January 2013 | The National Archives blog

Posts from January 2013

Fri Jan

2013

My Tommy’s War: An underage Welsh brickie on the Somme

Posted by David Underdown in Records and research

My introduction to First World War research didn’t initially come through looking into my own family. One of my hobbies is bellringing: like so many clubs and social groups the Central Council for Church Bell Ringers created its own roll of honour after the First World War. Much work has been done in recent years to link the names on the roll with Commonwealth War Grave Commission records, but some names were proving stubborn, and there didn’t seem to be any obvious candidate. I realised that I was in a position to help since I could easily look at the available records.

It soon became clear that at least some of the men had been overlooked at the time, their health had broken under the strain of army service and had been discharged as a result, and subsequently died from the same condition. While they qualify for recognition under the terms of CWGC’s royal charter, their names had never been put forward for inclusion on the debt of honour register. I wrote up as much detail as I could find on these men on our old Your Archives wiki (see for example Gilbert Victor Drew) and with help from members of the Great War Forum and the In From the Cold Project I was able to get a few men added to the CWGC register.

Studio photographic portrait of a young man in army uniform standing between a window on his left and pedestal with his service cap on it to his right. A cane under his left arm.

Fred Holbrook (from the family photo album)

So, having already honed my research skills to some extent, I then received an email via my Dad from his cousin Jane who had been working on the family history. In particular she was looking for help with her great-uncle (my great-great-uncle), Frederick John Holbrook. She had already found his entry in the CWGC database and his medal index card (WO 372/9/241037). This showed that he had served in 2nd Battalion, Welsh Regiment as Private 30649. ¹

They also reveal one slight discrepancy, with CWGC showing his date of death as 26 July 1916 and the medal card as 23 July. Another discrepancy is that CWGC record his age as 19, but Births, Marriages and Deaths records show that he was born on 5 May 1898, ² meaning he was just 18 when he died: and since the medal card also shows that he was posted to France on 12 May 1915 he must have been underage when he joined up. Certainly he looks very young in the surviving photo of him, and rather swamped by his uniform.

Notes:

1. The regiment itself always preferred the spelling Welch Regiment, but during the First World War period it was officially the Welsh Regiment, so that is the spelling I will use in this article ^
2. His birth was registered in the 2nd quarter 1898 see index entry on FreeBMD ^

Thu Jan

2013

Celebrating five years of Flickr Commons

Posted by Laura Cowdrey in Records and research

Unidentified Flying Object sightings chart

Unidentified Flying Object sightings c.1969 (ref: AIR 20/11612)

Yesterday marked the fifth anniversary of the launch of the Flickr Commons. There are now more than 250,000 images in the Commons, from 56 different libraries, archives and museums.

To celebrate, the Library of Congress, one of the original members, has pulled together galleries of the most viewed and favourite images from the Commons.

Our three most viewed images are:

UFO sightings chart (right)

Continue reading »

Tue Jan

2013

Trainee Tuesday: Do you know the Muffin Man?

Posted by Sarah Fellows in Technology and innovation

Encouraging creative reuse of archive collections

As part of my traineeship at Tyne and Wear Archives I have got involved in exciting projects that look at ways of being responsive to public interests as well as enable people to create new meaning from the collections. Some of the projects have invited creative practitioners to explore the collections and tell us what they feel evokes interest, what is inspiring to them and in turn their audiences.

For one project called Half Memory, Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums worked in partnership with Tyneside Cinema and record label Tusk Music to commission sound artists and musicians to create original music in response to the collections. Warm Digits and Richard Dawson, two regional artists, had the freedom to explore the archives to identify resonant collections areas to inspire new work.

Warm Digits created a film and soundtrack inspired by line drawing designs, plans and photographs from a massive 1970s Tyneside civic engineering project (the metro system construction). Richard Dawson took his inspiration for a new album from photographs, letters, newspaper cuttings and illustrations of obscure North East tales.

I worked with Emily Meritt, a volunteer and photography student, to help Warm Digits source the images based on their specific brief. It was important we understood the desired aesthetics of the film they wanted to produce.

We sourced and digitised a few hundred images, including the below:

Warm Digits: Tyne and Wear Metro Construction (ref: DT.MHA/17/1/K624-1) The finished film will be published online in April 2013

Mon Jan

2013

What was really going on: the hidden secrets of the UK Government Web Archive

Posted by Linda Stewart in Technology and innovation

New Year Openings at The National Archives are a time for looking back at the world of 30 years ago, marvelling at how much has changed, or, as a recent blog post on Renewing the Values of Society demonstrated, how much has stayed the same.

What government was doing about the web in 1982 hasn’t received the publicity of the Falklands files. Mainly because, you might think, in 1982 the World Wide Web was little more than a gleam in the eye of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, called ENQUIRE. But while war was raging in the Falklands, a group of civil servants from the government’s Central Computing and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA) were trying to second guess the future (BN 120/8 and BN 120/9).

Pre-web, there was plenty of computing going on in government departments; most of it hidden away on the one large machine each department had, with a scattering of terminals that connected staff in distant offices to the machine. The CCTA were trying to establish how much need, if any, there would be to transfer data from one government department’s machine to another. Another 1982 anniversary was the official adoption of the TCP/IP protocol, building block of the internet, by the US Department of Defense. In 1982, data was being exchanged across the world, but the internet was still very much part of its US Cold War communications origins. In the UK civil servants were speaking not of nets, let alone internets, but packet switching. The climate for building networks was not very encouraging. There was a waiting list for new telephone lines – which it was hoped the privatisation of British Telecom would address – meanwhile the first Data Protection Act (1984) was stirring in Parliament; there was an awareness of the public’s reluctance to have their personal information shared across departments by these worrying computers that sent you gas bills for £1,000,000,000.99p. And cost was a major factor: to save taxpayers money data from local benefits offices was sent by the cheaper overnight tariff to the DHSS central computer in Newcastle.

Fri Jan

2013

New Year, New… research topic

Posted by Jenni Orme in Records and research

Happy New Year!

So, the time is upon us once again – adverts everywhere for the latest celebrity diet, queues to sign up at the gym and playing ‘dodge the jogger’ in Richmond Park – yes, it’s the cycle of ‘New Year, New You’ repeating once again.

I admit I am guilty of the same – my desk is piled with ambitious mountains of fruit and I am determinedly marching up stairs, glancing longingly at the lifts…

As we well know, this annual dive in to health and fitness is nothing new, and I have been searching for records that reflect this.

The idea came from one of my favourite images in the collection – ‘Lady cyclists riding down a hill’.

'Photograph group, lady cyclists riding down hill, (Sittingbourne)' COPY 1/435/62

Taken in 1898, the photograph appears in COPY 1, the original application forms for the registration of copyright at Stationers’ Hall. It is registered by Frederick Miller Ramell of Sittingbourne.

Thu Jan

2013

National Cataloguing Grants Programme for Archives – 2012 awards

Posted by James Travers in Behind the scenes, Managing information

Access to 13 archive collections is set to be transformed by a series of grants announced today. The National Cataloguing Grants Programme 2012 has awarded £407,950 to archives across the UK to help make these vitally important collections fully accessible for the first time.

Large group of workers outside factory with flags

Warwickshire Record Office's successful project - 'Boaters & Bright Sparks' will catalogue the archive of Willans Works, Rugby

Managed by The National Archives, the grants programme helps archives to catalogue previously inaccessible collections. Cataloguing past collections has uncovered treasures, which have provided unique insight into our nation’s history.

The programme is funded by a collective of charitable trusts and foundations including the Pilgrim Trust, the Foyle Foundation and the Wolfson Foundation – we are very grateful for their renewed support.

Wed Jan

2013

Surveying the surveyed: what happened next?

Posted by Melinda Haunton in Behind the scenes, Managing information

Some responses are not too hard to interpret: Do you keep an accessions register?

I posted back in November about our annual survey, Accessions to Repositories, which maps new material taken in by archive services across the UK. I also mentioned that we were asking the services who participate in Accessions to Repositories to tell us how they find the experience, and what we can do to help them. We now have the results, and they make interesting reading.

Overview

I’m glad to say that over 100 archive services took the time to respond – that’s over a third of the total who participate in the Accessions to Repositories exercise – and that there was a good mix of types of archive: local and specialist, national and higher education archives were all represented. We’d like to thank all who responded.

Mon Jan

2013

What have archives to do with culture?

Posted by Emma Jay in Behind the scenes

I’ve been thinking about this question a lot since starting the Clore Fellowship Programme. Out of 29 fellows I’m the only one from an archive. Being quite literally the only archivist in the room has made me reflect not just on my own role, but also on how archives fit into the cultural sector.

I wasn’t accustomed to seeing myself as part of the cultural sector before the fellowship began. My day job rarely takes me out of the office, and when it does I don’t venture beyond familiar territory: my last (hugely enjoyable) work trip was to London Metropolitan Archives (LMA). What’s more, working at The National Archives means that I’m a civil servant within the official archive of the UK central government, and until recently this governmental context loomed larger in my mind than potential areas of collaboration with galleries, theatres or dance companies.

Prompted by the fellowship, I spent a day in our Archives Sector Development department a few weeks ago to find out more about what they do. I’m getting the impression that other archives are more likely than The National Archives to exist in partnership with different kinds of cultural organisations.

Fri Jan

2013

Getting your five a day – it takes a lot of information to make a garden grow

Posted by Julie Zielstra in Managing information

Information isn’t like apples and oranges, or even vegetables, but after my first year gardening on an allotment I realised how much information management I used to grow a simple salad.

Dig for plenty, by Le Bon (catalogue reference INF 3/98)

Those uniform bags of leaves sitting in the supermarket cooler had me lulled into a false sense of the ease and simplicity of the mechanics of planning, growing, protecting, distributing and finally storing the crop until it was time to eat.

If you haven’t gardened on an allotment before, it’s a community spirit geared towards the frugal application of resources, sharing and recycling, to create an abundance of crops. We’re seeing this attitude in the management of information as well – less is more, collaboration is necessary. When I started writing this blog post, I wanted to explain how an allotment is like a community cloud – I could use my own garden, but I choose to share a place that I pay for and can walk away from – hopefully with plenty of delicious food! But the Cloud is hogging the show lately – information management is needed whether it’s a cloud or your own servers and infrastructure.

Wed Jan

2013

Mr Johnston’s imagination

Posted by Andrew Janes in Records and research

Mr Johnston's 'fantasy' map of Africa, showing his proposed British territorial claims in red (reference: FO 84/1750 f 54)

Some of The National Archives’ most interesting maps are not kept as separate flat, rolled or folded sheets, or even as part of atlases. Instead, they are to be found within boxes, files or volumes of official correspondence and other mainly textual records. Most such maps are not yet described individually in our online catalogue. Today’s blog post is about one of them.

Authors