Category Archives: Division

The Why and How of Digital Archiving

21st century, Archives and Modern Manuscripts, Humanities, Medical, Modern, Sciences, Social Sciences, Web Archives

Guest post by Matthew Bell, Summer intern in the Modern Archives & Manuscripts Department

If you have ever wondered how future historians will reconstruct and analyse our present society, you may well have envisioned scholars wading through stacks of printed Tweets, Facebook messages and online quizzes, discussing the relevance of, for instance, GIFs sent on the comment section of a particular politician’s announcement of their candidacy, or what different E-Mail autoreplies reveal about communication in the 2010s. The source material for the researcher of this period must, after all, comprise overwhelmingly of internet material; the platform for our communication, the source of our news, the medium on which we work. To take but one example, Ofcom’s report on UK consumption of news from 2022 identifies that “The differences between platforms used across age groups are striking; younger age groups continue to be more likely to use the internet and social media for news, whereas their older counterparts favour print, radio and TV”. As this generation grows up to take the positions of power in our country, it is clear that in seeking to understand the cultural background from which they emerged, a reliance on storing solely physical newspapers will be insufficient. An accurate picture of Britain today would only be possible by careful digital archaeology, sifting through sediments of hyperlinks and screenshots.

This month, through the Oxford University Summer Internship Programme, I was incredibly fortunate to work as an intern in the Bodleian Libraries Web Archive (BLWA) for four weeks, at the cutting edge of digital archiving. One of the first things that became clear speaking to those working in the BLWA is that the world wide web as a source of research material as described above is by no means a foregone conclusion. The perception of the internet as a stable collection that will remain as it is without care and upkeep is a fallacy: websites are taken down, hyperlinks stop working or redirect somewhere else, social media accounts get removed, and companies go bankrupt and stop maintaining their online presence. Digital archiving can feel like a race against time, a push to capture the websites that people use today whilst we still can; without the constant work of web archivists, there is nothing to ensure that the online resources we use will still be available even decades down the line for researchers to consult.

Fortunately, the BLWA is far from alone in this endeavor. Perhaps the most ambitious contemporary web archive is the Internet Archive; from 1996 this archive has formed a collection of billions of websites, and states as its task the humble aim of providing “Universal Access to all Knowledge”, seeking to capture the entire internet. Other archives have a slightly more defined scope, such as the UK Web Archive, although even here the task is still an enormous one, of collecting “all UK websites at least once per year.” Because of the scale of online material that is published every day, whether or not a site has been archived by either the Internet Archive or the UK Web Archive has relevance for whether the Bodleian chooses to archive it; to this extent the world of digital archiving represents cooperation on an international scale.

One aspect of these web archives that struck me during my time here is the conscious effort made by many to place the power of web archiving in the hands of anyone with access to a computer. The Internet Archive, for instance, allows any users with a free account to add content to the archive. Furthermore, one of my responsibilities as intern was a research project into the viability of a programme named Webrecorder for capturing more complex sites such as social medias, and democratization of web archiving seems to be the key purpose of the programme. On their website, which offers free browser-based web archiving tools, the title of the company stands above the powerful rallying call “Web archiving for all!” Whilst the programme currently remains difficult to navigate without a certain level of coding knowledge, and never quite worked as expected during my research, its potential for expanding the responsibility of archiving is certainly exciting. As historians increasingly seek to understand the lives of those whose records have not generally made it into archive collections, one can see as particularly noble the desire to put secure archiving into the hands of people as well as institutions.

The “why” of Digital Archiving, then, seems clear, but what about the “how”? Before going into my main responsibilities this month, some clarification of terminology is necessary.

Capture – This refers to the Bodleian’s copy of a website, a snapshot of it at a particular moment in time which can be navigated exactly like the original.

Live Site – The website as it is available to users on the internet, as opposed to the capture.

Crawl – The process by which a website is captured, as the computer program “crawls” through the live site, clicking on all the links, copying all of the text and photographs, and gathering all of this together into a capture.

Crawl Frequency – The frequency with which a particular website is captured by the Bodleian, determined by a series of criteria including the regularity of the website’s updates.

Archive-It – The website used by the Bodleian to run these crawls, and which stores the captured websites.

Brozzler – A particularly detailed crawl, taking more time but better for dynamic or complicated sites such as social medias. Brozzlers are used for Twitter accounts, for instance. Crawls which are not brozzlers are known as standard crawls and use Heritrix software.

Data Budget – The allocated quantity of data the Bodleian libraries purchase to use on captures, meaning a necessary selectivity as to what is and is not captured.

Quality Assurance (QA) – A huge part of the work of digital archiving, the process by which a capture is compared with the live site and scrutinized for any potential problems in the way it has copied the website, which are then “patched” (fixed). These generally include missing images, stylesheets, or subpages.

Seed – The term for a website which is being captured.

Permission E-Mails – Due to the copyright regulations around web archiving, the BLWA requires permission from the owners of websites before archiving; this can be a particularly complicated task due to the difficulty of finding contact information for many websites, as well as language barriers.

My responsibilities during my internship were diverse, and my day to day work was generally split between quality assurance, setting off crawls, and sending or drafting permission e-mails. Alongside this I was not only carrying out research into Webrecorder, but also contributing to a report re-assessing the crawl frequency of several of our seeds. The work I have done this month has been not only incredibly satisfying (when the computer programme works and you are able to patch a PDF during QA of a website it makes one disproportionately happy), but rewarding. One missing image or hyperlink at a time, digital archivists are driving the careful maintenance of a particularly fragile medium, but one which is vital for the analysis of everything we are living through today.

‘Probable Prospects’: Richard Hill and Black Activism in The Archive of the Anti-Slavery Society

19th century, Archives and Modern Manuscripts, Humanities, Modern, Spotlight, Uncategorized, , , ,

By Olivia Carpenter, Department of English and Related Literature, University of York.

This is the fourth in a series of posts by researchers drawing on the archive of the Anti-Slavery Society, part of the Bodleian’s We Are Our History project.

Afro-British writer, politician, and activist Richard Hill was born in 1796. Hill was born in Jamaica but spent much of his youth in England, where some of his earliest efforts on behalf of Abolitionism and the rights of free Black people in the British Empire took place when he agreed to act as an agent of the London Anti-Slavery Society in 1830. A series of several letters exchanged between Hill and the Society’s President and Secretary are among the Bodleian’s collection of the Society’s papers. These letters, exchanged over a period of just over two years, allow us to trace Hill’s experience of traveling to Haiti on behalf of the Society. The Society sent Hill to ascertain the condition of this first and only new Republic created by formerly enslaved people who had fought and won a war to become a free, independent nation. Reading Hill’s correspondence with Thomas Pringle can help us gain a greater understanding of Black British anti-slavery activism in the early nineteenth century and what Haiti’s unique sociopolitical history meant for Black organizers like Hill, who hoped to establish Black freedom in the British Empire. The letters also give us unique insight into the day-to-day successes and struggles of a nineteenth-century Afro-British activist as Hill worked to earn a living in precarious circumstances while remaining committed to developing his career.

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The International Internet Preservation Consortium Web Archiving Conference: Thoughts and Takeaways

21st century, Event, Humanities, Modern, Social Sciences, Web Archives

A couple months ago, thanks to the generous support of the IIPC student bursary, I had the pleasure of attending the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) web archiving conference in Hilversum, The Netherlands. The conference took place in The Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision, adding gravitas and rainbow colour to each of the talks and panels.

The Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision. Photo taken by Olga Holownia.

What I was struck by most throughout the conference was the extremely up-to-date ideas and topics of the panel. While typical archiving usually deals with history that happened decades or centuries ago, web archiving requires fast-paced decisions and actions to preserve contemporary material as it is being produced. The web is a dynamic, flexible, constantly changing entity. Content is often deleted or frequently buried under the constant barrage of new content creation. Therefore, web archivists must stay in the know and up to date in order keep up with the arms race between web technology and archiving resources.

For instance, right from the beginning, the opening keynote speech discussed the ongoing Russian war in Ukraine. Eliot Higgins, founder of Bellingcat, the independent investigative collective focused on producing open source research, discussed the role of digital metadata and digital preservation techniques in the fight against disinformation. Using the example of Russian spread propaganda about the war in Ukraine, Higgins demonstrated that archived versions of sites and videos, and their associated metadata, can help to debunk intentionally spread misinformation depicting the Ukrainian army in a bad light. For instance, geolocation metadata has been used to prove that multiple videos supposedly showing the Ukrainian army threatening and killing innocent civilians, were actually staged and filmed behind the Russian frontlines. The notion that web archives are not just preserving modern culture and history, but also aiding in the fight against harmful disinformation, is quite heartening.

A similarly current topic of conversation was the potential use of artificial intelligence (AI) in web archives. Given the hot topic that AI is, it’s prevalence at the web archiving conference was well received. The quality assurance process for web archiving, which can be arduous and time consuming, was mentioned as a potential use-case for AI. Checking every subpage of an archived site against the live site is impossible given time and resource constraints. However, if AI could be used to compare screenshots of the live site to the captured version, even without actually going in and patching the issues, just knowing where the issues are would save considerable time. Additionally, AI could be used to fill gaps in collections. It is hard to know what you do not know. In particular, the Bodleian has a collection aimed at preserving the events and experiences of peopled affected by the war in Ukraine. Given our web archiving team’s lack of Ukrainian and Russian language skills, it can be hard to know what sites to include in the collection and what not to. Thus, having AI generate a list of sites deemed culturally relevant to the conflict could help fill the gaps in this collection that we were not even aware of.

Social media archiving was also a significant subject discussed at the conference. Despite the large part that social media plays in our lives and culture, it can be very challenging to capture. For example, the Heritrix crawler, the most commonly used web crawler in web archiving, is blocked by Facebook and Instagram. Additionally, while Twitter technically remains capturable, much of the dynamic content contained in posts (i.e. videos, gifs, links to outside content) can’t be replayed in archived versions. Discussions of collaborations between social media companies and archivists were heralded as a necessity and something that needs to happen soon. In the meantime, talk of web archiving tools that may be best suited for dealing with social media captures included Webrecorder and other tools that mimic how a user would navigate a website in order to create a high-fidelity capture that includes dynamic content.

Between discussions of the role of web archives in halting the spread of disinformation, the use of barely understood tools like generative AI, and potential techniques to get around stumbling blocks within the field of social media archiving, the conference discussions got all attendees excited to begin further exploration of web preservation. The internet is the main resource through which we communicate, disseminate knowledge, and create modern history. Therefore, the pursuit of preserving such history is necessary and integral to the field of archiving.

Photographer Helen Muspratt’s archive is now available

20th century, Archives and Modern Manuscripts, Humanities, Modern, Newly available (2023), Photography, Women, , , , ,
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).

A web of meaningful links. Archived websites in and as special collections

20th century, 21st century, Archives and Modern Manuscripts, Humanities, Photography, , , ,

As some of you may know, since 2011 the Bodleian has been archiving websites, which are collected in the Bodleian Libraries Web Archive (BLWA) and made publicly accessible through the platform Archive-it. BLWA is thematically organised into seven collections: Arts and Humanities; Social Sciences; Science, Technology and Medicine; International; Oxford University Colleges; Oxford Student Societies and Oxford GLAM. As their names already suggest, much of the online content we collect relates to Oxford University and seeks to provide a snapshot of its intellectual, cultural and academic life as well as to document the University’s main administrative functions.

From the very beginning, the BLWA collection has also been regarded as a complement to and reflection of the Bodleian’s analogue special collections that users can consult in the reading rooms. For example, there are multiple meaningful links between our BLWA Arts & Humanities collection and the Bodleian’s Modern Archives & Manuscripts. By teasing out the connections between them, I hope to offer some concrete examples of how archived websites can be valuable to historical and cultural research and explore some of the reasons why the BLWA can be seen as integral to the Bodleian Special Collections.

Collecting author appreciation society websites…

In BLWA, you can find websites of societies dedicated to the study of famous authors whose papers are kept at the Bodleian (partly or in full), such as T.S. Eliot, J. R.R. Tolkien and Evelyn Waugh. An example from this category is The Philip Larkin Society website, which complements the holdings of correspondence to and from the poet and librarian Philip Larkin (1922-1985) held at the Bodleian.

The website provides helpful information to anyone with a general or academic interest in Larkin, as it lists talks and events about the poet as well as relevant publications and online resources promoted by the Society.

A 2018 capture in BLWA of a webpage from the Larkin Society website, describing a public art project celebrating Larkin’s famous poem ‘Toads’

The value of the archived version of The Philip Larkin Society website may not be immediately apparent now, when the live site is still active. However, in decades from now, this website may well become a primary source that offers a window onto how early 21st century society engaged with English poetry and disseminated research about the topic through media and formats distinctive of our time, such as online reviews, podcasts and blog posts.

…and social media accounts

Alongside websites, BLWA has been actively collecting Twitter accounts pertaining to authors and artists, such as The Barbara Pym Society Twitter presence.

A 2019 capture in BLWA of the Barbara Pym Society Twitter account

The Twitter feed preserves the memory of ephemeral, but meaningful encounters and forms of engagement with the works of English novelist Barbara Pym (1913-1980). The experience of consulting the Archive of English Novelist Barbara Pym in the Weston Reading rooms is enriched by the possibility of reading through the posts on the Pym Twitter account. From talks about Pym’s work to quotes in newspaper articles mentioning the author, the Twitter feed is not only a collection of news and information about Barbara Pym’s work, but also a representation of the lively network of individuals engaging with her writings, both in academic and broader circles.

Online presence of contemporary artists

Building an online presence through social media and a personal website is a promotional strategy that many contemporary artists and authors have adopted. A good example of this is the website of the British photographer and documentarist Daniel Meadows (b. 1952). In 2019, BLWA started taking regular captures of Meadows’ website, Photobus, following the acquisition of Meadows’ Archive a year earlier. This hybrid archive (which includes both analogue and born-digital items) has since been catalogued and its finding aid is available here.

The captures taken of Meadows’ Photobus site provide us with contextual information on the photographic series described in the finding aid of Meadows’ Archive at the Bodleian. Through the website, we get an account of Meadows’ life in his own words, we learn about the exhibitions where Meadows’ photographs were displayed and find out about the books in which his work has been published.

If you were to search for Daniel Meadows’ website on the live web right now, you would find that the website is still active, but looks rather different in content and layout from the captures archived in the BLWA between 2019 and March 2023.

Comparison of the ‘About’ page on Daniel Meadows’ website: the BLWA capture from January 2023 (top), and the capture from May 2023 (bottom)

Furthermore, the URL has changed from Photobus to the name of the photographer himself. Were it not for the version of the website archived in BLWA, the old content and structure of the site would not be as easily accessible. The website has also changed in scope, as it now provides us with a comprehensive digital repository of Meadows’ photographic series.

Comparing Meadows’ website in BLWA with his archive at the Bodleian, we can see an interesting series of correspondences between digital and analogue realm, and between digital and physical archives. For example, the archived version of Meadows’ website Photobus is included as a link in the section of the finding aid for the Meadows archive devoted to ‘related materials’. In turn, the updated, 2023 version of Meadows’ site reflects in some respects the organisation and structure of an archive: his oeuvre is tidily arranged into series, each accompanied by a description and digital images of the photographs to match their arrangement in the physical archive at the Bodleian. Daniel Meadows’ new website exemplifies how, through the combination of metadata and high-resolution images, websites can become a powerful interface through which an archive is discovered and its contents accessed in ways that complement and enhance the experience of working through an archival box in a reading room.

Archived websites as a link to tomorrow’s archives

Web archives are a relatively recent phenomenon, so the uses of a collection of archived websites like the BLWA are only gradually beginning to emerge. The historical, cultural and evidential value of web archives is still overlooked, or perhaps just not yet fully exploited. It is only a matter of time before social media and websites like those kept in BLWA will be seen as an increasingly important resource on the cultural significance of 20th and 21st century authors and artists and the reception of their work. After all, for today’s authors and artists, social media and websites are an important vehicle for the dissemination of news about their work, of their opinions and creativity. As such, their online presence may be different in form, but similar in purpose and significance to the letters, pamphlets, alba amicorum and diaries that one would consult to research the social interactions, ideas, and activities of a humanist scholar.

One of the exciting aspects of working with digital archives is the proactive nature of our collecting practice. Curators of digital collections need to identify, select and collect relevant content before it disappears or decay – threats to which websites and social media are vulnerable. Through the choices we make today of content to archive, we are ultimately shaping the digital archives that will be accessible decades from now.

We are happy to consider suggestions from our users about websites that could be suitable additions to the collection. If you are curious to explore the BLWA collection further, you can find it here.  The online nomination form can be found at this link. So don’t just follow the links – help us save them!

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

20th century, Archives and Modern Manuscripts, Cataloguing, Humanities, Modern, Newly available (2023), Women

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.

Zachary Macaulay and the ‘Anti-Slavery Reporter’

19th century, Archives and Modern Manuscripts, Humanities, Modern, Spotlight, , , ,

By Iain Whyte

This is the third in a series of posts by researchers drawing on the archive of the Anti-Slavery Society, part of the Bodleian’s We Are Our History project.

In the various commemorative items produced in 2008 to mark the bi-centenary of Britain’s abolition of the slave trade, the names and portraits of Wilberforce, Clarkson, and Buxton appeared frequently and less so those of the formerly enslaved such as Olaudah Equiano and Ignatius Sancho.  But one name almost universally absent was that of Zachary Macaulay. Better known as the father of Lord Thomas Macaulay, the historian and politician, Zachary played an invaluable role both in the Parliamentary campaign against the trade, and later plantation slavery in the British Empire, and in galvanising public opinion through local committees. A shy and in many ways inhibited man, he never made a speech, but his first hand experience in Jamaica and along the Sierra Leone river enabled those in Parliament to speak with authority, and above all the research and writing he did in the 1820s to expose the reality of slavery, provided ammunition against the powerful attempts to shore up the profitable system. This was most marked in his founding in 1825, and editorship throughout the vital campaigning years, of the Anti-Slavery Monthly Reporter, a magazine that survives to this day under the auspices of the charity and campaigning group Anti-Slavery International.

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

20th century, 21st century, Archives and Modern Manuscripts, Cataloguing, Digital archives, Humanities, Modern, Newly available (2023), Photography, , ,

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

20th century, Archives and Modern Manuscripts, Humanities, Modern, Newly available (2023), Spotlight, , , , , ,

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.

New: Catalogue of the Archive of Denis Healey

20th century, Archives and Modern Manuscripts, Newly available (2023), Social Sciences,

The archive of Labour Party politician Denis Healey is now available for consultation. The catalogue can be consulted online at Bodleian Archives and Manuscripts.

via Wikimedia Commons

Healey held various roles both in and out of government, including Secretary of State for Defence, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Shadow Foreign Secretary and Deputy leader of the Labour Party, and ran for Party leadership in 1976 and 1980. The archive contains papers on Healey’s political work, as well as his personal interests, particularly his love of photography.

A real highlight of the collection are Healey’s diaries, which he kept throughout his life and cover holidays he took as a youth, his service in Second World War, and his political career all the way from his first job as International Secretary of the Labour Party to his death in 2015. These diaries give a personal, and often entertaining view of his times and his contemporaries – I particularly like his 1946 description of Michael Foot: “He looks like the Tory idea of a weedy Bolshie – gaunt, black hair en brosse, black glasses, bad teeth, and a ravaged complexion, and talks with a nervous cockney glottal stop” (MS. Healey 62).

Diaries of a cycling holiday in Germany, July-August 1936, from MS. Healey 61

My personal favourites, however, aren’t his political diaries, but rather the group of diaries he kept to record a cycling holiday he took to Germany in 1936. These were written in rough while on the holiday, written up neatly on his return (a good thing, as Healey’s handwriting is pretty terrible) and illustrated with postcards, photographs and sketches. Healey was a passionate anti-fascist, to the extent of leaving the Communist Party because of their opposition to WW2 following Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and in 1965 he had an altercation with notorious neo-Nazi Colin Jordan who invaded the stage at a town hall meeting: “I barged him off”, Healey says in his diary (MS. Healey 63), but contemporary newspapers seemed sure it was a punch. However, his experience of travelling around and talking to people strongly influenced his post-war attitudes to international relations, as well as simply being a fascinating and oddly charming account of an outsider’s view of Nazi Germany.