AROUND OUR DIOCESE The Diocesan Archives By Oliver Lewis Greetings from the Diocesan Archives! My name is Oliver and I have been appointed temporarily as Assistant Archivist at our new base in Lenton Business Centre, Nottingham. The archive collection was moved here in June 2021 from its previous home at Willson House near the Cathedral (not currently usable due to various structural problems with the building). Our archive holds a wide variety of material mainly from the 20th century, but also dating back to the creation of the Diocese in 1850 (and even earlier in some cases). Of particular importance are the parish registers, recording Catholic baptisms, marriages, confirmations and burials. Like their Anglican counterparts, these records can be a useful tool in family history research. Another significant part of the collection are the records relating to the Bishops of Nottingham: notable among these are the visitation books of Bishop Edward Bagshawe (1874-1901), who, for several years, kept fastidious notes on the state of the parishes (or ‘missions’ as they were then called) that he visited throughout the Diocese. Among the various bishops’ records we also have the ‘Ad Clerums’ which kept the clergy informed about Diocesan news, as they still do today. The yearbook was inaugurated in the episcopate of Bishop Thomas Dunn, a great administrator whose tenure saw much development in the Diocese. As former Diocesan archivist Canon Garrett Sweeney wrote in an article for the yearbook’s 50th anniversary, Dunn very much desired that news of Diocesan affairs be more accessible to the laity. Reflecting the Bishop’s forwardthinking attitude, the editor of the first 1921 yearbook stated: ‘it is confidently anticipated that as a record of Catholic life in the five Counties comprised in the Diocese it will prove in time as valuable from an historical point of view, as it is bound to be useful from its very inception’. And so it has proven to be. Not only do the yearbooks provide the usual information about clergy, parishes, Catholic organisations, Diocesan statistics (and much more), they also contain all kinds of Nottingham Diocesan Yearbook
advertisements for a variety of businesses; these range from altar wine sellers, funeral directors and church candle makers, to tradesmen, coal merchants and chemists. Like those found in historical newspapers and trade directories like Kelly’s and Pigot’s, these advertisements can be useful in researching the history of a local area (as well as being occasionally entertaining!). Yearbook articles can provide snippets about the lives of particularly interesting figures who once worked in the Diocese (like the Rosminian Fr. Albert Basil, an army chaplain who served with the US Rangers in WWII, won the Silver Star Medal, and later became chaplain at Loughborough College). They also feature news of important milestones in the Diocese, such as the Eucharistic Congress held in Nottingham (1933), and the Diocesan response to the Second Vatican Council and the 1982 papal visit. The general development of the Diocese can also be traced, such as the spate of church building begun in earnest during Bishop Dunn’s episcopate, the surge in new schools under Bishop Ellis (57 new schools built between 1944-1969), the creation of new parishes and the development of both evangelisation and ecumenism. As the editor of the first issue had hoped, the yearbook has been shown to be an invaluable historical record for all these events, and I’m sure it will continue to be so for future researchers.
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