averil Cameron –available soon!

Averil Cameron is a historian of late antiquity, classics and Byzantine studies. She was professor of Late Antique and Byzantine History at King’s College London and Warden of Keble College, Oxford, from 1994 to 2010.

She has been associated with various academic societies including as founding director of the Centre for Hellenic Studies at King’s College London. Since 2018 she has been President of the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies.

She has published several works, including; Agathias (1970), History as Text (1989) and The Byzantines (2006). The archive comprises papers and correspondence mainly relating to Cameron’s academic work. This includes books, published and unpublished lectures, and articles.

This collection will be available soon.

Catalogue of the archive of Averil Cameron

Three books of Averil Cameron

The catalogue of the archive of the Butler family – available soon!

This archive comprises three generations of an Oxford academic family; Rohan Butler (1917-1996), his father Harold Butler (1883-1951), and grandfather Alfred J. Butler (1850-1936).

Rohan Butler was a historian and civil servant. He worked at both the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Information during World War II. From 1963 to 1982 he was Historical Advisor to the secretary of state for foreign affairs. He authored two books, The Roots of National Socialism (1941) and his magnus opus Choiseul: Father and Son, 1719-1754 (1980). He was elected a prize fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, in 1938 and continued to be involved with the college throughout out his life.

Rohan Butler’s papers include his personal papers, literary work, time at All Souls College and work as a civil servant. The subseries relating to Choiseul includes extensive notes on the French military officer and diplomat, and on European history of the time, used by Butler to complete the work. There are also several volumes of unpublished poetry, a draft play and papers relating to an unpublished book titled ‘Redeemers of Democracy’.

Harold Butler was a civil servant and author. He worked in various government departments, including the Ministry of Labour and the Home Office. At the outbreak of World War II, he was appointed southern regional commissioner for civil defence. In 1942 he was appointed head of the British Information Service at the British Embassy in Washington, DC, where he remained until his retirement in 1946. His papers relate mainly to his civil service work, including his time in Washington which brought him into correspondence with Churchill, Eden, Ismay and Roosevelt. There are three diaries, covering 1917-1919 and 1940-1941, in which he talks about the war progress and the home situation. Olive Butler was a frequent correspondent to her son, Rohan, and her correspondence gives an insight into a diplomat’s life in Washington during World War II.

Alfred J. Butler was a historian specialising in Coptology. He was the author of several works including; The Ancient Coptic Churches of Egypt, Vol 1 and 2 (1884), The Arab Conquest of Egypt and the Last Thirty Years of the Roman Dominion (1902) and Sport in Classic Times (1930). His papers relate to his work on ancient Coptic Churches and includes a draft manuscript for an unpublished work titled ‘Greater or Lesser Britain’.

This collection will be available soon.

Catalogue of the archive of the Butler family

The catalogue of the archive of Dr Emilie Savage-Smith – available soon!

Dr Emilie Savage-Smith is a historian of science specialising in Islamic celestial globes. Islamic celestial globes are spherical maps of the sky that give the viewer a ‘God’s’ eye view of the stars and constellations, with Earth at the centre, originating from lands where Islam was the predominant religion.

Celestial globe

Savage-Smith graduated from DePauw University in 1962 and completed her Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1969. She was professor of the History of Islamic Science in the Faculty of Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford from 2006 to 2019, and a fellow and archivist of St Cross College, Oxford, 2004-2021.

She has authored several books, including Islamicate Celestial Globes: Their History, Construction and Use, 1985. She was named a fellow of the British Academy, 2010, and the Medieval Academy of America, 2020.

Celestial globe

This collection is the largest research archive of material on Islamic celestial globes in the world, with over two-hundred globes and instruments dating back to 1080 featured. It comprises her papers, photographs and drawings collected over the course of her career. Her collection of objects was donated to the History of Science Museum.

This collection will be available soon.

Catalogue of the archive of Dr Emilie Savage-Smith

Science in the Islamic World | History of Science Museum

 

New catalogue: the Archive of Joanna Trollope

Photograph of Joanna Trollope.

Joanna Trollope. Reproduced with kind permission of www.barkerevans.com

The archive of the novelist and Oxford alumna Joanna Trollope, generously donated to the Bodleian by Joanna herself between 2014 and 2021, has now been catalogued and is available to view at the Weston Library.

A prolific author of numerous best-sellers, Joanna first started out writing historical fiction in the 1970s whilst working as an English teacher. By 1980 – the year her novel Parson Harding’s Daughter was awarded the Romantic Novel of the Year Award by the Romantic Novelists’ Association – she had become a full-time author. Her only non-fiction title, Britannia’s Daughters, was published in 1983.

During the 1980s, Joanna’s writing evolved to contemporary fiction and The Rector’s Wife (1991) was her first number one bestseller. Her works have been translated into over twenty different languages as well as being adapted for audiobook, television, radio, and theatre. In 2010, Joanna was awarded the Romantic Novelists’ Association Lifetime Achievement Award. She was made an OBE in 1996 for services to charity and a CBE in 2019 for services to literature.

Manuscript draft of Parson Harding’s Daughter (1979), Oxford, Bodleian Libraries,                 MS. 9515/29. Reproduced with kind permission of Joanna Trollope.

The undoubted highlights of the collection are the neatly-tied handwritten manuscript drafts of Joanna’s novels, ranging from her earliest work Eliza Stanhope (first published in 1978) right up to An Unsuitable Match (published in 2018). The collection also includes several notebooks demonstrating Joanna’s careful background research into the topics and places featured in her work, covering anything from football matches to inheritance tax. They bely the preconception that her characters are consigned to cosy, country lives but instead deal with some of the tougher elements of life – bereavement, adoption, sexuality, and self-harm. They also show how much Joanna’s work mirrors life in the 1990s and 2000s and in years to come the collection will be of much interest to any one researching (to paraphrase Joanna’s family’s famous Victorian author ) ‘the way we lived then’.

-Rachael Marsay

Photographer Helen Muspratt’s archive is now available

A bride in a flower-decorated Oxford punt, being steered by the groom or a groomsman, c. 1960s

The punting bride, a wedding photograph by Helen Muspratt, Ramsey & Muspratt, c. 1960s, ©Bodleian Libraries

The archive of the portrait and documentary photographer Helen Muspratt is now catalogued and available in the Weston Library.

Helen Muspratt (1907-2001) first made her name as a skilled, experimental portrait and documentary photographer in the 1930s.

Muspratt was introduced to Lettice Ramsey (1898-1985) by their mutual friend Fra Newbery, the retired head of the Glasgow School of Art. Lettice Ramsey was a Cambridge graduate and a widowed young mother of two who had excellent contacts in Cambridge and in the winter of 1932, Muspratt joined her in Cambridge to create the studio Ramsey & Muspratt. They soon expanded into Oxford. Some of those Ramsey & Muspratt photographed during this period were the intellectual and left-wing luminaries of the day, including Virginia Woolf, C.P. Snow, Dorothy Hodgkin, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Anthony Blunt, as well as Julian Bell, who was Lettice Ramsey’s lover. Muspratt’s photographs in the 1930s are notable for her experimental approach, including the use of double negatives and solarisation, inspired by the photographer Man Ray.

Muspratt met her husband, Oxford University graduate and Communist Party organiser Jack Dunman (d. 1973) in Cambridge where he was working for the railway. In 1936 Muspratt went on a tour of the Soviet Union with a group organised by the Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR, and her photographs from the trip were used in lecture tours to drum up support for the Soviet Union during World War II. With a commission from the Left Book Club in 1937, Muspratt did her last major documentary series, producing haunting photographs of out-of-work miners and labourers in South Wales and Liverpool, and she also joined the Communist Party. Ramsey and Muspratt’s business partnership was formally dissolved at the end of February 1945, but their respective Cambridge and Oxford studios retained the name Ramsey & Muspratt, and the pair remained friends.

From World War II onwards, while her husband worked as a full-time, rural Communist Party organiser and editor of The Country Standard, Helen Muspratt supported her family as a hardworking studio photographer. From her studio on Cornmarket Street in Oxford she staged lively portraits of everyone from babies to brides to new graduates. Muspratt also loved to photograph architecture, and she photographed Oxford and its environs for John Betjeman. She did a final documentary series when she was commissioned in 1946 by a group of campaigning doctors to photograph elderly patients in the Victorian workhouse-like conditions of the Poor House near Wantage.

Her archive, which mainly comprises prints and negatives, is a wonderful window into Oxford and its environs in the latter half of the twentieth century, as well as pioneering experimental photography of the 1930s. It also includes correspondence with her husband and her parents that are relevant to British Communist Party and left-wing political history. Muspratt’s work, including her 1930s experimental portraiture, is celebrated in the book Face: Shape and Angle by her daughter Jessica Sutcliffe (available from the Bodleian shop).

New: Catalogues of the Archives of Enid Starkie and Joanna Richardson

Enid Starkie (1898-1970) was a literary critic whose love of France lead her to study and write on authors such as Baudelaire, Gide, Flaubert and Rimbaud. She was a fixture of the Oxford academic scene from her first arrival at Somerville College in 1916 until her death in 1970.

When Starkie started at Oxford in 1916 women were not allowed to matriculate and therefore could not obtain a degree. It was only in October 1920 that women were permitted to matriculate and, using their previously gained examinations, were awarded degrees for the first time. Starkie, having completed her examinations in Modern Languages with distinction in June 1920, matriculated and graduated as BA on 30 October 1920.

After a brief period away from Oxford to obtain her doctorate at the Sorbonne in Paris and to teach at Exeter University, she returned to Somerville as the Sarah Smithson Lecturer in French literature. She made her home at Somerville becoming a fellow, and later reader in French literature. During her career she successfully campaigned for the Professor of Poetry at Oxford to be a poet, rather than a critic, and helped raise the profiles of those she wrote about, including securing honorary doctorates for Gide and Jean Cocteau.

After her death, Starkie’s papers were deposited in the Bodleian for use by her friend, and former student, Joanna Richardson to write her biography.

Dr Joanna Richardson (1925–2008) studied Modern Languages at St Anne’s Society, Oxford, and after graduating with a third-class degree began graduate study under Enid Starkie. Her thesis was rejected and she was not awarded a DPhil at the time, it was only in 2004 she was awarded DLitt from the University of Oxford for her published body of work. She published her first biography in 1952 on Fanny Brawne, muse of poet John Keats. This started a fascination with the subject and during her life she wrote biographies on British and French 19th-century figures including Keats, Tennyson, Baudelaire and Verlaine. She was awarded the prix Goncourt for biography for Judith Gautier, 1989, the first time someone outside of France, and a woman, won the prize.

These collections consist of Starkie’s papers, along with Richardson’s working notes, as well as some personal papers of Richardson’s.

Additional material of Daniel Meadows – focus on photographic prints of Welfare State International

Welfare State International [WSI] often incorporated lanterns into their projects. Their headquarters, no longer in use, was itself a converted old warehouse called ‘Lantern House’. I think a fundamental reason for the frequency of lantern creation and usage in WSI’s history is, unsurprisingly, the “lighting of dark times and places”. The work of Welfare State helped to regenerate the communities and economic infrastructure of towns across the UK, such as Barrow-in-Furness and Ulverston. They illuminated communities trapped inside industrial shadows. Michael White wrote that these lanterns were “an extraordinary animated artwork that would be impossible to exhibit in a gallery or to ‘price’ as a commodity. They exist only for a few hours through a great deal of collective involvement and imagination”. This amalgam of ephemerality and memory is one that resonates with me at the present, as I reflect on my time as an archives intern. My experience here has vastly opened my mind to the variety of histories that are accessible thanks to the dedication of the Bodleian Archives.

For three weeks this Spring, I was fortunate enough to undertake the cataloguing of the Bodleian 500 Print Project: the newest addition to the Archive of Daniel Meadows. This series highlights some of Meadows’ most powerful, beautiful, and memorable work from across the span of his career. Meadows is a social documentarist noted for his photographic records of working class individuals, communities, and livelihoods across Great Britain. These records serve as a source of nostalgia and progress for many, and of post-industrialist woe for many others. Such affective features are shared with the work of Welfare State International. This organisation combined the nostalgia of folk traditions with socio-political ambition to reject the machinations of our industrial, capitalist milieu. The items in MSS. Meadows which intrigued me most were the photographs that documented the artistic spectacles of Welfare State International.

Brookhouse Summer Festival, Blackburn, Lancashire, August 1977, from the Welfare State International series. © Daniel Meadows. [MS. Meadows 227, item 5] Reproduced with the kind permission of Daniel Meadows.

Welfare State International co-founder John Fox, in Eyes on Stalks, reflects on the ambitions of Welfare State International right from the start. They “took [their] art into the street in order to reach an audience who wouldn’t normally cross the thresholds of elitist theatres and galleries”. This reality permeates lower class engagements with elitist cultural spheres to this day. I recall a conversation early on in my first year that made the reality of Britain’s cultural class divide feel much more real. I had visited my first gallery at 18, while my peers had crossed that threshold very early on in their lives. Theatre, galleries, and literature were a family event for them: something still difficult for me to imagine. When you grow up in poverty, art is hardly at the top of your priority-list. What WSI did for communities across the country gave people the space and opportunity to access the arts at their doorstep. Community was essential to making it happen. Their work encompassed not only carnivals and processions, but education for youths and collaborative projects that can transform a life weighed down by the constant anxieties of one’s socio-economic situation.

Daniel Meadows’ work relies on collaboration and community, too. This is visible across his oeuvre: photographic projects such as ‘The Shop on Greame Street’ and ‘The Free Photographic Omnibus’ are highly regarded now as a visual record of the changing landscape faced by the lower classes across the country. They emphasise the necessity of their voice and presence in all circles of artistic expression. What Meadows’ work also highlights is what is most relevant to my internship: all people deserve to be remembered. Archives should be filled with a more diverse array of lives and achievements. The world as we know it — its flairs and its flaws — has been transformed by individuals, organisations, communities across the socioeconomic spectrum. His photographic records of Welfare State International capture the collaboration of all these things, and all sorts of people, in action. Meadows’ WSI series keeps the spirit of their work alive today. Their manifesto acknowledges the “need for ceremony” in the lives of the masses, and these photographs capture and celebrate the ceremonies of the everyday.

Parliament in Flames, Burnley, Lancashire, November 1976, from the Welfare State International series. © Daniel Meadows. [MS. Meadows 227, item 4] Reproduced with kind permission from Daniel Meadows.

My favourite material to look at while completing this internship was definitely the the physical and digitised print of the image above. Its combination of people working together amid dilapidating Parliament imagery, construction equipment, and a cluster of typical council estate new builds encapsulates everything that WSI and Daniel Meadows seek to highlight in their work. The anti-capitalist power of WSI’s creative spectacles complements Meadows’ showcasing of a socially diverse Britain. Now that they have a presence in the Bodleian, the institution will be able to paint a much more complete and culturally rich picture of Britain in the archives. The work of Daniel Meadows helps to foster a positive, productive sense of national identity and progress. What it also does is break down the barriers of Oxford’s exclusivity. The archive of Daniel Meadows recognises his contributions to the cultural landscape of Britain over the past, and grants anybody interested the access to his creative projects and processes. The university can feel, at times, detached and alienating through its class divide. This is a common sentiment that pervades academia and beyond. The Archive of Daniel Meadows has been an honour to work with, and has empowered me with a greater sense of belonging in this institution.

The Archive of Daniel Meadows illuminates the working class experience across the latter half of the 20th century. The changing landscape of post-Industrial Britain left people – workers, families, communities – behind in its wake. What hasn’t changed is the socio-economic disparity faced by millions of people across the UK. An institution like Oxford must champion equal opportunity. The Crankstart Scholarship has been invaluable in providing me with access to this internship. I feel very fortunate to have the opportunity to contribute to a more socially, culturally diverse Bodleian through the work of their archives.

For more information on Daniel Meadows, visit his website or view the the catalogue of his archive online.

Guest post by Olivia Hersey, Crankstart Intern, 13-31 Mar 2023.

New catalogue: Literary Manuscripts and Correspondence of James Elroy Flecker

Guest post by Lilia Kanu
Easter intern at Bodleian Libraries Archives & Modern Manuscripts


Photograph of James Elroy Flecker [c.1911-1914], Oxford, Bodleian Libraries, MS. 21234/1

A collection of books and manuscripts related to the poet James Elroy Flecker (1884-1915) has now been catalogued and is available to view at the Weston Library. This small collection spans the period from 1902 to 1951, with papers dating from his late school years up to decades beyond his death. Although it is a small collection, the contents of these five boxes are nonetheless fruitful and intriguing.

Flecker was born in London and first attended Dean Close School in Cheltenham, where his father was headmaster. In 1902, he won a classical scholarship to study at Trinity College, Oxford, where he spent his time writing poetry characterised by his growing interest in Parnassianism and being a sociable conversationalist with his peers. After several stints as a schoolmaster in schools in London and Yorkshire, in 1908 he attended Caius College, Cambridge where he studied oriental languages to prepare for consular service. From 1910, he was stationed in Constantinople [Istanbul], and then Beirut, as vice-consul, but he oscillated between his posts abroad and living in England due to bouts of illness.

He married Helle Skiadaressi (1882-1961) in 1911. Due to his long-term struggle with tuberculosis, he retired and moved to Switzerland in 1913, where he lived out his final years. Here, he continued to write and published his most notable work, The Golden Journey to Samarkand (1913). He died aged 31 in January 1915, and many of his poems were posthumously published, as were his two acclaimed plays Hassan (1922) and Don Juan (1925).

This collection was brought together from several different sources by Howard Moseley before arriving at the Bodleian. The boxes include a plethora of items, including manuscript drafts of Flecker’s published and unpublished poetry and plays written throughout his life, as well as his personal correspondence with other notable contemporaries such as John Mavrogordato and Edward Marsh. There are also books which Flecker owned and annotated, including one with an 18 line comic poem inscribed into the title page of The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini (1904). There are also posthumously produced sources, such as a proof copy of T.E. Lawrence’s An Essay on Flecker (1937), alongside ephemera and clippings from publications such as The Times containing obituaries, featuring his poems, or reviewing various productions of Flecker’s plays. Amongst the materials produced after his death are letters from his wife, Helle, to the same recipients of the letters written by Flecker himself which are also present in the archive.

A striking element of this collection is the broad temporal and geographic scope from which these items were produced: there are letters written from Switzerland, manuscript poems written in Beirut, and postcards sent from his alma mater – and family home – in Cheltenham. These materials had obviously been in different hands and travelled across continents, with many of the manuscripts or bounded books being accompanied by postcards or letters between Flecker and others. The same names continuously pop up in his correspondence, evincing some valued, long-lasting friendships. There is much evident interaction with these materials, as seen by the extensive marginalia, fingerprint marks, and other signs of use. Each item can be placed at distinct points of Flecker’s lamentably short life, the latter fact which is heightened by the sentimental features of the posthumous sources written about his life and his impact – a quality which, as a fervent Parnassian, Flecker might have been averse to! You get a sense of the impact Flecker had in his loved ones’ lives; the letters from his wife to Flecker’s friends are characterised by black edged writing paper as a symbol of mourning, and Heller Nichols’ copy of Hassan features a cut-out from The Times stating that ‘it was James Elroy Flecker’s dream to live long enough to see his first play Hassan produced’. In some of his items, Flecker’s personality shines through – especially amusing was reading of his preference to write in ink, noting below a typescript copy of one of his poems, ‘excuse the typing on a mad writing machine’!

Printed copy of Hassan in German, translated by Albert Langen, München, 1914 (inscribed ‘W. Heller Nicholls’), Oxford, Bodleian Libraries, MS. 21234/4

Typescript draft of ‘The True Paradise’ [c.1914], by J.E. Flecker, Oxford, Bodleian Libraries, MS.21234/1

This is overall a lovely small collection of materials relating to Flecker, and will be of interest for early 20th century English poetry and further insight into Flecker’s life.

-Lilia Kanu, Balliol College


This collection complements the Literary Papers of James Elroy Flecker already held at the Bodleian Libraries.

When Oxford University won the FA Cup

Saturday will see two historic firsts for the FA Cup. It will be the first time the final has been held in June and it will also be the first to be played between the Manchester clubs with United taking on rivals City. The Bodleian Libraries have recently acquired an important piece of FA Cup history: the first minute book of the Oxford University Football Association Club.

The Club was formed in 1871 and the minute book records both its early meetings and Club fixtures and results. It begins with the Club’s inaugural meeting on 9 November 1871 where it was agreed that matches would played according to ‘Association Rules’ with membership limited to ’40 resident members of the University’. The first recorded match in the minute book is a 3-0 victory over Radley on 10 February 1872.

Minutes of inaugural meeting, 9 November 1871. © Oxford University Association Football Club

The  Club entered the second staging of the FA Cup in the 1872-1873 season. Oxford progressed to the final where they lost 2-0 to the Cup holders Wanderers on 29 March 1873. The minute book report on the final notes that ‘neither team played their full strength, but Oxford was particularly weakened by the absence of [Charles] Nepean and [Frederick] Patton.’

‘Entries for the Challenge Cup’, 1872-1873 season. © Oxford University Association Football Club

In the 1873-1874 season, Oxford again reached the final but this time emerged with the trophy (although it wasn’t actually presented until later in the year at the annual dinner) after a 2-0 victory over Royal Engineers. The final was held at The Oval on 14 March 1874. Nepean, the first choice goalkeeper, and Patton were both in the Oxford team this time. Patton scored the second of Oxford’s goals in the twentieth minute of the match. Oxford’s Cup winning captain, Cuthbert Ottaway, also holds the distinction of captaining England in the first official international fixture against Scotland on 30 November 1872.

Oxford were runners-up again in 1877 and in 1880. 1880 was the last time that the Club competed in the FA Cup. On 6 June 1880 it ‘was decided by a large majority that the University XI sh[oul]d not enter.’

‘Association Challenge Cup’, 1874. © Oxford University Association Football Club

The catalogue of the minute books of the Oxford University Association Football Club, 1871-1883 and 1946-1982, and of the Oxford University Centaurs Association Football Club, 1919-1941 and 1946-1960 is available online in Bodleian Archives & Manuscripts. The Club’s first minute book has been digitised and is accessible online via Digital Bodleian.