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England and Wales when I entered the Public Record Office in 1921. These
local Record Offices play a large and important part in our schemes for
collecting, keeping and utilising family archives, as I will explain later: but
their primary function is to preserve the records of the local courts, such as
the Quarter Sessions and the Petty Sessions, and the records of the County
Councils which date only from 1885, and these do not concern us today. Nor
are we concerned with the records of the Nationalised Industries, and to the
question whether the records of the Nationalised Industries are public records
or not, we need not offer an answer today (although you may be surprised
to learn that the Records of the National Coal Board, the coal industry
was the first to be nationalised the Records of the Naional Coal Board,
by a clause in he Act of Nationalisation of 1947, are classed as Public Records;
but there is no such clause in the Acts which nationalised the Railways,
Electricity and the Gas industries, and their records are not deemed to be
Public Records: but we must leave the matter there, remembering however
that many a coal mine began as a family enterprise on a small estate, and the
records of the beginnings of many of these enterprises are very much in the
nature of family archives).
To go on to another major Division of Archives: Ecclesiastical Records.
The records of the Established Church, of the Roman Catholic Church in
Britain since the Reformation, of the Nonconformist Churches, of the Dutch
and Moravian and other branches of European Churches in England: their
records form a great and important Division of Archives. They too do not
concern us today but we are interested in the private and semi-official activities
of the Dignitaries of the Church and of the Mnisters of the various churches.
As we are likewise concerned today with the personal archives of the Heads
of Universities, of the Professors and Teachers in the ancient and new
Universities, though not in the records of these venerable Institutions
themselves.
I am not sure that I have eliminated all the Divisions of Archives which are
not our business today, but it is high time that I got on to Private or Family
Archives. I do not know if the Family Archives about which I was asked
to speak were intended to include Business Archivess. It is often very difficult
to distinguish between them. I know that today is the day of Big Business,
of vast organisations and big combines in which the individual is a mere
cipher. But many of these organisations began as small enterprises enter
prises which remained small and essentially family concerns for one or more
than one generation and were then absorbed by another business or amalga
mated withother neighbouring small businesses and family enterprises. And
it is our duty today when a family business has been swallowed up in a
mammoth organisation and has lost its identity, to try to ensure that the
early records of the enerprise are preserved for posterity.
I shall not attempt to offer you a historical conspectus of the major Family
Archives in England and Wales, or to give you a list of the most famous,
or to mention many dates. Our concern as Archivists is not so much with
the contents of these private collections but rather wth the efforts that have
been made and are being made to preserve them and make them available;
and for that we need not go further back than a hunderd years or so.
First, a word about Public Records. During the first 36 years of the 19th
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century, Parliament was mush concerned, or shall we say, was at intervals
concerned with the state of the Public Records. In 1800 there was a Parliamen
tary Report of a „Select Committee appointed to inquire into the State of
Public Records", a very valuable report on the quantity and location of the
Public Records; and immediately, with remarkable promptitude, a Royal
Commission was set up, the first of six which lasted until 1836 and paved
the way for the P.R.Office Act of 1838 which brought into being the Public
Record Office as a Department under the Master of the Rolls, the object
being to bring the Public Records into one place under one authority. The
foundation stone of the Public Record Office was laid in 1851 and by 1856
or thereabouts the main block of the repository at Chancey Lane was erected
and occupied.
The Statute of 1838 did not mention Local or Private Archives; but in De
cember 1859, juist a century ago, a Memorial (that is, a formal petition or
appeal) a Memorial was presented to Lord Palmerston, then Prime Minister,
urging him to appoint a commission (I quote the words of the memorialists,
which can be easily distinguished from the pedestrian language of the lecturer)
to appoint a commission "to rescue from oblivion and in many cases from
decay, valuable collections of papers, the contents of which were unknown
even to their possessors, but which were in several cases (this, I might inter
pellate, is very modestly put), of the highest value on account of the infor
mation which they would afford on matters of history, law, legislation,
biography and several other important matters". A somewhat vague ending
to the petition, it seems to me, but the signatories formed as powerful a group
of famous man as one could meet anywhere: 29 members of the House of
Lords, including the Archbishops, Lord Brougham, that stormy petrel of politics
and Law, and Lord Macaulay. An equal number of members of the House
of Commons, among them Mr. Gladstone, already a power in the land but
not yet Prime Minister; and a long list of men of learning and renown; including
Regius Professors, Hallam, the Constitutional Historian, Thomas Carlyle the
apostle of duty and work, and Froude, the historian of the Tudor period.
I should like to be able to report that Palmerston reacted immediately to
this powerful memorial. He did not. I have not seen the original document
presented to him, so cannot tell you whether it has on it one of his famous
comments; but nothing happened for several years. As for Palmerston, untamed
by nearly fifty years of Public Office, I fear that the only archives in which
he took an interest were the F.O. Dispatches which he composed with vigour
and dispatched with a flourish, and those which he received and to which he
added a characteristic comment or minute. He died in office in 1865, having
I believe done nothing for the private archives of the country he had governed
with such gusto.
Mr. Gladstone became Prime Minister in 1868. Early in 1869 the Historical
Manuscripts Commission was launched by Royal Warrant. As I propose to
quote later from the latest Royal M^arrant issued in December last year,
I shall now quote here the object of the Commission of 1869: that „whereas
there were belonging to many Institutions and private families various col
lections of manuscripts and papers of general public interest, a knowledge of
which would be of great utility in the illustration of history, constitutional
law, science and general literature; that n some cases these papers were liable
