Post-colonial Musings

Given the fact that it used to be a British Protectorate and was, from 1925 to 1960, a Crown Colony, a holiday in Cyprus was always likely to prompt some reflections of a historical nature, and so it proved. If I am right in saying that studies of decolonisation in general are not that common then that is something of a gap in the historiography of the British Empire; turbulent events in Cyprus in the mid-1950s certainly offer plenty of scope for serious research.

The subject gave some shape to my thoughts following a visit to the 'Museum of the Boat of Saint George', just north of Paphos. The Saint George caique was used in an attempt to run guns from Greece to Cyprus in early 1955, the shipment being intended for the nascent National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters, usually known as EOKA, under the command of Georgios Grivas (who, by way of a flippant aside, must - surely - have been nicknamed 'Grivas Bodily Harm' by British squaddies given to such mordant wit). The Museum's leaflet talks darkly of the mission's betrayal, but tellingly it does not provide any details. What ever the exact truth of the matter, it does seem that the Saint George was closely shadowed from the beginning of her voyage, and events culminated in rather ignominious confusion, mass arrests and the eventual imprisonment of most of those involved. 

Thus the events of January 1955. The Museum itself is well worth a visit; the Saint George is a fine looking craft, and there is some excellent archival material on show - mugshots, photographs, press-clippings, letters and so on, and although not everything has English captions there is enough to gain a general understanding of what happened and the main protagonists. Inevitably the place has been pressed to serve contemporary political ends, and it is now a celebrated site for Cypriots (but I suspect largely unknown to the British ex-pats who mass in great numbers along this coast), which is fair enough. But what I find most intriguing is how events that - when viewed dispassionately - are in themselves of little actual historical consequence (the weapons were never used in the cause: they were impounded or thrown overboard) somehow become so symbolically powerful; the process by which a failed gun-running mission is transformed into an unchallengeable act of heroism must involve all sorts of complex interactions - it would be well beyond my competence to unravel it all, but someone should give it a go.         

The Jury's Still Out

The workings (or failings) of the jury system have been in the news recently, and I'd be willing to bet that most people who have done jury service will have a story to tell. My own stock of anecdotes, from a stint at Blackfriars Crown Court back in November (I saw the very best and the terrible worst of the system), are a little too tired to bear further repetition here, but the historian in me continues to lament how few paper records the whole process seemed to generate. With the provision of raw material for future historians and genealogists in mind, I think that we're missing a trick here: no lists of jurors' names appear to be kept, let alone papers - such as they are - from the deliberating room. And if the system was based on proper record-keeping think how rich such accumulated data would be: you'd have the massed names beloved of genealogists, plus maybe minutes, verbatim transcriptions, votes and so forth. True you'd have to slap a 100-year closure period on the whole lot, but we are talking about future historians here - they can wait. 

In Praise of Bureaucracy

Not a popular view, but restrain the Daily Mail reader that lurks within and consider: bureaucracy is not only essential in terms of ensuring accountability, it is also a vital component in making an over-evolved world actually function. And from the historian's point of view the more of it the better: annotated personal papers, records of committees and sub-committees, with motions considered in depth, votes cast and counted, and minutes dispassionately recording all; how preferable that is to the sinister farce of sofa government, with its documentary silence and in-built opportunities for confusion, and worse yet, obfuscation and evasion by the unscrupulous.

But why this futile attempt to rescue such an obviously useful concept from unthinking opprobrium? You may thank the London Missionary Society, the extensive records of which are kept at SOAS. The earnest worthies who founded the Society in the 1790s were very careful record-keepers; standing committees dealt with finance and administrative matters, but the smallest subject that came within the purview of the Directors was referred to an ad hoc committee, which discussed and deliberated before reporting their findings back to the Directors for further consideration, and, ultimately, a vote. Slow, painstaking and thorough and democratic: how quaint, and how invaluable to my client, who had retained me to look into the history of the printing of the Society's published account of its first mission to the southern Pacific that sailed aboard the Duff in 1796 (a remarkable story in itself). Astonishingly, even some of the ad hoc publication committee's rough notes have survived, and these, together with the general minutes, a few financial records and in-coming and out-going correspondence, enabled me to piece together much of the story.

This standard of record-keeping reminded me of some early nineteenth-century trade union records at the Modern Records Centre that I once looked at; and how grateful we researchers should be to those hidebound and antiquated bureaucrats - their administrative genius (and honesty) has left so much for the attentive enquirer. In contrast, pity the hapless soul who comes to research the Blair years.

When is a historical source not a historical source?

Just before Christmas I was lucky enough to receive a commission that involved working in the library of the Royal Society and at the Parliamentary Archives. I was new to both of these repositories (both 'real' archives and undeniably memorable places: a cloistered feel, oak-panelled book cases, heavy volumes and all the rest of it), but infinitely patient and helpful staff ensured that my visits were productive. I'm fairly confident that I turned up some interesting material for my client, but the nature of the job set me thinking about a particular - and in some respects slightly troubling - aspect of some of the documentary materials which some historians must use to pursue their craft.

The example I have in mind is the extensive but scattered correspondence of an important eighteenth-century political figure; nothing problematical about that, and in fact surely it is a good thing that so much has survived. Perhaps, but many of these archival remains consist of numerous copies of the same items. I was surprised to find this, although had I bothered to think about it the situation would have been self-evident: an army of clerks turning out copies of copies of copies of an original letter was an obvious and vital component of the machinery of government; cabinet members, lords, dukes, MPs and what not naturally needed copies of important letters and papers to aid their deliberations, but 200 years later how to identify the original and in some circumstances can it even be said to exist? Should one privilege one particular copy or will any of them do? And what if mistakes were introduced at some point in the laborious copying process? Would that compromise the integrity of the historical source? It could be argued that as long as the historian accurately references what he finds in the archives none of this matters as he can only work with what is available, but start thinking too much about this stuff and the discipline can start to look a little shaky. (And this might be relevant in future; think of the vast numbers of copy documents generated by business, government and organisations - which of them can be cited with confidence as the original?) 

Cornish antiquities

A recent short holiday in west Cornwall offered plenty of opportunities to indulge an interest - even if it is only a passing interest as in my case - in antiquarian matters. Prehistoric field systems, quoits, cairns, man-made mounds, humps and bumps; there's an abundance of these things here, and many of them were visited, and no doubt measured, drawn and noted by the eighteenth-century Cornish antiquary and clergyman William Borlase (1696-1772). His name featured several times in our guidebooks, and it rang bells with me and with good reason: I drafted the entry for Borlase in the Historical Manuscripts Commission's Papers of British Antiquaries and Historians, the twelfth in the much-lamented HMC's guides to sources for British history. In many ways Borlase could probably stand as the very type of an eighteenth-century antiquary: a clergyman living in a remote part of the country with time on his hands, intensely curious about the past (it seems to have either been that and/or natural history with these sorts) and possibly starved of intellectual companionship.

As with so many eighteenth-century antiquaries Borlase's papers are now dispersed (and many more were no doubt lost), but rereading the HMC's guide I flatter myself that I did a tolerable job in summarising his literary remains in six short paragraphs. Aside from the simple - and impressive - fact of the mere survival of the papers, there is, of course, the question of how useful such material actually might be in a wider sense. Some might dismiss scholars such as Borlase as lacking modern rigour and hopelessly mistaken in their conclusions, but I think that the case for the usefulness of their papers can be made; sites may have changed and artefacts been lost that Borlase preserved in descriptive notes, sketches and measurements. And when it comes to very remote antiquity about which we really know very little perhaps the speculations of an eighteenth-century clergymen have as much validity as the modern archaeologist.   

'The Titantic Maid'

A recurring feature of family history is surely 'Titanic Maid' syndrome: by which I mean the family legend, recounted in all sincerity, of the relative who travelled on the Titanic and perished along with so many others on the fateful night. It makes for a great story, except that further enquiry reveals that there is no truth in it all ... No one has ever taken the time to examine the facts, such as they can be established, and so the yarn is wheeled out over time and unwittingly recycled. I actually had a beneficiary recount this very story whilst working on a case for Title Research, and in various guises the syndrome recurs so frequently that it seems to me almost to constitute an urban myth; some folklorist should certainly be collecting and studying this material. Needless to say that in the case I mention the 'maid' in question turned out to be alive in 1916 and - I couldn't resist looking - she did not even appear to feature on the Titanic's passenger list(s).

Another variation popped up in a recent case: the surname - Peto; the story - the Petos were of Mediterranean origin, and true to the passionate nature of the peoples of that region the particular individual under consideration was described as highly-strung, capricious and wilful. Another fine story, except that further enquiry established that the ancestor in question - one Priscilla Peto - was born in Bermondsey. Now maybe Priscilla was indeed a handful, and there is no doubt that Peto is an unusual sounding surname; maybe somewhere there is even a grain of truth in the story, but if so it must pre-date Priscilla's birth in 1864; but even in the early nineteenth century the Peto family seem to have originated from Wallingford in Berkshire - not known for its olive oil and wine, as far as I know.

I don't doubt the sincerity with which these stories are told, but it is interesting to speculate why this phenomenon occurs. Perhaps people need something to distinguish their family, by endowing them with some unusual attributes or attaching them to some famous/infamous event. The latter certainly offers a frisson, as anyone who has ever discovered that a relative died on the Somme, for example, will confirm.

Queen Mary University of London Archives

As well as rummaging around at The National Archives and other record repositories in London, I have a part-time job working with the Queen Mary University of London Academic Services team at Mile End Library. The job is varied, and involves some work in the archives section of the Library. The archives at Queen Mary are burgeoning under the energetic leadership of my colleague Lorraine Screene, and there are a number of very significant collections (for example the recently digitized diaries of Constance Maynard, mistress of Westfield College, and the records of the National Union of Tailors and Garment Workers), among which must surely be counted the extensive personal papers of Lord Hennessy, Attlee Professor of Contemporary British History at Queen Mary. I have been working on this collection under Lorraine’s direction for the past couple of months, the ultimate aim being to produce a box list of the papers that will facilitate access (the collection is currently unsorted which makes that difficult) and assist in the complicated process of full cataloguing.

The collection includes material from Lord Hennessy’s previous career as a journalist, as well more recent papers he has created as an historian and broadcaster, and in fact it can be difficult to spot the boundary between the two careers, the one having emerged so naturally from the other. What is abundantly clear though is just how rich the papers are: so far I have come across correspondence with politicians, civil servants and government insiders; working notes and memos; draft newspaper articles; and historical research notes and lecture papers. Even the necessarily cursory analysis involved in producing a box list has confirmed that future historians of, for example, Suez and the evolution – many would say the decay – of cabinet government will find much of value here.