Archives Hub feature for November 2018

Last year the Britten-Pears Foundation completed a project, funded by the National Cataloguing Grant programme, to catalogue Imogen Holst’s archive held in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, at The Red House, the former home of composer Benjamin Britten and his partner the singer Peter Pears.

Imogen Holst (1907-1984) was the daughter of composer Gustav Holst, best-known for The Planets. Holst, herself a composer, is perhaps best-known today as Britten’s musical assistant, but she also had an exceptional, wide-ranging but lesser known career as, amongst other things, educator, conductor and music traveller for CEMA, the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, work which put her at the forefront of the development of music education and community music-making in England in the twentieth century.

Every Tuesday afternoon in Stories from the Archive a member of the Foundation’s collections team gives a short talk to Red House site visitors focusing on an item from the holdings. I chose to share with visitors my enthusiasm for an item from Holst’s papers: her 1932 to 1934 scrapbook. This is the sixth of ten large scrapbooks she started as a student at the Royal College of Music in 1926, and continued until 1941, in which she pasted letters, postcards, programmes, press cuttings, photographs, tickets, drawings and other ephemeral material, writing captions next to the items. These volumes represent a colourful social record of cultural and musical life in pre-war England as well as telling the personal story of a passionate and open-minded woman musician.

Holst left the RCM in 1930, having received the Octavia Travelling Scholarship for composition, a prize of £100 which she spent travelling round Europe, returning home in May 1931. In this sixth scrapbook we see Holst at the start of her career – using her talents as composer, arranger, piano accompanist, conductor, public speaker, teacher, writer and organiser, as well as her immense enthusiasm, to earn a living. All the threads are already here that will run through the rest of her life, echoing through her entire archive – skills she continued to use, and passions she followed, whilst teaching at Dartington Hall, Devon, after moving to Aldeburgh in 1952 and in her role as artistic director of the Aldeburgh Festival from 1956 to 1977.

Early in 1932 Holst joined the staff of the English Folk Dance and Song Society. She was passionate about the preservation and spread of our folksong and dance heritage and her scrapbook is full of press cuttings and programmes documenting her travels throughout the country lecturing, teaching, conducting and playing as accompanist for the Society, as well as her work arranging traditional folk tunes for amateurs and professionals to play and sing.

This sixth scrapbook epitomizes Holst’s enthusiastic and lifelong work on amateur and community music making, and the important role she played in the democratization of music. We see her as a keen supporter of the newly formed Pipers’ Guild, which encouraged people to make and play their own musical instruments. Items in the scrapbook document Holst lecturing on the making and playing of bamboo pipes, arranging old English airs for performance on pipes as well as composing original tunes for both beginner and more advanced players.

Almost a decade later Holst’s passion and gift for working with amateurs led her to work, from 1940 to 1942, under CEMA, a forerunner of the Arts Council, as a music traveller to boost home morale during the war by encouraging musical activities in rural communities. Holst was allocated the south west of the country and travelled the wartime countryside, often cycling or walking between villages, to keep people singing, dancing and playing while the bombs fell. The reports Holst filed whilst working in this role were digitised as part of our cataloguing project and can be read in full from the Britten-Pears Foundation’s online catalogue. They illustrate the central role played by women in the crucial task of morale-boosting on the home front during the war.

Imogen Holst’s continuing enthusiasm for writing for and working with amateurs made her a much-loved part of the music scene in Aldeburgh and more widely in Suffolk.

This enthusiasm emanates from the scrapbook page recording a Gustav Holst Concert on which is pasted programme and press cuttings from a concert held in Carlisle on 12 Feb 1933 featuring first performances of new works by both father and daughter. Imogen Holst’s composition, a suite for brass band entitled The Unfortunate Traveller, was dedicated to St. Stephen’s Band – the group of amateurs giving the work its first performance. Here Holst crossed social and cultural barriers, not only by writing for brass band, – the News Chronicle article reports on ‘the first occasion on which an original brass band work by a woman composer has been publicly performed’ – but also by conducting the performance herself. Holst is quoted in The Daily Mail review ‘This is the first time, so far as I know, that a woman has conducted a brass band at a public concert’. We see Holst as a pioneer, composing throughout her career for instruments such as brass band, pipes, recorders and hand bells, bringing these instruments into the art music or cultivated music worlds.

Imogen Holst pasted into this scrapbook one of the last letters she received from her father, in May 1934, the month he died. Her papers represent the most significant father-daughter relationship in 20^th century British music and culture, one that added immeasurably to the democratization of music during this period, as both Holsts spent their lives and careers dedicated to the task of encouraging amateur music-making. The archive tells the story of the shared ideals, interests and talents of father and daughter – as composers, conductors, music educators, ethnomusicologists and community musicians – however we see from Gustav’s letter that he did not share his daughter’s enthusiasm for pipes!

Holst’s scrapbooks encapsulate, in a wonderfully lively and colourful way, what a remarkable, gifted, pioneering, energetic, generous and busy woman she was. Her papers form part of the Britten-Pears Foundation Archive which documents the lives and work of Britten and Pears, as well as their wider collaborative relationships through the papers of librettists, singers, producers, designers, musical assistants and organisations with whom they worked.

Judith Ratcliffe
Archivist
Britten-Pears Foundation Archive

Related

Imogen Holst archive

Browse all Britten-Pears Foundation collections on the Archives Hub

Britten-Pears Foundation online integrated catalogue

Holst Archive cataloguing project blog

The Holst archive project website gives an overview of the collection, details of digitised items available, list of works and further resources for researchers.

Bibliography

Imogen Holst: A Life in Music, revised edition, edited by Christopher Grogan, Woodbridge: Boydell, 2010 (first published 2007)

All images copyright the Pears-Britten Foundation and reproduced with the kind permission of the copyright holders.

Archives Hub feature for October 2018

Calvin Percival Bamflyde Wells (1908-1978) was a pioneer in the study of disease in archaeological skeletal remains, otherwise known as palaeopathology. A qualified medical doctor who spoke several languages Wells’ publications continue to be cited by researchers and academics working across a range of disciplines, including bioarchaeology, anthropology and the history of medicine. In 2017 the University of Bradford received a Wellcome Trust Research Resources grant to catalogue Wells’ archive of writings, research material and correspondence. One of the most significant parts of the collection relate to Wells’ skeletal reports, which document his analysis of excavated human remains from archaeological sites around the world.

Upon his retirement from medicine at the age of 55 Wells started to study palaeopathology full-time, and soon became the United Kingdom’s leading authority on the subject. Working out of his cottage in rural Norfolk Wells received specimens by post which he examined on his kitchen table, or weather depending, garden. A consummate professional Wells offered an efficient service though insisted that he was paid for his reports, and preferably published in a noteworthy journal. Among Wells’ clients were many distinguished archaeologists, such as Glyn Daniel, Sonia Chadwick-Hawkes, Cecil Hackett, and Charles and Barbara Green. Aside from his first and most impactful book Bones, Bodies and Disease, Wells’ most influential work remains the 120 skeletal reports he produced between 1965 and 1978. A biography of Wells in the Global History of Palaeopathology notes that:

“Calvin Wells’ skeletal reports are remembered for two reasons: the data presentation is meticulously executed and useful to bioarchaeologists today, and his interpretation for the evidence of disease are fascinating and creative, if not necessarily scientifically supported”

The extent of Wells’ dedication to the scientific method is revealed in the archive material, which includes handwritten notes, tables and graphs alongside photographs and radiographs of bone specimens. Almost paradoxically Wells combined a clinical approach to palaeopathological examination with an imaginative, if eccentric, manner in interpreting causes of injury and death in ancient people. For those familiar with Wells’ skeletal reports it would not be surprising to learn that he wrote a considerable amount of short fiction in his spare time. A fascination with the romantic and tragic bled into Wells’ skeletal reports, which has since left an indelible mark on his scientific bibliography.

One example among many which show Wells’ imaginative reading of skeletal remains is a 1963 report title The Human Skeleton from Cox Lane, Ipswich. The report contains Wells’ scientifically sound analysis of male skeleton in his early thirties with six injuries caused by blunt force trauma. It is only when Wells’ attempts to “deduce the probable sequence leading to the man’s death” that he veers into the realms of fiction. In this instance Wells concocts a scenario wherein the victim is pulled from horseback by two assailants before being gruesomely stabbed by a third. Wells concludes that the victim was:

“A young, vigorous energetic man who had probably led a not unadventurous life and finally died in some blood foray fighting desperately and it would seem not ingloriously”

While intriguing, this narrative does not hold up to scientific scrutiny, and there are many similar instances of Wells subjugating objective facts and the historical record to salacious invention. In consideration of these various faults, to what extent are Wells’ skeletal reports valuable for contemporary researchers in bioarchaeology?

As with all pioneers in unexplored disciplines, Wells was prone to deviation and false starts on his journey to new discoveries. For example Wells was among the first palaeopathologists to undertake serious examination of cremated skeletal remains, revealing that it was possible to ascertain age, sex and, in some cases, pathological change with some degree of certainty in charred bone. Wells was also the first to introduce the important concept of pseduopathology, which states that the appearance of disease may be caused by other factors such as bacteria, soil erosion, wildlife and the excavation process itself. Additionally Wells authored several significant reports which examined leprosy, Paget’s disease and Harris lines in archaeological human remains. Wells is also credited for reintroducing the use of radiography in palaeopathological examination.

The fact that citations of Wells’ bone reports in scientific and academic journals have increased in the forty years since his death are a testament to their enduring value. In the process of cataloguing his archive we have discovered the depth of research and preparation Wells invested in every single skeletal report. As a result of the cataloguing project, contemporary researchers can now access Wells’ original research material providing an opportunity to form improved or revised conclusions about the specimens he examined. In addition to unlocking the research potential of Wells’ archive, the cataloguing project has unveiled a lot about the ‘Sherlock Holmes of Palaeopathology’s’ enigmatic life and personality. Although forthright and resolute in his opinions, Wells by no means thought himself as completely infallible. As he was keen to remind scholars attempting to diagnose disease in the remains of the past:

 “When we remember the many ways in which a pseudopathological appearance can be produced – or a genuine lesion obscured – it no longer seems extraordinary that palaeopathologists occasionally make a wrong diagnosis. The wonder is that we ever make a right one”.

James Neill
Project Archivist – Calvin Wells Collection
Information Services
University of Bradford

 Bibliography

Bones, Bodies and Disease by Calvin Wells (London: Thames & Hudson, 1964)

‘Pseudopathology’ by Dr. Calvin Wells ‘Diseases in Antiquity: A Survey of the Diseases, Injuries, and Surgery of Early Populations’ Edited by Don Brothwell Springfield, Illinois: C.C. Thomas (1967)

‘Calvin Percival Bamfylde Wells (1908–1978)’ by Charlotte Roberts and Keith Manchester ‘The Global History of Paleopathology: Pioneers and Prospects‘ Edited by Jane Buikstra and Charlotte Roberts New York, NY: Oxford University Press (2012)

‘Crooked Timber: The life of Calvin Wells (1908-1978)’ by Tony Waldron in Journal of Medical Biography (May 2014)

Related

The Calvin Wells Palaeopathology Archive, 1953-1984

Browse all University of Bradford Special Collections on the Archives Hub.

Previous features by University of Bradford Special Collections Archives:

The Nuclear Disarmament Symbol Sketches, March 2017

The PaxCat Project: bringing peace archives to life, 2010

All images copyright The University of Bradford and reproduced with the kind permission of the copyright holders.

Archives Hub feature for August 2018

Barclays Group Archives has just posted a collection-level description for the records of Jonathan Backhouse & Co. of Darlington, one of the three principal partnerships that combined in 1896 to form the modern Barclays, which by the mid-20th century became the largest domestic clearing bank in Britain. The Hub entry for Backhouse bank complements descriptions previously posted for the other two principals in the merger, Barclays of Lombard Street and Gurneys of East Anglia.

The 1896 merger was described by The Economist at the time as ‘the largest of its kind that has yet taken place.’ It signalled the end of a long tradition of private banking, both in London and the provinces, the culmination of a process by which most of the private banks had converted themselves into, or been absorbed by, joint stock companies, during the previous 70 years.

Measured by total customer deposits, the three banks ranked as follows:

• Barclay, Bevan, Tritton & Co., Lombard Street (est. 1690)                             £8,589,530
• Gurney & Co., Norwich (est. 1775)                                                                    £6,931,521
• Backhouse & Co., Darlington (est. 1774)                                                           £3,303,293

One of the distinctive features of all three was their origin in Quaker business enterprise. In both Gurneys and Backhouses the Quaker influence remained noticeable well into the 19^th century, and another press comment on the 1896 merger referred to it as a combination of those ‘well-known Quaker firms’.

Although by 1896 few of the partners directly involved in the amalgamation were still practising Friends, they were content to claim a heritage that looked back to the Quakerly qualities of frugality, prudence and trustworthiness that had been so attractive to customers, and which had contributed to the remarkable growth of the banks in their early decades.

The reasons why so many Friends entered the business world in the first place are long acknowledged. Exclusion from mainstream professions and occupations led many to establish their own businesses, relying on their hard work and moral code to become trusted and respected figures within the mercantile community.

The historic core of the modern Barclays traces its origins from John Freame and Thomas Gould, two Quaker goldsmith bankers who in 1690 started a business in the heart of the City. The partnership was one of the most successful amongst the early bankers, pioneering the discounting of provincial bills of exchange. This success sprang at least in part from what has been described as ‘Quaker competitive advantage’.

They financed Quaker traders in the American colonies and helped to finance the Pennsylvania Land Company; they were actively involved in Quaker-dominated enterprises such as the London Lead Company and the Welsh Copper Company. The latter produced silver as a by-product, which Freame and Gould then sold to the Royal Mint. They were also the closest thing the Quakers had to an official banker, holding the Society of Friends’ central funds.

By the mid-1700s the partners were amassing fortunes which may have seemed at odds with the Quaker principles of simple and plain living; on the other hand, a Quaker who went bankrupt was liable to be disowned by the Society. While the fear of bankruptcy may have spurred the Barclays on to ever greater profitability, they still had not lost sight of other Quaker virtues.

David Barclay the younger, who became a partner in the Bank in 1776, remained an active Friend throughout his career. A keen supporter of the emancipation campaigner William Wilberforce, he used his influence to persuade other Quakers to take a stronger stand for the abolition of slavery. Later, David Barclay found himself the owner of a plantation in Jamaica in settlement of a debt. His decision to free the slaves and transport them to Philadelphia cost him £3,000.

The country banks, too, sprang from the original business of their founders. In the case of both Backhouses and Gurneys this was textiles, though the former also had interests in shipping, coal mining and railways. One of the most eye-catching documents in the Backhouse archives is a signed and sealed agreement (currently on loan to Tyne & Wear Archives as part of the Great Exhibition of the North), between the subscribers for the construction of the pioneering Stockton-Darlington railway. The signatories comprise a roll-call of Quaker business families, including bankers who would, decades years later, come together in the modern Barclays: Backhouse, Pease, Barclay, Leatham, Gurney, and Birkbeck.

Jonathan Backhouse junior (1779-1842), grandson of the founder, argued in favour of a railway during a public meeting at Darlington town hall in 1818, stressing its commercial advantages over those of the conventional option, a canal. The first track was laid in May 1821, and the completed railway opened on 27th September 1825. Jonathan served as the company’s first treasurer until 1833. In 1811 he had cemented a significant Quaker banking alliance by marrying Hannah, daughter and co-heir of Joseph Gurney of Norwich: “of crucial importance…..this dynastic alliance in itself transformed the prospects for transport improvement, especially when the Backhouses allied themselves with the Quaker Pease family of Darlington in the raising of capital.” [M W Kirby, ‘Jonathan Backhouse’ in Dictionary of National Biography ] The Backhouses were also connected with the Barclays by marriage. After 1833 Jonathan left the business in the hands of his son Edmund, in order to devote himself full-time to the Quaker ministry.

Meanwhile the Gurneys of Norwich were establishing themselves as one of the leading commercial families in England, and came to be connected by marital, social and business ties with other Quaker banking families, including Barclay, Birkbeck, Buxton, Backhouse and Pease. Notable Gurneys in the bank’s history include Joseph John (1788-1847), religious writer, Quaker minister, anti-slavery campaigner and, like his sister Elizabeth Fry (nee Gurney), also active in prison reform; Hudson (1775-1864), scholar, member of parliament and philanthropist; and Samuel (1786-1856), philanthropist and partner in the Norwich bank for nearly forty years. Notable partners in the Norwich bank from the other families included Henry and William Birkbeck, Thomas Fowell Buxton, and Henry Ford Barclay. By 1838 the Gurneys were said to be ‘exercising an influence and a power inferior to that of no banking establishment in Great Britain – that of the Bank of England alone excepted.’

Like other successful Quakers, some of the Gurneys found it difficult to reconcile faith with wealth. Joseph John chose to become a ‘plain Friend,’ dedicating his life to his bank, his religion and good causes. In 1837 went on a three-year mission tour of the West Indies and America, giving away one third of his share of the bank’s profits for the duration. He was a renowned Quaker author, and his 1824 work, ‘Observations on the Religious Peculiarities of the Society of Friends’ was reprinted several times. His attitude is exemplified by his statement that “I suppose my leading outward object in life may be said to be the Bank. While I am a banker the Bank must be attended to. It is obviously the religious duty of a trustee to so large an amount to be diligent in watching his trust.

The history of the Quaker banks reveals all sorts of connections. For example, it’s no coincidence that the Backhouses used Barclay & Co. of Lombard Street for their London clearing agents in the 19^th century. Both Backhouses and another Quaker country bank in the 1896 merger, Bassett & Harris of Leighton Buzzard, commissioned one of the renowned Gothic revival architects of Victorian England, Alfred Waterhouse, who was also from a Quaker family, to design new banking houses for them in the 1860s – the result being two remarkably similar buildings. Waterhouse also designed at least three country houses for the Backhouses in county Durham.

The Backhouse and Gurney archives each contain papers about the partners’ activities as Friends. For example, a Backhouse bundle from 1776-79 includes brief reports on the state of the various Meetings in Ireland visited by  James  Backhouse  on  his mission tour. Amongst the Gurney archives are papers concerning the old Friends’ burial ground at St. Stephen’s Green in Dublin, and a scarce contemporary print showing John Gurney, ‘the Weavers’ Friend’, with a printed testimonial following his speech before parliament on behalf of the Norwich weavers in 1720.

Although the bulk of the surviving records document the partners’ banking and business activities, there are also many items of wider interest in the collections listed on the Hub. Amongst the Gurney papers is a series of letters written during the 1850s-80s, between John Henry Gurney (bank partner, sometime Liberal M.P. and amateur ornithologist), his son of the same name, and various naturalists of their circle including Alfred Russel Wallace, mainly about birds and their classification. In the same archive is an eye-witness account of the devastating Lisbon earthquake of 1755 by Benjamin Farmer, member of a mercantile family connected with the Barclays.

At least three of the smaller banks in the 1896 merger also had Quaker founders or partners, and in due course their archives, too, will be described on the Hub: Sharples, Tuke, Lucas & Seebohm of Hitchin; Fordham, Gibson & Co. of Royston; and Bassett, Son & Harris of Leighton Buzzard.

Nicholas Webb
Archivist
Barclays Group Archives

Related

Jonathan Backhouse & Company, Darlington, 1615-1916

Browse all Barclays Group Archives collections on the Archives Hub.

Previous features by Barclays Group Archives

Barclaycard: 50 years of plastic money – the story from the Archives, June 2016

Barclays Group Archives, January 2014

All images copyright the Barclays Group and reproduced with the kind permission of the copyright holders.

Archives Hub feature for July 2018

Cambridgeshire Archives is privileged to hold the records of the Bedford Level Corporation. This significant archive, which includes records of Commissions of Sewers dating as far back as 1362, documents, arguably, the greatest land reclamation seen in the country’s history; the drainage of the Fens.

2018 marks the 200th anniversary of the commencement of work on one of the more controversial and problematic drainage projects undertaken; the Eau Brink Cut.

The Great East Swamp

Piecemeal attempts to drain the Fens (commonly referred to as the Great East Swamp and described by William Elstobb as the “deep and horrible fen”) enabling more land to be brought in to use for summer grazing began in medieval times. The swampy conditions were due to the constant tidal flooding of the Ouse, Nene and Welland which would overspill their natural banks causing widespread crop damage and creating an ideal environment for diseases such as malaria, known locally as Fen ague. Yet, this watery landscape also provided a livelihood peculiar to Fen dwellers who were unwilling to give up a traditional way of life trapping eels and fish and shooting wildfowl.

In 1630, despite local opposition, Francis 4^th Earl of Bedford contracted with a number of landowners to drain, within six years, the area of the Southern Fen afterwards known as the Bedford Level. Sadly, the records of the work carried out over this period were stored in the Fen Office at the Inner Temples Chamber and largely destroyed during the Great Fire of London.

The Society of Adventurers and Cornelius Vermuyden

After the Civil War, Francis’ heir, Sir William Russell, 5^th Earl of Bedford  with some of the original ‘Adventurers’ and other interested parties, picked up the work again, this time with the aim of  making the Bedford Level ‘winter ground’ capable of growing crops which could sustain cattle over the winter months. Under the Pretended Act of 1649 they came to be known as the Bedford Level Company or the Society of Adventurers. The Dutch engineer, Cornelius Vermuyden, who had been commissioned by Charles I in 1626 to drain Hatfield Chase in the Isle of Axholme in Lincolnshire, was appointed Director of Works. 

That same year, Jonas Moore took up office as Surveyor to the Bedford Level Corporation and was charged with producing ‘one general Complete Map of the whole Levell of the fennes with the Adventure Land and lott devisions.’ It was to become the finest map of the Bedford Level ever published but Moore did not live to see its release in 1658.

The Great Levell of the Fenns…drained

One of the many projects directed by Vermuyden was the construction of the Denver Sluice near Downham Market intended to ‘’force the tidal waters in a straight course up the Hundred Foot river, instead of allowing them to flow in their natural and more circuitous channel up the Ten Mile, or Ouse River.’  It was a heavily criticised undertaking, blamed, ironically, for causing flooding in the South Level of the Fens and the build-up of silt and sand downstream which proved injurious to navigation in the port of King’s Lynn. After a particularly high tide ‘blew up’ the sluice in 1713, merchants in the towns enjoying unobstructed navigation campaigned, unsuccessfully, against its reinstatement and it was reconstructed in 1748 by Charles Labelve.

The Eau Brink Cut

 There is a wealth of material to be found in the Corporation’s archive, correspondence, reports, minutes and plans, for anyone wishing to trace the long and contentious struggle to come up with an effective and affordable means of improving the Ouse near King’s Lynn.

The eventual cost of obtaining the first Eau Brink Act, in 1795, was nearly £12,000. Further delays ensued so it is this year, 2018 which marks the 200th anniversary of the actual commencement of work on the Eau Brink Cut, a two and a half mile straight channel dug between St German’s Bridge and Lynn to provide an alternative route to the existing six mile bend in the Ouse.

 Shifting sands

 The construction of the Eau Brink Cut, under the aegis of engineers Thomas Telford and John Rennie, took nearly 4 years then, in April 1822, only a few months after the new cut was opened, they submitted a report recommending the channel be widened since a bank of sand and mud had already formed extending about 400 feet upwards from Denver Sluice.

The humble petition of John Owen

 John Owen blamed the Eau Brink Cut for the destruction of his smelt fishery and having leased fishing rights in the Hundred Foot River for almost 40 years, petitioned the Corporation for a reduction in his rent so he could afford the £200 needed to invest in new nets and other equipment. Thousands of other memorials and petitions presented to the Corporation, all individually catalogued, now help document the personal impact of the monumental endeavour which was the draining of the Fens.

Sue Sampson
Public Services Archivist
Cambridgeshire Archives

Related

Records of the Bedford Level Corporation, 1630-1920

Browse all Cambridgeshire Archives collections on the Archives Hub.

All images copyright Cambridgeshire Archives and reproduced with the kind permission of the copyright holders.

Archives Hub feature for April 2018

In 2017 the Salvation Army International Heritage Centre purchased the diary of a British Salvation Army officer serving in Switzerland in 1883 from a rare book dealer [TNG/1]. The cost of the purchase was covered by a grant from the Friends of the National Libraries. Lieutenant Richard Greville Thonger was one of the first group of Salvationists to arrive in Switzerland in 1882 and his diary records the opposition faced by The Salvation Army, including his own imprisonment. You can read more about the diary and its author on our blog.

This diary joins many others already held in our archive, including the diaries of The Salvation Army’s founder, William Booth, and those of members of his family. Among them are three volumes written by his daughter-in-law, Florence Booth (nee Soper), in which, alongside accounts of her evangelical work and raising a young family, are details of her involvement in the campaign to raise the age of consent to 16 via the passing of the Criminal Law Amendment Act in 1885.

Just as Thonger’s diary gives a detailed account of the work of The Salvation Army in Switzerland, several other diaries in our archive look at the work of other Salvation Army ministers (known as ‘officers’) from all over the world. To take just three examples, we hold diaries written in Sri Lanka, Italy and Indonesia.

Captain John Lyons (1860-1940) was originally from Donegal in Ireland but was appointed to India as a missionary officer in 1886. At this time Salvation Army missionaries adopted Indian names and John Lyons became Dev Kumar. He was then transferred to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in 1888 and the 3 diaries we hold date from this period. At the end of 1893 he returned to Britain with his “health broken” and his diary for that year records his mixed feelings about Ceylon. Lyons shows a deep affection for the country, writing that “with the tall coconut trees […] shading this lovely spot […] my heart is drawn out to God for His goodness & His wonderful works to the children of men.” However in moments of frustration he writes of “all the trouble to our work here in Ceylon” and that “I am sure it must be an abomination to God when He looks down upon this lovely island of ours.” However, his regret at leaving is palpable in the entry for Christmas Day: “I was far away in Ceylon last year in that sunny land; here I am among the cold of England. Everything seems so very strange, few people I know, all seems so changed. I went and seen Captain Stone who has been home from India about 12 months. He loves India as ever.” In 1945 The Salvation Army published one of its series of ‘Liberty Booklets’ about John Lyons written by Arch Wiggins and called ‘Lyons in the Jungle.’

We hold copies of manuscript extracts from the diaries of Adjutant Raffaelo Batelli (1870-1941?), an officer with The Salvation Army in Italy (called l’Esercito della Salvezza in Italian). These extracts include details of his early life in Florence and recount that Batelli, originally a Catholic, encountered The Salvation Army on 16 June 1895 and was immediately converted (“conosco l’Esercito della Salvezza e mi converto. Alleluia!”). He befriended Major (‘Maggiore’) John and Elizabeth Gordon who lived in Italy and who had become Salvation Army converts in the 1880s. Batelli referred to himself as their “spiritual son” and regularly travelled with them to Britain in the late 1890s.

When John Gordon died after a tram accident in Edinburgh in 1902, Batelli accompanied Margaret to the funeral in Scotland. The extracts are in Italian and the original diaries are believed to have been destroyed.

Lt-Colonel Leonard Woodward (1883-1950) became a Salvation Army officer in 1903 and, after serving in the UK and Ireland, went to the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) as a missionary in 1916. His diaries cover the period from 1927 to 1950, during which time he and his wife, Maggie, were stationed in Java and Celebes (now Sulawesi). The early diaries include reference to many days spent on horseback riding between villages in the highlands of Sulawesi, often “very hot [and] hungry”. The diaries also record the years Leonard and Maggie spent in the Kampong Makassar civilian internment camp in Java after the Japanese invasion in 1942. The couple were separated and Leonard alleviated his daily forced labour (‘corvée’) by practicing his language skills: writing a diary in Uma, producing a concordance of New Testament names in Malay and discussing Toraja languages with an interned philologist.

Leonard and Maggie were released in September 1945 and, when they were reunited he wrote “M. looked very thin and aged, wrinkled and scraggy, which was just the impression she got of me.” They returned to the UK in 1949, bringing with them a large collection of ethnographic objects from Celebes, some of which are now held by the National Museums Scotland.

Salvation Army International Heritage Centre
William Booth College, London

Related

Explore all Salvation Army International Heritage Centre collections on the Archives Hub.

Salvation Army International Heritage Centre website

All images copyright Salvation Army International Heritage Centre and reproduced with the kind permission of the copyright holders.

Archives Hub feature for February 2018

In 2018 a project will commence to restore and enhance Canterbury Cathedral’s organ, due for completion in time for the 2020 Lambeth Conference, when Anglican bishops from all over the world assemble in Canterbury. The first organ was installed at Canterbury in the 12^th century although it is believed that unlike its modern counter part, it was not viewed as a musical instrument, rather “a producer of cheerful though fairly random noise.”[1] The current organ was built in 1888 and underwent a number of renovations in the twentieth century. To mark the commencement of the Organ Project, funded through the Canterbury Cathedral Trust, here is an enticing overture of musical collections held by Canterbury Cathedral Archives and Library.

Music in the Aisles

There has been a tradition of music as an integral part of worship at Canterbury Cathedral since its foundation over 1,400 years ago and there is evidence of this in both the fabric of the Cathedral itself and the collections it holds. The Cathedral’s medieval archive was added to the UNESCO UK Memory of the World Register in 2016. This outstanding nationally significant collection includes over 8,000 charters, 30 of which date from before 1066. The collection of medieval music of the Cathedral is principally made up of fragments of music manuscripts from the 11^th century onwards. This is partly as a result of the practice of music manuscripts being reused when the music became obsolete during the Middle Ages, and then later due to the Cathedral’s service books being mostly destroyed, dismantled or given away after the Reformation. A number of music fragments were re-used to bind later manuscripts, such as the fragment of 14^th or 15^th century antiphonal music pictured below, which was re-discovered in 1937 as part of the cover of a Court Book (CCA-DCc/AddMs/128/9).

A number of missals are also included in the collections held by the Cathedral Archives and Library. The Plumptre Missal is a particularly fine example of a Sarum Missal containing all the text and music required to celebrate mass and the variations for feast days (CCA-U53/1). Illuminated throughout this mid fourteenth century missal was written at the request of the Stathum family, lords of Morley, Derbyshire, presumably for use in Morley Church. The missal included in the collection of records from St Augustine’s College, a Canterbury based missionary college, is believed to have originally been used by All Saints’ Church, Woodchurch in Kent (CCA-U88/B/6/1). The missal, which is in two columns in red and black ink, with simple illuminated initials in blue and red and a small number of further illuminated borders for certain feast days, is extravagant for a parish church and possibly the gift of a wealthy donor. It shows evidence of having been heavily used since the time it was written circa 1430.

Records relating to the Cathedral Choir are a significant part of the Cathedral’s collection of music. The archive holds the various part books used by the choir from the seventeenth century to the present day (CCA-DCc/MusicMS). These manuscripts include service settings and anthems for contratenor (alto), tenor and bass voices and comprise music for the choir, the organ and, occasionally, other instruments. The records of the Canterbury Cathedral Choir School (CCA-U166) contains accounts, administration files, records relating to pupils and performances and a wonderful series of photographs dating from 1881 onwards. This archive provides an insight into all aspects of the life of a chorister, including worship, musical practice and performance, study and leisure.

Music in the Streets

In addition to the religious music one would expect in a Cathedral archive the collections also contain a surprising range of secular music and music ephemera as part of the wide range of collections held on loan. Examples include handbills and programmes for musical and theatrical performances in the collection of personal diaries, notes and memorabilia of Alfred E. Johnson, a Canterbury based sugar-boiler (CCA-U520/6), and a collection of music hall patriotic song sheets held as part of Furley Solicitors Records (CCA-U51/44), both from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Most notable are the records of the Canterbury Catch Club, a musical members’ only society formed in 1779 (CCA-CC-W/7). The members met every Wednesday evening between October and March until it disbanded in 1865 to indulge in music making, alcohol, tobacco, and a considerable amount of merriment. While all members were expected to participate in the performance of amusing ‘catches’, the more technically challenging ‘glees’ were left to those more adept which would have included musicians employed by Canterbury Cathedral. Further music was provided by an orchestra funded out of the subscription fees, and occasional visiting musical celebrities.  The minute books of the society along with volumes of music performed by the Catch Club form part of the City of Canterbury’s large and varied archive which is housed at the Cathedral.

You can find out more about collections on the Canterbury Cathedral webpage: https://www.canterbury-Cathedral.org/heritage/archives-library/.

Ashleigh Hawkins, Archivist
Canterbury Cathedral Archives and Library

[1] “The Liturgy of the Cathedral and tis Music, c.1075-1642” Roger Bowers, A History of Canterbury Cathedral, P. Collinson, N. Ramsay and M. Sparks 2002, p 417

Related

Records of the Dean and Chapter of Canterbury Cathedral, c800 – [ongoing]

All Canterbury Cathedral Archives collections on the Archives Hub.

All images copyright of the Chapter of Canterbury and reproduced with the kind permission of the copyright holders.