Issue 3/2016
INSIDE: Another mystery The Flying Fish lands 5 minutes with Mark
The University of Nottingham’s Manuscripts and Special Collections
Welcome
It’s all about the digital...
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elcome to the third edition of Discover. This edition has a digitisation theme.
Digitisation plays an increasingly important role in our work by both widening access and preserving some of our fragile holdings from overuse. This is amply illustrated in our exhibitions. In Grand Tourists and Others: Travelling Abroad before the 20th Century, the digitisation of the photograph album of Prince Leopold enabled us to display multiple images from the album which could not be displayed in an exhibition case due to its size. These images provided an impressive backdrop to the exhibition and can also be enjoyed through our Turning the Pages technology. Again, in Francis Willughby, A Natural Historian and his Collections, we have been able to display, to stunning effect, digital images of birds, fish and plants from the Middleton Collection, too fragile to exhibit in their original format. We were also pleased to be able to digitise the manuscript of Colin Wilson’s The Outsider to provide a vital security copy of this seminal work. All these images have been created by Mark Bentley, our digitisation technical officer, who talks about his work on pages 10&11. We are launching a Heritage Digitisation Service to provide a service to any organisations that don’t have access to
the equipment and expertise we have developed. To find out more, contact Mark Bentley or myself. Digitisation has also enabled us to produce our first iBook. Parchment, Paper and Pixels will showcase some of the highlights of our collections and bring them to the attention of a wider audience. Please look out for the promotional materials for its publication. News of recent acquisitions includes information on digital accessions from our campus in Ningbo, China. The acquisition of born digital archives will soon become as important as the acquisition of paper and parchment records. We have been doing a lot of work on digital preservation to future proof our collections. However, we were still very excited to acquire an original DH Lawrence manuscript of his short story Flying Fish. Digitisation also helps us to promote and discover more about our holdings, through blog posts and Twitter - see the facing page.
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By the time you read this, we will have celebrated our 10th anniversary of moving to new and expanded premises on the King’s Meadow Campus and opened the refurbished reading rooms, redecorated with large digital prints from the collections. To find out more about any aspect of our work please do not hesitate to contact me. Meanwhile I hope that you enjoy reading Discover.
Beneath the impressive cover of MS 57 are 133 small watercolour paintings and 15 photographs, recording a journey from Liverpool to Canada from 1884.
Mark Dorrington Keeper of Manuscripts and Special Collections
We really need your help Manuscripts and Special Collections needs your help to review its website. Volunteers will be sent a link to an online questionnaire and asked to carry out specific tasks such as finding certain information on the website. They will then be asked to rate it for ease of use, clarity, design, etc. It should take
Cover of an album containing paintings and photographs of Canada, 1884. Manuscript Collection MS 57
about 20 minutes. It will all take place online; you will not need to come in to the University. We’re looking for a wide range of volunteers – from regular users to those who have never looked at the site before, and plan to run it towards the end of October. To take part, please contact us at mss-library@nottingham. ac.uk
date. A place. A set of initials. There were quite a few clues about the beautiful peacock feather album, but after 130 years, we couldn’t quite put them together. Back in our first issue, we mentioned our semi-regular social media feature Monday Mysteries, where we post unidentified images on our Twitter account and blog, in the hopes our readers may be able to help. Some of them have really grabbed people’s imaginations, and I’m thrilled that one of them has been comprehensively solved by a researcher in Canada.
The only definite clue to the identity of the artist was an inscription on the title page reading “(With the British Association) Our Silver Wedding Trip illustrated by camera and brush. IMM 1884”. Michelle Cabana, a researcher visiting the UK on behalf of The Bell Barn Society in Saskatchewan, Canada, asked to see the album. The British Association visited the site and she was hoping to find images. Before major renovation works started several years ago, the circular Bell Barn on the farm was on the list of most endangered Canadian heritage sites, but in the 1880s the farm was an enormous corporate enterprise. There were 5,000 acres of crops, livestock numbering 1,500, and one of the first two telephone lines in the North West Territories. Unfortunately it seems likely there was at least one other album, which we had
Mystery solved... then along comes another suspected as this one made no mentioned of the return journey. The Bell Barn visit was probably documented in the later album, but Michelle was able to tell us the following about the trip: “The Bell Farm was at one time the largest colonisation farm in the world and in 1884 members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science visited the Bell Farm before and after their Montreal meeting.
Chicoutimi, Saguenay in Canada, 1884. Manuscript Collection MS 57. Watercolour painting of Niagara Falls, 1884. Manuscript Collection MS 57
“The Canadian government offered BA members an all-expense paid trip on the Canadian Pacific Railway and approximately 150 excursionists then travelled by special trains from Montreal, visiting the Rocky Mountains and the region then known as the North-West”. This ties in the location of the photos and water-coloured landscapes, although sadly there are none of Bell Farm. Despite the large number of excursionists, the pictures are remarkably devoid of people, including any of the couple who were using the trip to celebrate their 25th anniversary. That couple were Rev John Magens Mello (the ‘IMM’ of the inscription) and his wife Charlotte, whom he married in November 1859, making 1884 their silver wedding anniversary. Both were members of the British Association. Michelle noted that several articles reporting the trip mentioned the couple.
When not attending to the spiritual needs of his parishioners in Derbyshire, Mello was a keen amateur geologist, archaeologist and local historian, publishing numerous books and papers. A small collection of his books and papers were donated to the University Library (the Manuscripts department did not exist at that time) in the 1930s, and it is likely that the album was gifted at the same time, but perhaps kept apart as having less obvious research application. Unfortunately at the time,
procedures for accepting donations consisted of a handshake and a thank-you letter. Over time, any knowledge of the provenance was lost. Which now leads us to another mystery: whatever happened to the Mellors’ second album? Monday Mysteries are posted on our Twitter account @mssUniNott and compilations feature on the Manuscripts and Special Collections blog at blogs. nottingham.ac.uk/manuscripts/
Exhibition news
Watercolour of a European Green Woodpecker perched on a branch, pre 1663. Middleton Collection, Mi Lm 24/26
Francis Willughby (1635-72): A Natural Historian and his Collections
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ur latest Weston Gallery exhibition explores the life and work of Francis Willughby, a noted 17th-century natural historian.
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. e: hayley.cotterill@ nottingham.ac.uk t: 0115 951 4565
Francis Willughby, of the Willoughby family of Wollaton Hall, was a pioneering figure in the history of science. An original member of the Royal Society he had a keen interest in the natural world. Willughby travelled widely within Britain and Europe in the 1660s, studying and collecting specimens. He was accompanied by his Cambridge tutor, friend and colleague, John Ray. The descriptions they made of specimens observed in their natural habitats influenced the modern scientific study of species based on characteristic marks. Francis Willughby died at the age of 37. Today he is known to historians of science mainly through pioneering studies of birds and fishes which were published by John Ray after Willughby’s death. In time Ray’s work as a botanist and 30
further years of publication meant that he came to overshadow Willughby. Historians of science have debated whether Willughby or Ray should take the credit for the two works published under their joint names: the Ornithologia and Historia Piscium. Using original papers, this exhibition reveals how they worked in collaboration. It also seeks to show Willughby’s many other interests, extending beyond natural history, such as his manuscript study of games and recreations. This exhibition draws almost exclusively on the papers of Francis Willughby and other family members, held in the Middleton Collection at The University of Nottingham. Much of the material is on public display for the first time. One highlight is a volume of dried British and European plant specimens dating from the late 17th-early 18th centuries. These specimens were apparently collected by Francis Willughby and John Ray and their associates during their field trips. The volume on display is just one of five such
volumes held in the collection. The work of our digitisation staff has been key to this exhibition; without them the exhibition simply wouldn’t have been possible. At the gallery your attention is grabbed by the stunning frieze of images. These images have been taken from collections of watercolours and engravings of birds, fishes and plants, which belonged to Francis Willughby and are believed to have been commissioned, purchased and created by him and his associates during their travels on the Continent. The Middleton Collection contains more than 400 of these images. A small number of the original drawings are on display in cases – there was no way to display all of them. Through digitisation we have been able to make much more of this rich collection available to visitors. The exhibition is the result of a Leverhulmefunded research project which explored Francis Willughby’s scientific legacy. The entire collection of bird, plant and fish images were digitised, as well as the five volumes of plant specimens. Sadly the original images and plant specimens are too fragile to be handled – we have been unable to produce them for researchers for many years. We are delighted that visitors to our reading room at King’s Meadow Campus can now access a full-set of digital images, together with digitised versions of letters and works written by Francis Willughby. Thanks are due to the academics involved in the research project and to Lord Middleton for his support for this exhibition.
EXHIBITION EVENTS A series of events will accompany the exhibition. All talks will take place in the Djanogly Theatre, Nottingham Lakeside Arts, 1-2pm. Public lectures will take place at 6-7pm. Places are free but are limited. Please book in advance with Lakeside Box Office on 0115 846 7777. FREE TALKS
Oil painting of Francis Willughby. Middleton Collection, ACC 1752 No details survive to show when or where Willughby acquired this picture of an eagle owl, which was not native in Britain in the 17th century Middleton Collection, Mi LM 24/91
FRANCIS WILLUGHBY’S EUROPEAN FIELD TRIP Thursday 6 October Professor Mark Greengrass, early-modern historian, reconstructs the excitements of Francis Willughby’s journey across Europe to find out what it tells us about the lure of science in the age of the early Royal Society. THE AVIAN TREE OF LIFE Thursday 3 November Dr Gavin Thomas, zoologist at the University of Sheffield, explores the tree of life of birds with particular focus on the role that natural history collections continue to play in understanding avian evolutionary history. PUBLIC LECTURES A Bird’s Egg: The Most Perfect Thing Thursday 20 October Birds’ eggs design is a testament to the power of natural selection. In the words of one 19thcentury ornithologist, a bird’s egg is ‘the most perfect thing’. This is the story of the biology of birds’ eggs, but also the story of those that have studied and collected eggs, including Francis Willughby. Tim Birkhead, FRS, leader of a research project on Willughby, and author of The Wisdom of Birds (2008) and Bird Sense (2012), takes his theme from his publication, The Most Perfect Thing: the Inside (and Outside) of a Bird’s Egg (2016). INSECTS: CLOSE UP AND PERSONAL Thursday 17 November Willughby’s work on insects – his particular interest – depended on his observation of the appearance and behaviour of specimens that he collected. Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665) showed his contemporaries how the microscope could reveal the complexity of an insect, but the revelations of the electron microscope lay far in the future. Tom Hartman demonstrates how this technology has transformed scientific understanding of the insect world, drawing on his work in the University of Nottingham’s School of Life Sciences and on its Zoology collection.
Profile
y e l t n e B Mark How long have you worked for Manuscripts and Special Collections? 11 years
conservation staff, and a custom-made book cradle was used to hold the volumes safely while they were being photographed.
What’s your job title? Digitisation Technical Officer
For the conservation project involving the Wollaton Antiphonal, I photographed all the folios and from these we were able to create a digital resource.
What does your job involve? I oversee the digitisation of items from our collections. We photograph and scan items from our collections for preservation and other purposes. We have an ongoing exhibition programme at the Weston Gallery, Nottingham Lakeside Arts, and we digitise items to be displayed alongside original items there. I’m also involved in projects that the section undertakes, and help supply orders placed by users of our collections. My latest project involves helping to develop a Heritage Digitisation Service, offering the skills and experience we have to help digitise archive collections of heritage organisations and others. Tell us about some of the projects you’ve worked on. The Wollaton Library Collection was an interesting project because it involved photographing fragile medieval volumes. This required close collaboration with
I’m also involved in an ongoing project to conserve and digitise our collection of Soviet War Posters. The posters, which are a rare survival, are challenging because of their size (they can be over a meter long) but digitising them has allowed us, with the help of colleagues to display the posters in an online resource making them more widely available. How did you get in to this? There isn’t a clearly defined career path for people who want to work in this area. Some people come to it from an IT background, for others it has grown out of an interest in photography, or it is just something that they’ve picked up over time. Personally my background is in both computers and photography, so I’m fortunate in my job to be able to combine these interests.
What’s the best and worst things about the digital age? The ability to share and the potential to make our collections more accessible is great. Digital capture of archive items allows a great deal of control of the process so that you can make an image of the original as accurately as possible. However, some time is required for preparation, setup, and processing to produce the best image. There’s a bit more to it than just taking a quick snap. What the future for digitisation? In heritage digitisation, 3-D imaging allows great visualisation of artefacts, as does multi-spectral imaging which reveals detail that ordinary photography can’t. Do you enjoy taking your own digital images, outside of work? Yes. Photography has always been an interest of mine and I don’t think that’s ever going to change. Finally, what’s your greatest weakness? Coffee and chocolate. Digitisation is hard work!
Examples of Soviet posters of the Second World War. Manuscript Collection MS 281
My background is in both computers and photography, so I’m fortunate in my job to be able to combine these interests.
Recent acquisitions
Tri collecting some memories to share...
Our collections have continued to grow since the last edition of Discover. Here we take the opportunity to tell you about just some of the material that has come to us in the last few months. Yue Li’s entry to UNNC Library Services student photography competition. University Collection, ACC 2736
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e’ve seen a surge in the deposit of records related to the University. As the official University of Nottingham archive Manuscripts and Special Collections is interested in the records created by all three branches of the University – in the UK, China and Malaysia. We have established a TriCampus Contemporary Collecting Project, gathering material created by students, staff and alumni to complement the official institutional records. Earlier this year our Keeper, Mark Dorrington, travelled to China and Malaysia to promote this project, and as a result we have received a collection of digital photographs taken by students of UNNC (The University of Nottingham in China). We’re hoping the project will attract more photographs of student life on all campuses which we can publish on the project’s Time Capsule Blog: blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/manuscripts/ category/time-capsule/ We‘re also hoping to collect ephemera (leaflets, posters, tickets); journals/ scrapbooks; records of student societies or activities such as elections, charity events, theatre productions, sports fixtures, and music performances; records of significant events in the development of departments, campuses, or halls. These documents will join the early records of our institution, to be used by the researchers of the future. Oral histories or testimonials also give us a better understanding of how student life has changed. We’ve acquired an account (Accession 2714) by Mrs Marion Wallwork (Politics, 1953) of her time as a student, including her interview, residence in ‘digs’, details about attending lectures in the Trent Building and eating in the Refectory; life in Nightingale Hall under the watchful eye of the Warden, Miss Audrey Beecham, and events such as Saturday ‘hops’ and the Graduation Ball. Her husband, Dr Stephen Wallwork, has also given us an account (Accession 2715) of his time here, starting as an Assistant Lecturer in Physical Chemistry in 1949, becoming acting Head of the Chemistry Department in 1980. After retiring, he did an MA in Local and Regional History. He graduated in 1985 and became a Statistical Assistant in the History Department. Such accounts shed light on what it meant to be a student or staff member at a particular point in time. Other acquired papers include those of Sydney George Clift, University College Nottingham student and later lecturer in Geology. He specialised in the fairly new discipline of petrology, and lectured extensively across the UK, particularly on coal mining. The collection includes notebooks from the 1920s, and
including posters aimed at inspiring female students to pursue careers in Biosciences. We have also acquired an important literary manuscript written by DH Lawrence. The Flying Fish is an unfinished short story written in March 1925 during a stay in Mexico City. It tells the story of an Englishman in Mexico who is called back to his ancestral home in the East Midlands. He sails from Vera Cruz, and at the start of his journey enjoys sitting “for hours at the very tip of the ship, on the bow sprit, looking out into the whitish sunshine of the hot Gulf of Mexico”, where he sees “flocks of flying-fish swept into the air, from nowhere…brilliantly twinkling in their flight of silvery watery wings rapidly fluttering”. A page from Sydney George Clift’s notebook in 1920s. Acc 2751
publications by Henry Swinnerton (18751966), Professor of Geology at University College Nottingham, whose collection of glass-plate negatives of India we are digitising for a future exhibition. Other accessions contain: photos and plans documenting changes (including our 2006 move to King’s Meadow and video footage of the flooding of George Green Library); Students’ Union files dating back to the 1970s, newspaper cuttings and photos collated by the SU from the 1980s; material relating to sports and theatre; photos of staff and students of the Physics Department (1940s-1990s) – many of these give names but we need help identifying others; and digital accessions of photos of Electrical Engineering students from the 1960s and files created by the School of Biosciences Equality and Development Strategy Committee,
Lawrence fell desperately ill and was advised by his doctor not to write. He dictated the first part of the story to his wife Frieda. He was diagnosed with tuberculosis, the disease which would ultimately lead to his death in 1930. Lawrence recovered enough to write the remaining part of the story himself. The different handwriting styles are an unusual and interesting feature of the manuscript. The Flying Fish remained unfinished and unpublished during Lawrence’s lifetime. Why it was never finished is a mystery, but Lawrence’s friends Earl and Achsah Brewster recalled him saying: “I’ve an intuition I shall not finish that novel. It was written so near the borderline of death, that I never have been able to carry it through, in the cold light of day.” It was finally published in 1936 in the volume Phoenix: the posthumous papers of DH Lawrence edited by Edward D McDonald (New York: Viking Press, 1936).
The newly acquired manuscript of The Flying Fish. DH Lawrence Collection, La L 30
Digitisation
Bringing in The Outsider
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hen Leicester-born author Colin Wilson died aged 82 in late 2013, he left behind a close family, a worldwide army of fans, and a lifetime of accumulated published works, notes, correspondence and other papers. His literary output was prodigious but his later works never achieved the same critical acclaim as his debut, The Outsider, a philosophical examination of literary characters who are alienated or distanced from society, and the effects this has on both them and society. Wilson wrote widely on true crime, mysticism and the paranormal, as well as his philosophy of ‘new existentialism’ and several novels and plays. He contributed numerous articles to magazines, worked on documentaries and film scripts, and provided forewords and chapters for other authors’ works. The Outsider was published on 26 May 1956, and was an instant success, selling out of its initial print run of 5,000 copies in one day. Wilson was grouped in with the Angry Young Men, a group of working and middle-class playwrights and novelists, disillusioned with traditional British society who became prominent in the 1950s. It was a label Wilson rejected. Much of Wilson’s collection of published and manuscript material is in the process of being transferred to and catalogued by Manuscripts and Special Collections. The printed Colin Wilson Collection contains almost all of Wilson’s body of published books, articles and reviews including some very rare and early editions. The bulk of the Colin Wilson Archive comprises drafts and proofs of his works (including some unpublished works), correspondence, a small number of publishing files, copies of reviews and research files.
version, suitable for most purposes and which can be made available to staff and readers. The work was completed in time for the manuscript to be displayed to 60 researchers, fans and family members who travelled to the University’s King’s Meadow Campus to attend the first International Colin Wilson Conference in July. Delegates had come from as far afield as America, Australia and even West Bridgford! Wilson had been to King’s Meadow in its previous life as the Carlton TV studios where, in 1995, he was interviewed as an expert in the paranormal for the programme Beyond Belief. Thus it was doubly appropriate that the first international conference in his name should have been held here. Conservation work was needed on the manuscript before it could be digitised. edge, and others hole-punched top and bottom and red thread tied through to hold the leaves together. First the conservator, Robert, examined the manuscript meticulously and photographed the areas where work could be done. The first job was to remove the metal staples, which had started to corrode and stain the pages with rust. The pages were flattened and, with the family’s permission, were wrapped in archival paper rather than being rebound, then housed in a custom-made acid-free box. Once conservation work was completed the manuscript was passed to our digitisation technical officer, Mark Bentley, to create a complete digital facsimile. Each page was photographed separately and the image processed. Two copies of each image, or page, are saved; a high-resolution master copy, which is archived, and a derivative
The day was packed and the breadth of the papers presented showed Wilson’s range of interests: from Jack the Ripper to science fiction; from existentialism to the paranormal, the eight speakers managed to represent his 50-year writing career admirably. Memorable moments included listening to excerpts from Wilson’s extensive audio diaries and how one melted cassette was salvaged after being damaged by lightning, and an appearance by the toilet chain that potentially belonged to Jack the Ripper. Most of the talks were recorded so that those who couldn’t attend in person won’t miss out. Delegates were universal in their praise for the conference, and their appreciation to organiser Colin Stanley and to the Wilson family for their support. Murmurings were heard about this potentially becoming a regular event, although the next one will need a bigger venue!
The original handwritten draft of The Outsider is in a private collection, but it was understandably felt that no serious Colin Wilson collection could be complete without it. The owners generously agreed we could borrow the unique manuscript and create a high-quality complete digital copy that would be made available to researchers in the Reading Room. Before the manuscript could be digitised, it needed conservation work to safely remove the rusted fastenings and prepare some of the fragile paper. The manuscript was made up of eight chapters in 11 parts. Some of the parts had been stapled along the spine
The conference was a huge hit. Photo ©Rowan Wilson
Contact details Manuscripts and Special Collections The University of Nottingham King’s Meadow Campus Lenton Lane Nottingham NG7 2NR e: mss-library@nottingham.ac.uk t: +44 (0)115 951 4565 w: www.nottingham.ac.uk/manuscriptsandspecialcollections
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