Discover Issue 7/December 2017

Issue 7/December 2017

DISCOVER The University of Nottingham’s Manuscripts and Special Collections

INSIDE: Danelaw Saga • Anne Vaux • Mountain Goat King • Mary Howitt • 5 minutes with Jayne

Welcome

Welcome Welcome to the latest edition of Discover, The University of Nottingham Manuscripts and Special Collections’ Newsletter. I would like to take this opportunity to send you best wishes for Christmas and the New Year.

Our new exhibition, Danelaw Saga: Bringing Vikings back to the East Midlands, runs until 8 April 2018. It is a collaboration between Manuscripts and Special Collections, the Centre for Study of the Viking Age and the University Museum, supported by The Arts and Humanities Research Council. It brings together artefacts from regional museums with items from our own collections to tell the story of the Vikings in the East Midlands. This complements Viking: Rediscover the Legend, a touring exhibition from the British Museum and the York Museums Trust being shown at the Djanogly Gallery. Both exhibitions are supported by a programme of talks and events.

Two other articles continue the Scandinavian theme.

There is an article on the writer Mary Howitt, whose correspondence we hold and who, among her other writings, translated Scandinavian literature. We are also appealing for help in identifying students who appear in a Geography Field Group Album on a field trip to Norway in 1936.

The article on recent acquisitions includes more information on our Tri-Campus Contemporary Collecting project to document the lives of current students. We were also pleased to receive a collection of the papers of Nora Lavrin (1897-1975), artist, illustrator and wife of Janko Lavrin, Professor of Slavonic Studies at Nottingham. These will feature in our next exhibition on children’s literature, From Rags to Witches: the grim tale of children’s stories.

A fascinating piece of research brings together evidence from the Archdeaconry of Nottingham archive on the 17th-century recusant Anne Vaux.

This is a follow up to the recent BBC drama series Gunpowder. The Archdeaconry records are a mine of information covering the 16th to 19th centuries and one of our most important collections.

If you would like to find out more about any aspect of our work, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Meanwhile I hope that you enjoy reading this edition of Discover.

Mark Dorrington Keeper of Manuscripts and Special Collections

Can you name these students who left it rather late to be knitting warm clothes for Norway?

In the falls with the Moutain Goat King After successfully tracking down the compiler of the Canadian watercolours (Issues 1 and 3), we are once again seeking help with identifying an overseas album. Tucked away among the student society records are several boxes of carefully-compiled photo albums from the 1930s and 1940s.

These albums belonged to the Le Play Society, which was established to encourage a method of geographical field study based on the three fundamental bases of society: place, work and family. It was very active, organising numerous field trips in an era when foreign travel was uncommon, and conducting intensive studies of small areas which resulted in a number of publications.

The albums are a mixture of geographical features, local people – as one would expect from a research trip – and the enthusiastic young students themselves. They travelled by ship and steam train around Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.

This is what makes the early albums especially interesting and even poignant, depicting as they do the normality of life in the farms, markets and bustling cities across Europe just prior to the total devastation wrought by World War II. This particular album is of the 1936 trip to Norway, when the students visited numerous sites in the west of the country.

Many of the photos visited have a clear geographical relevance: Hardangerfjord is the fourth largest fjord in the world, Bergen is known as the city of seven mountains and Vøringfossen is one of the most famous waterfalls in Norway, although at less than 600 feet tall it is comparatively small. The group were also apparently

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Monday mystery

Row, row, row your boat gently ‘cross the fjord.

The page of the goat: there’s no mystery here, they’re just inherently amusing images.

Geography students on ice.

Shorts weather!

A typical image from the album.

much taken with a goat, or several goats, which proves that people’s fascination with adorable animals is timeless.

After the trip, the photo album was circulated to the Society’s members. From this list we can work out who was likely to have been on the trip, but we can’t put names to the faces. Many of the photos are probably too small and blurred to positively identify people now, but hopefully these reasonably clear photos combined with the list of names will help.

There seem to have been annual fieldwork trips abroad and we are lucky that most of the photographs survive – a handful of photos have been lost from the albums, and in a couple of cases the whole album is missing, presumably having been lost in the post or put aside and forgotten about. The overseas fieldwork programme, understandably, came to an abrupt end during World War II. The restrictions on travel in the immediate post-War period meant that the group, by now having cut ties with the Le Play Society and renamed itself the Geographical Field Group, initially struggled to maintain an active overseas fieldwork programme.

The University holds a large quantity of material from the Le Play Society/Geographical Field Group and from various members, much of which relates to the trips and research undertaken. Unfortunately the majority has not been catalogued, but with the help of some of our student placements, we have made good progress with digitising the photo albums. If you have any information that can help us identify these travellers, please contact us.

All images taken from Papers of the Geographical Field Group, incorporating records of the Le Play Society, and individual members of the GFG c.1933–c1990, GFG.

Kicking glaciers, taking names. These people are probably in the photos, can anyone match names to faces?

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Spotlight

Mary Howitt revisited Mary Howitt (1799-1888), dubbed “another lost Victorian writer” in the sub-title of a biography, is remembered principally for the children’s poem The Spider and the Fly, whose charm has endured since its publication in 1828. The inclusion of some of her works in two successive exhibitions in the Weston Gallery, Collected Words and Danelaw Saga, has helped to renew interest in her writings.

Mary spent her early life in Uttoxeter, London and Sheffield, and after she married William Howitt (1792–1879) they lived briefly in Nottingham. William was originally from Heanor in Derbyshire and worked as a chemist in Nottingham, before he and Mary became freelance authors. Success saw them shuttle between London, their new home, and European centres of culture such as Heidelberg and Rome. They entered a social circle of creative people connected by affinities for literary trends and philosophical outlooks. The Howitts met with other writers wherever they lived as if by default, a mirror-image of how aristocrats were aware of each other and sought out their peers as soon as they arrived in a new place.

The Howitts led busy family and social lives, which makes the couple’s published output all the more astonishing: William was the author of or contributor to fifty books, while Mary authored twice as many, including adult and children’s fiction and translations. Manuscripts and Special Collections holds approximately 150 editions of printed works by the Howitts.

The bulk of our knowledge about their lives comes from two collections of letters, the Correspondence of Mary Howitt (Ht), which contains approximately 1,000 letters written by Mary Howitt and various members of her extended family, and the Briggs Collection of Literary Papers and Correspondence (Bg), which includes 24 letters written by William and Mary Howitt and their daughter Margaret.

Reading Mary Howitt’s letters to her sister Anna, it becomes apparent that the couple wrote relentlessly. Although Mary scarcely ever refers to this work, when she does it is to complain.

The “artistic labours” (Ht 1/1/207) are an under-reported side of daily life in the Howitt household, as they stood ready to respond to requests at a moment’s notice. Mary apologises that she and William were taken up with reading proofs during a visit to her sister, implying that they had been disappointing guests (Ht 1/1/234), she also cuts a family holiday short and returns to write a text to order (Ht 1/1/210). Though there are few clues to actual mishaps in Mary’s career as a writer, the text production itself seems to put the author under stress, which is the only part of the

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Portrait of Mary Howitt from Mary Howitt: an autobiography edited by her daughter, Margaret Howitt (London, 1889), East Midlands Special Collection Not 1.W8 HOW/MY Z, barcode 6001695544.

process she shares candidly with her sister (Correspondence of Mary Howitt, Ht 1/1/153): “How different one’s moods are at different times. Just now it is one of my darker times, I feel everything a labour & a discouragement or rather I see discouragements so abundant around me. I am ashamed to confess very superstitious, art Thou so? I should think not for a superstitious person wants faith & dependence on providence. I have been all this year beset and depressed by the feeling as if this year would be unfortunate to us.

I am ashamed of such a feeling and try to [w]ar against it but at times it is too strong for me & quite casts me down.

The true cause, however, I think is that I am tired for mentally & bodily. I am anxious too about poor Claude [her son, who died that year] and worried about these rival translations and annoyed - oh how much I cannot say by the engraver having ruined so many of the pretty little embellishments of the Verse & Picture books. So that altogether I have been vexed & mortified & made angry & that wears one out. But it is really a shame to cast one’s burden on another and above all things it is wrong to cast it on them at the time. But oh my dear sister, if […] wouldst to see me Thou wouldst be shocked to see how old & wizened & miserable I look […]. I look as if I were crazed by care.”

Dedication by Mary Howitt to her daughter Margaret in a first edition gift copy of Trust and Trial: A Story from the Danish by Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Translated by Mary Howitt (London, 1858), East Midlands Special Collection Not 1.W8 HOW/MY T, barcode 6001695965.

The self-effacing author of the letters changes tack dramatically when it comes to causes she believes in. The Danelaw Saga exhibition showcases the Howitts as cultural salvagers of the Old Norse world. They inspired the British public with their appreciation for a cultural landscape which at the time was holding sway in Germany and – by rights of the Viking invasion in the 9th century AD – they thought belonged as much and more to Britain than to Germany.

Mary and William co-wrote the ambitiously titled literary history The literature and romance of northern Europe: constituting a complete history of the literature of Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland, which reclaims the importance of the Viking heritage for the national character of Victorian Britain. Influenced by romantic nationalism, the authors reinterpret the meaning of Britishness at the peak of Empire by claiming that its most distinguished traits are Viking in origin. Sweeping statements such as “Erroneous opinion of Anglo-Saxon influence on the English character” and “The Viking, the exact prototype of the English” plunge the reader headlong into a cultural tug-of-war between the politically-weak Germany and a confident Britain.

Earlier in the century, German thinkers sought to establish a new political identity after the Napoleonic Wars led to the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806. Culturally, Germans searched for the roots of their nation in history, language and myth – and Norse mythology played an important part in redefining a German cultural identity distinct from the francophone world.

The Howitts used their polemic literary history to score points off

Frontispiece portrait of the Swedish author Fredrika Bremer and title page of her novel in Mary Howitt’s translation. The H- Family: Trälinnan; Axel and Anna; and Other Tales by Fredrika Bremer, translated by Mary Howitt (London, 1844), East Midlands Special Collection, Not 1.W8 HOW/MY T, barcode 600169591X.

Letter from Mary Howitt, Heanor, Derbyshire, to her sister Anna Botham [later Harrison], Uttoxeter, Staffordshire; 15 May 1822. Ht 1/1/4.

Germany’s weakness, although Germany would establish new strength and identity not long after this history went to print in 1852. When the authors taunt that the Angles cannot be responsible for the Britons’ “infusions of strength, enterprise, and that spirit of dominion and colonisation which have made us what we are” because the Angles’ ancestral home, Angeln in Holstein, does not even belong to Germany any more, the reader knows that Prussia will recapture Schleswig-Holstein in 1864. When the authors deplore the fate of fragmented Germany, with her 38 mini-states, as one of “complete political slavery”, the reader realises that the unification of Germany under Bismarck is less than two decades away. The passionate arguments underpinning the Howitts’ efforts to link Britain to the culture of Scandinavia make this literary history a political document of its time well worth revisiting today.

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Exhibition news

The Vikings on your doorstep

Danelaw Saga: Bringing Vikings back to the East Midlands tells the tale of how the Vikings arrived in the East Midlands. The subtitle of the exhibition is a bit of a misnomer though: we cannot bring the Vikings back, because they never left. The Vikings became assimilated into local culture, bringing with them words and customs that endure to this day, and, in doing so, they helped shape our society. A thousand years after the Vikings invaded the East Midlands, their legacy is still evident.

Danelaw Saga demonstrates the invasion, immigration and integration of the Vikings by showcasing archaeological artefacts found in the area. It shows their enduring influence through a display of medieval manuscripts and modern books from the archives at Manuscripts and Special Collections.

In the 860s, the Great Heathen Army descended upon the East Midlands. They set up camps in places like Torksey, Lincolnshire, and Repton, Derbyshire. Archaeological evidence from these camps paints a picture of Viking life that is not all about the battles. Gaming pieces from both sites show that the Vikings enjoyed a good game with their friends. We also know that they were keen on keeping clean. Ear scoops or ear spoons from Torksey are evidence for the Vikings cleaning out their ear wax! These are not disposable items but are crafted in bronze to ensure that you can keep using them, provided that you do not lose them, as the owners of the ones on display did. Coins found in these camps and around the East Midlands show that the Vikings had contacts as far away as Baghdad and that some had come from Frankia, a kingdom that included large parts of modern France and Germany. Others came from different parts of Scandinavia, all determined to make their fortune here in the East Midlands.

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By Cassidy Croci and Roderick Dale

Stereotypical image of Viking warriors in Told by the Northmen by EM Wilmot-Buxton, (London 1908), Eiríkur Benedikz Icelandic Collection Juvenile PZ8.1.W4, barcode 1002926727.

However, it did not go all their own way. Alfred the Great fought the Vikings to a standstill in the 870s, and negotiated a peace treaty with their leader Guthrum. This treaty established the Danelaw where Viking laws and government reigned, giving the Vikings half of England to rule. The Vikings settled in the five boroughs of the Danelaw (Derby, Leicester, Lincoln, Nottingham and Stamford) and integrated with the local Anglo-Saxon community mixing traditions and families. Deeds from the 13th century reveal that the population of the East Midlands was surprisingly diverse. A gift in fee dated to c.1200 mentions Alice (Norman French), the daughter of Edmund (Anglo-Saxon), and wife of Thurstan (Anglo-Scandinavian) being given all the land that Ulf (Viking) held. This all took place at Gunthorpe (Gunnhild’s farm), a place named for a Viking woman. The placename evidence is particularly important for understanding what languages people spoke. It shows that Anglo-Saxons were living cheek by jowl with Vikings, and that both communities were mixing. Clearly, the East Midlands was a melting pot of cultures throughout the Viking Age and medieval period.

Although the Vikings appeared to disappear from the record, these names and place-names show that they were still here. Nevertheless, they were forgotten, and it took until the beginning of the 19th century for them to be rediscovered.

Papers from the Mellish Collection in Manuscripts and Special Collections include a volume of poetry in which Joseph Mellish published three poems about Alfred and the Vikings. Local authors, William and Mary Howitt, translated Scandinavian texts into English and wrote histories of the Anglo-Saxons and Vikings. Other local authors, like Hilda Lewis (The Ship that Flew, 1939) wrote children’s stories based on the Vikings or with Viking themes. The Vikings were suddenly popular again, and the selection of books on display from our archives shows just how much.

EXHIBITION EVENTS A series of events will be held to accompany the exhibition at Nottingham Lakeside Arts. Places are limited. Book in advance on 0115 846 7777.

LUNCHTIME TALKS

Djanogly Theatre. Admission free. 1–2pm.

VIKINGS IN YOUR VOCABULARY Wednesday 10 January Language and dialect are indicators of identity. Before the Vikings settled in the East Midlands, the locals spoke their own dialects of Old English that marked them out from the other inhabitants of England. These dialects changed with the adoption of Old Norse words into the language. Dr Richard Dance of the University of Cambridge will explore and explain how Midlands dialects were influenced by the arrival of the Vikings.

PAGANS AND CHRISTIANS Wednesday 24 January The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that Guðrum, one of the leaders of the Great Viking Army, was baptised in 878 with thirty of his men after their defeat by Alfred the Great. The conversion to Christianity was part of the process of the formation of the Danelaw. Professor Lesley Abrams of the University of Oxford will discuss the religious identity of Viking armies and Scandinavian settlers in this period.

The Viking King and Saint Olav’s first expedition in Olav den Helliges Saga from Kongesagaer by Snorri Sturloson (Kristiania, 1899), Special Collections Oversize PT7277.A2, barcode 6001837836.

Danelaw Saga: Bringing Vikings back to the East Midlands will be on display in the Weston Gallery from 15 December 2017 to 8 April 2018.

Danelaw Saga has been jointly curated by Professor Judith Jesch and Dr Roderick Dale of the Centre for Study of the Viking Age, and

by Manuscripts and Special Collections at the University of Nottingham, in collaboration with the University of Nottingham Museum. The Bringing Vikings back to the East Midlands project is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Opening hours

Weston Gallery Nottingham Lakeside Arts, University Park Open Tuesday–Friday 11am–4pm, Saturdays and Sundays 12noon-4pm.

Closed Mondays.

Free admission

DISTINCTIVENESS AND ASSIMILATION: REDISCOVERING VIKING AGE STONE SCULPTURE IN THE EAST MIDLANDS Wednesday 7 February Stone sculpture provides evidence for the assimilation of the Vikings into Anglo-Saxon society, where Anglo-Saxon motifs are combined with Norse motifs to produce hybrid forms. In this talk, Paul Everson of the University of Keele will explore Viking Age stone sculpture in the East Midlands showing its characteristic elements and how hybrid forms emerged.

FROM POETRY TO REALITY: THE GOLD-TRIMMED SWORD HILT IN THE BEDALE HOARD Wednesday 21 February The Bedale Hoard is a late 9th or early 10th-century hoard that was found in 2012. It includes necklaces, arm rings, hacksilver, ingots, and fittings from a sword hilt. The hilt included gold bands, gold rivets and a pommel inlaid with gold foil. Dr Sue Brunning of the British Museum will discuss the goldtrimmed sword hilt, and explain what ownership of such an item might have meant in Viking Age England.

BEHIND-THE-SCENES TOURS

Weston Gallery. Admission free.

CURATOR’S TOUR OF THE DANELAW SAGA EXHIBITION Monday 15 January, 11am to 12 noon and Monday 12 March, 2 to 3pm Join one of the curators for a guided tour of the exhibition Danelaw Saga.

Hear some of the stories behind the unique artefacts and manuscripts on display; learn how the Danelaw came to be established and the impact that it continues to have on the East Midlands today.

Get in touch

Are you an academic, archive or local business interested in working with Manuscripts and Special Collections to host an exhibition in the Weston Gallery? If so please contact Hayley Cotterill.

hayley.cotterill@nottingham.ac.uk 0115 951 4565

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Anne Vaux – Recusant!

Spotlight

If you watched the recent BBC drama Gunpowder, you will be aware of the historical character Anne Vaux, played by Liv Tyler. Anne was unmarried and wealthy, and fiercely devoted to Roman Catholicism at a time when Catholics were being persecuted for their faith.

According to her biographies in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (available to subscribers including members of the University of Nottingham) and Wikipedia, she and her sister were known to rent country houses and shelter Catholic priests there. Gunpowder focuses on Vaux’s harbouring of the Jesuit Father Henry Garnet, who was executed in 1606 for his complicity in the Gunpowder Plot of 5 November 1605.

Vaux herself was arrested in March 1606 and interrogated in the Tower of London. She admitted that the plotters had visited her various houses, but was acquitted of being a part of the conspiracy and released in the summer. After 1606 she is known to have lived with her sister Eleanor Brooksby at Shoby in Leicestershire, where they sheltered the Jesuit Father William Wright. Both sisters were convicted of recusancy (being Roman Catholic and refusing to attend their parish church) at Leicester in 1625. Anne Vaux died sometime after 1637. But this is the extent to which her biographies mention her life after the Gunpowder Plot.

However, a possible Nottinghamshire connection to Anne Vaux can now be revealed for the first time. The Archdeaconry of Nottingham Presentment bills from 1612 to 1616 consistently report the presence of a household of ‘papists’ or ‘recusants’ at Broadholme in the parish of Thorney. Broadholme was the former site of a convent of canonesses, which had been dissolved in the 1530s. It was an isolated site, perfect for concealing illegal religious practices.

The first reference comes on 27 April 1612, when the churchwardens of Thorney presented “Mistris Smith for an obstinate recusant, and all of her house[hold] for the like” (AN/PB 295/2/93). On 22 April 1613, she was named as Mris Vawse and described as a ‘papist’ (AN/PB 295/4/127). An undated bill, probably dated 1613, revealed that the churchwardens had a warrant to demand the names of the recusants at ‘Brodholme’, but that “they would not let us in… we could not learn any of their names” (AN/PB 295/4/128).

The next presentment bill, probably dated 1614, gives the most detail (AN/ PB 295/5/35): “There is a recusant, commonly called Mrs Smith, but as we do of late understand, her name is Mrs Anne Vaus; she has been excommunicate almost ever since her coming here; her family also are all recusants; there are usually three menservants and four or five women servants, besides ‘comers and goers’ of we know not

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Presentment bill and detail from the Presentment bill, Thorney, c.1614 (AN/PB 295/5/35).

how many. One of the menservants is about 40 years of age and he is called John, but we do not know his other name; the other menservants are called William, one of them is above 60 years of age and the other about 40; we do not know the women’s names, but one of them is about 60 and the others about 24 or 26.”

The final document, dated 18 April 1616, names Mrs Anne Vause for a recusant (AN/PB 295/6/22). She then disappears from the records.

The spelling of her name is variously given as Vawse, Vaus or Vause. This was a 17th-century variant for the name which is now usually given as Vaux. The behaviour of Mrs Anne Vause of Broadholme is remarkably similar to the known antics of Anne Vaux, associate of the Gunpowder plotters.

Various communities of long-established recusant families and their households were presented to the Archdeaconry court over and over again in the early 17th century. In 1605, James I’s Act for the better discovering and repressing of Popish Recusants (3 Jac. I, iv), required churchwardens to present recusants each year. Civil courts had the power to fine recusants and to prevent them from taking up public office, but the ultimate weapon of the church courts was excommunication: not allowing the offender to take Holy Communion in their Anglican parish church. This was not a punishment which would deter committed Roman Catholics.

You can find out more about the Archdeaconry of Nottingham presentment bills in the Archdeaconry Resources section of our website: nottingham.ac.uk/mss/collectionsindepth/ archdeaconry/introduction.aspx A version of this article has previously appeared on the Manuscripts and Special Collections blog: blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/manuscripts

Profile

Jayne Amat What is your job title and how long have you worked for Manuscripts and Special Collections?

I’m an archives assistant. I’ve worked here since 2000, so going on eighteen years now.

What does your job involve?

A bit of everything! My main focus is on reader services and reprographics but I also help out with enquiries, exhibitions, outreach, and I do a little bit of cataloguing.

How did you get into archive work?

I was working at another university library (the George Green Library) when I saw an advert for the post of library assistant in Manuscripts and Special Collections.

It sounded really interesting and I had developed an interest in history, so I applied and got the job. A few years later I moved into my current role.

Can you describe a typical day?

My day might start by helping a colleague open up the reading room, which is where our visitors look at the materials from our collections. Then I’ll check the desk rota to see if I am supervising visitors and if I am, this will take up half the day. Supervising involves issuing

material to visitors and ensuring that they handle it appropriately. I will also help visitors search our online catalogues and answer any questions they may have about the material they are looking at. Working in the reading room provides the opportunity to meet the people who use our collections and to appreciate the incredibly diverse range of topics they are researching (anything from the literary works of DH Lawrence to student hairstyles of 1970s). Occasionally, a visitor may ask for help in deciphering a word in a document (poor handwriting is unavoidable when using manuscripts) and it’s always a relief when I can tell them what the word is. For the remaining part of the day, I am most likely to be found in the digitisation studio scanning some documents, or at my own desk catching up with enquiries and copying orders or working on content for an exhibition.

What is the best thing about your job?

It has to be knowing that the work we do helps to make our collections more accessible to researchers, not just locally but all over the world.

Tell us about some of the projects you’ve worked on.

For some years, I’ve been involved in a project to catalogue the records of the Archdeaconry of Nottingham (1556-1942), one of our largest collections. I’m currently working on the penances. These documents record the parishioners who were found guilty of various offences (such as fornication, defamation, not attending church) and the punishments they were given. The penance was usually performed in the parish church during a busy Sunday service in front of friends and family. The project aims to extract information from the documents such as the names of the penitents and clergy, where the penances took place, and the offences committed. All this information is then made available publicly in a searchable catalogue via our website. Another project I worked on involved sorting through thousands of University negatives taken in the 1960s and 1970s by the University’s photographic unit, which came to us when the unit was closed down. Many of the negatives show students, staff, and newly-opened buildings in a contemporary setting and are a really valuable resource. The negatives are now being catalogued and digitised so that they can be made more widely available to researchers.

Do you have a favourite collection?

It’s impossible to say, but I do like maps. Not just for the information they provide but for the artistry that goes into them. Some cartographers illustrated their maps with little vignettes and one of my favourites shows a group of surveyors in a landscape marking out distances using chains (hence the ‘scale of chains’ scale used in old maps). I find printed maps equally interesting, especially when they have been beautifully coloured in by hand.

Map of the estate belonging to Gervace Rozell Esq. at Radcliffe-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire; 1710, Ma 2 P/115.

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Recent acquisitions

Student society ephemera from 2017 Welcome Fair, ACC 2869.

What’s new?

12th Earl of Portland Timothy Bentinck, visiting our Bentinck Room, named in honour of his ancestor, Lord William Henry Cavendish-Bentinck (1774-1839) MP and Governor General of India.

Original artwork from the Lavrin Collection, ACC 2866.

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The University archive’s new additions come from everyone from students to a Vice-Chancellor. We’ve had an exciting multi-media collection from a talented artist, digitised diaries from a well-known individual, and collected a business archive from one of our favourite local heritage sites.

University of Nottingham

Autumn is a busy period for new students settling in and for students who act as officers for student societies. To document this for our Tri-Campus Contemporary Collecting project, we went along to the Welcome Fair in October to collect ephemera created by the various societies and support groups in order to capture a snapshot of contemporary student life. Our haul this year included a tea bag and a Harry Potter inspired Sorting Hat containing a free sweet (which we ate so as to avoid causing problems for our Conservator ten years down the line).

One of the aims of our Tri-Campus Contemporary Collecting project is to make the University Archive collection as representative as possible of life on all campuses, so we would love to receive material from Welcome Fairs and student societies based in Ningbo and Malaysia. More information about the Tri-Campus Project can be found on our Time Capsule blog: blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/manuscripts/category/time-capsule Following the appeal in our last issue of Discover (Mind the Gaps), we received a wonderful collection of material which belonged to a member of the Student Union’s Carnival Committee and Ensoc (Entertainments Committee) in the 1950s.

The collection contained a number of copies which we were missing of Chickerah!, the carnival (fundraising) magazine which started in the 1930s. Also present were some wonderful posters and flyers for Ensoc and other University social events.

As well as appealing to current and former students, we also contact staff who are retiring, to ask them if they have any papers which could be passed to the archive to form a lasting legacy of their time here. One high profile example is former Vice-Chancellor Professor Sir David Greenaway. On his retirement we received a number of ceremonial items commemorating significant milestones of his time in office and the history of the University, including a medal commemorating the opening of the University College buildings by King George V and Queen Mary in July 1928, a presentation plate celebrating the University’s 130th anniversary, and a pictorial publication presented by Professor Yang Fujia, former Chancellor of the University of Nottingham and President of the University of Nottingham, Ningbo Campus.

Art and design

A major acquisition with a University connection is the papers of Nora Lavrin (1897-1975), artist, illustrator and wife of Janko Lavrin, Professor of Slavonic Studies at Nottingham. Nora Lavrin taught art at University College Nottingham for a brief period and her works were exhibited at the Royal Academy. The collection includes landscapes and portraits and work relating to ballet and theatre productions such as set and costume designs.

Also present is material relating to her work as a book illustrator including sketches and published works. Lavrin illustrated books of Slovene literature, as well as a memoir on DH Lawrence and a children’s book. She was also interested in ballet sets and costumes and the collection includes clay figures used in the preparation of ballet performances.

Family and estate papers

The catalogue for one of the estate collections has recently been improved following work carried out by a Manuscripts and Special Collections volunteer. Five thousand upgraded entries have been added to the Ma B section of the Manvers catalogue having been typed up from handwritten descriptions made by the volunteer, Harry Stirling. The entries provide welcome detail to the catalogue, describing the estate papers relating to Nottinghamshire belonging to the Pierrepont estates owned by the Pierrepont Family, Earls Manvers, of Thoresby Hall, Nottinghamshire.

Special collections

Notable additions to the special collections include three books authored by members of families whose estate papers are held

by Manuscripts and Special Collections: Mellish, Galway and Portland. The publication dates happen to be equally spaced at intervals of a century, in 1818, 1910 and 2017 respectively.

The 1818 publication belongs to Joseph Charles Mellish of Blyth (1768-1823). The Mellish family resided at Hodsock Priory but at the time of this publication Joseph Charles Mellish was pursuing a diplomatic career in Germany as British Consul at Hamburg, following stints in the same function at Louisiana, USA and Palermo. The book is titled Deutsche Gedichte eines Engländers: nebst einigen Übersetzungen in das Englische und Lateinische and contains poetry written in German as well as some translations into English and Latin. In 1910, George Edmund Milnes Monckton-Arundell, 7th Viscount Galway of Serlby Hall (1844-1931) published Sport with Viscount Galway’s hounds: 1876-1907. He succeeded his father as 7th Viscount Galway in 1876 and also as Master of the Grove Hunt from that year on. Alongside his political career in the House of Lords and in many of the local positions usual for an aristocratic landowner of his rank, the 7th Viscount maintained a keen interest in foxhunting even after he retired as Master in 1907. He continued to allow Serlby to be used as kennels for the Hunt and published books on the subject such as the retrospective volume from 1910 which was recently acquired for the East Midlands Special Collections. The correspondence, title deeds, estate and legal papers relating to the 7th Viscount’s ownership of his estates are part of the Galway papers.

This year saw the publication of Being David Archer: And Other Unusual Ways of Earning a Living by Timothy Charles Robert Noel Bentinck, 12th Earl of Portland, Count Bentinck. Commonly known as Tim Bentinck, the author is an English peer and actor, most widely known for his long-running role as David Archer in the BBC Radio 4 series, The Archers. The book conveys the layers of history attached to the Earl of Portland’s ancestry “So, we are a family of counts. […] So, when my parents left for Australia in 1950, they took just one crate of paintings and furniture to a modest settlement in the midlands of Tasmania.

One crate. This was all this nouveau pauvre aristocrat had been left after a succession of forebears had managed to lose great castles full of the stuff.”

Manuscripts and Special Collections holds a number of collections relating to the Portland family of Welbeck Abbey, the two most significant being the Portland (Welbeck) Collection and the Portland (London) Collection.

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Contact details Manuscripts and Special Collections The University of Nottingham King’s Meadow Campus Lenton Lane Nottingham NG7 2NR mss-library@nottingham.ac.uk +44 (0)115 951 4565 nottingham.ac.uk/ manuscriptsandspecialcollections

@ mssUniNott

Parchment, Paper and Pixels Highlights from Manuscripts and Special Collections at the University of Nottingham

Parchment, Paper and Pixels provides a taster of the wonderful collections held by Manuscripts and Special Collections.

This iBook introduces you to a selection of archives, maps, photographs, posters and music covering the globe from Iceland to China by way of Nottingham and the Soviet Union.

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