Discover Winter 2016-17

INSIDE: Another mystery Weather Extremes 5 minutes with Sarah

Issue 4/2017

The University of Nottingham’s Manuscripts and Special Collections

Welcome

National award R for our staff

egular readers of Discover will be aware of our social media feature, Monday Mystery, where we post unidentified images from the collections on our Twitter account and blog, in the hopes our readers may be able to help.

We were recently contacted by an alumni, Richard Barton, who sent us a copy of a photomontage assembled in 1944 showing five students of University College Nottingham and Goldsmiths College (University of London). The students have written their names on their photos: Ivy Banmar (?), Irene Tibbs, Max Sparkes, Eleanor Whineys (?), and Sheila Rogers.

The montage is entitled ‘UCN & Goldsmiths Dec 1944’ and presumably features students from both institutions. Richard studied Engineering at University College in the 1940s and would like to hear from anyone who recognises the people.

W

elcome to the fourth edition of Discover, The University of Nottingham Manuscripts and Special Collections newsletter.

Since the last newsletter we have celebrated our 10th anniversary of moving to the King’s Meadow Campus and reopened the refurbished reading rooms. We have also launched our Heritage Digitisation Service (for more details please see the advert on the back cover). Early in the new year we will be publishing our iBook, Parchment, Paper and Pixels, but more about that in the next issue.

However, the highlight since the last edition is that Manuscripts and Special Collections has been awarded Archive Service Accreditation by The National Archives. Accredited Archive Services ensure the long-term collection, preservation and accessibility of our archive heritage. Accreditation is the UK quality standard which recognises good performance in all areas of archive service delivery. Achieving accredited status demonstrates that The University of Nottingham has met clearly defined national standards relating to management and resourcing; the care of its unique collections and what the service offers to its entire range of users.

The Archive Service Accreditation Panel “…congratulated the service on their excellent sense of themselves in the context of the University and beyond, and on their detailed and comprehensive policies and planning which combined ambitious aims with practical objectives.

The service demonstrated a commitment to review and improvement which was warmly commended, as was its ongoing commitment to communicate with a variety of audiences”.

The award is a recognition of the hard work and dedication of the Manuscripts and Special Collections staff in looking

Souvenir of the Great Flood, in Nottingham.

Weather is the focus of our latest exhibition.

From HR Potter’s research papers HRP/F/1/3/3

after our wonderful collections and making them available for teaching, research and public enjoyment. We look forward to celebrating this achievement and being presented with the award.

This issue really seems to herald the onset of winter, with an article on our latest exhibition at the Weston Gallery on weather, and an article on medicinal remedies for coughs – some of which I’d advise you not to try at home!

But news of recent accessions brings memories of the summer when the Laxton History Group launched their impressive series of booklets at the first publication launch I have attended in a barn, seated on bales of straw. The Monday Mystery includes details of wartime links between the University College Nottingham and Goldsmiths College, London.

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

Meanwhile, I hope you enjoy reading.

Mark Dorrington Keeper of Manuscripts and Special Collections

Students from Goldsmiths were evacuated to University College Nottingham (the forerunner of The University of Nottingham) during the Second World War. The college took in 400 students and staff from Goldsmiths’ College, as well as 110 students from the Institute of Education.

They brought with them more than 100 beds, crates of equipment, crockery and around 1,000 library books.

The photomontage complements other material in the archive relating to the evacuation of Goldsmiths’ College. The University College collection contains minutes and memoranda recording the arrangements that were made for the evacuation. We have a photograph (UMP/2/1/39) showing the reception of students from the Institute of Education and Goldsmiths College by the President of the Students’ Union at Nottingham University College in September 1939.

During their time in Nottingham, some Goldsmiths students joined forces with University College students to create a film, Saturday at University College Nottingham.

This silent film shows life at the college in wartime conditions. Scenes include breakfast in lodgings; transport from Market Square to College; a lecture by N Davy (Physics); a laboratory tutorial; eating in the Refectory in Lower Hall; playing sport; and having fun at a Saturday ‘hop’. The film has recently been digitised and is available for viewing in our reading room.

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/

Photos show wartime link between top city colleges

Reception of students from the Institute of Education and Goldsmiths’ College by the President of the Students’ Union at Nottingham University College in September 1939. Photos from The University of Nottingham and University College, UMP/2/1/39 Below, students from University College Nottingham and Goldsmiths’, December 1944. Acc 2764

Exhibition news

WEATHER EXTREMES

Making and breaking records in Nottinghamshire

“The River Trent during the great frost, 1896”, by Thomas Hammond.

East Midlands Collection Oversize Not 3. D28 HAM

Opening hours Weston Gallery Nottingham Lakeside Arts, University Park.

Open Tuesday-Friday 11am-4pm, Saturday and Sunday, 12noon-4pm.

Free admission.

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

Our exhibition explores the history of extreme weather in and around Nottinghamshire; freezing temperatures, droughts, floods, hurricane force winds, and heatwaves. Archival sources reveal how such extreme weather affected daily life in the city of Nottingham and the wider county, the impact it had on different groups in society and their responses to it, and which events have entered the public memory.

Documents are drawn from various collections and cover 400 years. The earliest is a Church Presentment from 1616 detailing damage to the chapel at Flawborough, Newark, as a result of heavy rain. The University’s Newcastle and Portland Estate collections are particularly rich sources of weather information. Correspondence, diaries and account books detail how the weather affected the growth of crops and the raising of livestock, building work and garden maintenance and the ability of estate employees to work. Other highlights are drawn from the Wrench collection; the diaries and letters of Derbyshire-based medical practitioner and surgeon, Edward Wrench (particularly those he wrote to his children) are particularly rich sources of information on the weather and atmospheric conditions, including, for example, the volcanicinduced sunsets of 1883, the severe winter of 1895, and the heatwave and drought of 1911.

The city’s position on the River Trent exposes it to severe floods (notably those of 1795, 1852, 1875, 1932 and 1947). Some are linked to unusually heavy and/or prolonged rainfall, as in 1875 when swathes of the UK suffered repeated flooding. Others, however, are linked to snow melt – such as the so-called ‘Candlemass’ flood of February 1795, the worst in the city’s history.

Extreme temperatures encouraged participation in outdoor pursuits, including skating, boating and swimming, against a backdrop of familiar landmarks – the River Trent, Market Square or parks. The exhibition materials also suggest that extreme weather has often fostered community spirit, neighbourliness and charitable giving.

The exhibition considers the contributions of Nottinghamshire people to the extreme weather archive and to the wider development of the science of meteorology. Key players in this respect include William Sampson, Rector of Clayworth in North Nottinghamshire, who, from 1672 to 1701, kept a register of parish life – including weather; Hayman Rooke, of Mansfield Woodhouse, who kept a meteorological register for over 20 years at the end of the 18th century, and Edward Joseph Lowe, who took meteorological observations from his family home of Highfield House on University Park Campus (now the Centre for Advanced

EXHIBITION EVENTS All events take place in Djanogly Theatre, Nottingham Lakeside Arts. Places are free but limited. Please book in advance on 0115 846 7777. Talks run from 1pm to 2pm.

TALKS AND WHAT BECOMES OF THE TURNIPS?: ARCHIVAL INVESTIGATIONS OF EXTREME WEATHER EVENTS IN THE UK 12 January 2017 Curators Georgina Endfield and Lucy Veale discuss their research of extreme weather in the UK. They illustrate the multiple ways in which unusual and extreme weather has been, and continues to be, observed, recorded and remembered. They discuss the development and creation of the exhibition and the work involved in the development of the TEMPEST extreme weather database.

WHOM DO WE BLAME FOR THE WEATHER? 9 February 2017 Mark Twain reputedly claimed that ‘Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it’. But do we in fact know whom to blame for ‘bad’ weather? Professor Mike Hulme, of King’s College, London, surveys historical and cultural explanations for bad weather and ends with some reflections on whether or not climate science today is offering a new and helpful narrative of blame.

Flooding in The Meadows, 1947. Records of the Engineer's Department of the Trent River Authority and its predecessors. From RE/DOP/H42/89. Courtesy of The Nottingham Post

Studies) before moving to Broadgate House, Beeston. Another important figure is Edward Mellish, of Hodsock Priory. Mellish maintained a recording station from 1875 to about 1925 and sent weekly reports to the Meteorological Office, becoming President of the Royal Meteorological Society in 190910. After his death, Mellish’s valuable collection of works on meteorology and climatology passed to the University, and several published items appear in the exhibition. An hydrologist for the Trent River Authority, Harold Reeve Potter, was influential in establishing the value of a variety of historic records for hydrological information and his research papers, as well as meteorological records maintained by meteorologist Arnold Tinn and staff and students in the

Department of Geography, are all held by the University and showcased in the Weston Gallery displays. The exhibition not only illustrates the diversity of records available but also serves to demonstrate the changing nature of weather recording and weather records over time.

Exhibition visitors are invited to share their own extreme weather memories.

This exhibition has been jointly curated by Professor Georgina Endfield and Dr Lucy Veale, from the School of Geography, and Manuscripts and Special Collections at The University of Nottingham. It has been produced as part of a broader research project looking at the history of extreme weather events in the UK, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

FROM SORCERY TO SUPER COMPUTERS: THE STORY OF WEATHER AS TOLD THROUGH A SELECTION OF TREASURES FROM THE NATIONAL METEOROLOGICAL ARCHIVE 7 March 2017 The National Meteorological Archive holds materials ranging from a 12th-century illuminated manuscript of a work by the patron saint of Natural Sciences to the tender for the first Met Office Super Computer.

Using unique treasures from the archive, Catherine Ross presents a brief overview of developments in meteorology, from the work of Aristotle to the dawn of the computing age.

POETRY/THEATRE THE STORM OFFICER: WILD STORIES AND SONGS OF EXTREME WEATHER Friday 17 March 2017, 1.30-2.45pm Wild floods, Nottinghamshire whirlwinds, fire-drakes, the Thames frozen over, Sir Cloudesley Shovell and Ann the local poet, with her notebooks. The Storm Officer is a rich journey, weaving together story, songs, strange characters, 1,000 years of extreme weather and real experiences from the Cumbrian floods of December 2015.

Written by Matt Black www.matt-black.co.uk

Profile How long have you worked for Manuscripts and Special Collections?

Over 10 years.

What’s your job title?

Collections Archivist (job share) What does your job involve?

I am involved in acquiring and processing new material for the collections which includes liaising with donors or seeking out material which matches our Collecting Policy. I appraise, arrange and describe (catalogue) the collections and am involved in publicising them so that researchers know what we have. I also help with staffing the reading room; answering enquiries; managing volunteers and supporting student placements; giving classes to introduce students to our holdings; supporting exhibitions, and more.

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

I am particularly involved in our Tri Campus Contemporary Collecting Project which aims to ensure that the University Archive represents the experience of all staff and students, including those in China and Malaysia. It’s a great opportunity to be proactive about collecting and has got me thinking about how we capture the conversations, photos and videos shared on social media, which is where significant events tend to be documented these days. It has also involved processing material from China and Malaysia, and heading out to Welcome Fairs to talk to student societies and collect flyers to add to the student ephemera collected by my predecessors in the 1970s and 1980s.

I have also enjoyed writing for the project’s Time Capsule blog which asks students to send in photos representing what student life is like now where they are.

How did you get in to this?

After graduating from The University of Nottingham (Classical Civilisation, 1997), I ran a business with a friend. I wanted a new career and started volunteering with Manuscripts and Special Collections.

When I was taken on as a part-time archives assistant I was able to study a masters course in Archive Administration via distance learning, with help from the then Information Services and Staff Education and Development Unit towards the cost of the fees. After qualifying I was on short-term contracts before becoming a permanent team member. I’m now a mentor for the East Midlands’ Archives and Records Association, helping people who are just starting out on their careers, and supervising students and graduates who are looking for work experience. I’m also a member of the Libraries Research

e n r o b l o C h a r Sa

and Learning Resources Training and Development Group.

How do you decide which records to save?

Our Collecting Policy sets out which material we aim to collect (building on our existing strengths, supporting teaching and research, etc), but there are other factors to take into account, such as the collecting strengths of other neighbouring archive offices, space, and the expense involved in committing to look after something for infinity (and beyond).

Archivists need to take the long view when appraising collections; attitudes change over time and something that might once have been regarded as modern ephemera not worthy of long-term preservation, can end up being the more accessible and heavily used material within a collection. It’s also important to think about the records that are missing and find new ways of documenting the experiences of those who are underrepresented in the archives.

Finally, what’s your favourite collection, or item from a collection, held here in Manuscripts and Special Collections?

It’s very hard to decide, but I think the collection I’m most fond of is the very first one that I started work on as a volunteer.

It’s a huge and varied collection comprising the papers of a local Communist Party Official and self-proclaimed ‘professional revolutionary’ Fred Westacott.

His archive includes copies of speeches made at meetings and rallies and accompanying research materials he gathered to ensure that he was fully informed about issues such as unemployment, nuclear disarmament, miners’ strikes and cuts to social services.

His vast collection of political pamphlets is being catalogued by library colleagues as a special collection in its own right.

He was also an avid collector of ephemera, such as the leaflets, flyers and stickers handed out at protest marches or campaign events.

Examples of pamphlets collected by Fred Westacott.

Fred Westacott Printed Collection

Recent acquisitions

Our collections have continued to grow since the last edition. Here is just some of the material that we have taken in or catalogued over the last few months.

University archive

Percy Grainger (1882-1961) in particular.

The material was collected at Pilgrim College, Boston, Lincolnshire (once an outpost of the University’s Adult Education Department). Patrick O’Shaughnessy, a former tutor at Pilgrim College, was central to the collection’s development and publicity. Its current arrangement reflects the activities of O’Shaughnessy in researching his own articles and publishing collected editions of Lincolnshire folk songs. Many of these published editions can be found in the related Lincolnshire Folk Song (Printed) Collection, which also includes LP recordings.

We have had several additions to the University’s archive. These include material collected by RG Bradley, a former Equipment Officer at The University of Nottingham Medical School, whose papers contain an album of photographs of the official opening of the Queen’s Medical Centre on 28 July 1977. Other photographic accessions include images

by Martine Hamilton Knight of the former Imperial Tobacco/John Player bonded warehouses on Triumph Road (next to Jubilee Campus), taken in June 2016, and a 1940s’ photograph of the Royal Engineers’ section of University College Nottingham’s Senior Training Corps building a Bailey Bridge at Newark.

One of our aims is to collect current material which reflects the experience of students at the University, to complement the official institutional records. Our staff recently attended the 2016 Welcome Fair and collected leaflets, and we will be contacting student societies to see if they have any records which can be added to the archive.

Manuscripts and Special Collections is on the King’s Meadow Campus, which was previously Carlton TV studios. We were pleased to receive a donation of the official opening programme for the Central TV East Midlands TV Centre (as it was known) of 2 March 1984.

Local history

One acquisition (Accession 2734), though small, represents a huge body of work undertaken by dedicated locals. The Laxton History Group was awarded £31,400 from the Heritage Lottery Fund to support the project ‘Snapshot in Time, Laxton in peace and at war (1900 -1920)’. They spent many many hours in our Reading Room working through original records from the Manvers Collection (Estate Papers of the Pierrepont Family, Earls Manvers, of Thoresby Hall, Nottinghamshire, 1342-1982) looking for references to Laxton for this period.

The accession consists of four booklets published by the group: Laxton in Wartime,

by Roger Cottee, Living in Laxton, by Cynthia Bartle, Open Field Farming in Laxton, by Mary Haigh, and The Village Schoolmaster, by Joan Cottee. There are also loanable copies of the booklets in our open access local studies library, the East Midlands Collection.

Main image is: Examples of new material added to the Records of the Morley Family of Nottingham and I & R Morley Limited, hosiers of Nottingham, 1710-1896, Mr1. Above: a price list from the Morley Collection, 1894. Mr1

peak, Morley’s, which made stockings and underwear, had factories in Nottingham, Heanor, Sutton-in-Ashfield, Leicester and Loughborough, and had more than 10,000 employees. It was taken over by Courtaulds in 1968, and closed in the 1990s.

Additions to our online catalogue

We have also been adding descriptions to our online catalogue http://mssweb. nottingham.ac.uk/catalogue. Additions include a full catalogue for the Lincolnshire Folk Song (manuscript) collection which has undergone substantial rearrangement and cataloguing with the help of one of our student placements from Music, Lydia May. It is a collection of research material relating to English folk music in general, and Lincolnshire folk song and the work of

We have also catalogued an accrual to our collection of the papers of the Mellish family of Hodsock. It includes correspondence involving two of the 19th-century owners of Hodsock Priory, Anne Chambers (née Mellish) and her cousin William Leigh Mellish. Within this correspondence are letters from William to his wife Margaret Mellish (née Cunard), written in the 1850s when he was the Lieutenant Colonel of the Nottinghamshire Militia. William wrote to Margaret from the camps where the Militia was stationed, such as Aldershot, Newark, Newcastleupon-Tyne and Athlone. The Militia helped to keep the local peace and their activities were varied; William wrote about his role in fighting a fire at Kelham Hall near Newark in 1857, and helping to quell a disturbance between English and Irish workmen at Shotley Bridge in County Durham in 1858.

There are also some sad letters which William wrote to Margaret in 1855, when he was called to France to be at Anne Chambers’ bedside during her final illness at Fontainebleau.

Business records

We received an accrual to our collection of records of the Nottingham hosiery firm, I & R Morley. This includes scrapbooks and books of newspaper cuttings, price lists, shipping totals and account books. At its

Examples of LPs. From the Lincolnshire Folk Song Printed Collection

Spotlight

A spoonful of spermaceti

From, Crocker, Henry Radcliffe, 1845-1909. Atlas of the diseases of the skin: in a series of illustrations from original drawings. London: Caxton Publishing Co, 1903. Med Chi Collection Oversize XX WE17 CRO, barcode 6001885410

helps the medicine go down...

Recipe for cough medicine found in a household book belonging to Margaret Willoughby, c17371790. Manuscript Collection MS 87/1, f.55

Coughs, colds and flu are doing the rounds. But how did our ancestors cope with ill-health, before the days of readyprepared pills and potions?

Manuscripts and Special Collections holds a number of works with useful recipes to be made at home – some possibly more efficacious than others! Gervase Markham’s 1683 volume A Way To Get Wealth included the following information: For a dangerous cough Take Aquavitae (concentrated aqueous solution of ethanol) and Salt, and mix with it strong old Ale, and then heat it on the fire, and therewith wash the soles of the feet when you go to bed.

Markham (c1568–1637), born the third son of Sir Robert Markham of Cotham in Nottinghamshire, was a soldier, poet and writer. He had no formal training as a doctor or apothecary, but took an interest in agriculture and animal husbandry, so would have been familiar with herbal remedies.

It’s unlikely that washing the feet with salty alcohol would help a cough, but it is a much more pleasant remedy than the one advocated by Margaret Willoughby (c1713-1795). Margaret was the daughter of a London sculptor and in 1736 she married Edward Willoughby and moved to Aspley, Nottinghamshire. As a mother-ofsix, she undoubtedly took a great deal of interest in home remedies for childhood colds and sniffles. Her household books contain a mix of food and medicinal recipes, all neatly written and indexed.

Some of them appear to be contributed by other women, suggesting friends and relatives swapped recipes and cures in much the same way people do today.

For a Cough Take 3 Drachms of Spermaceti distorted with the yolk of an Egg as much as sufficient then add 6 ounces of Spring Water & of Cinnamon Water & of Syrup of Balsam, & of John each one ounce. Take 3 spoons two or three times a day.

It sounds awful. By the second or third dose you could probably convince yourself

you were no longer ill enough to need it.

Many of these remedies used easilyavailable natural ingredients that had been used in folk medicine for centuries. In 1652 Nicholas Culpeper (1616-1654) published The English Physitian, an ‘astrologophysical discourse of the vulgar herbs of this nation’, explaining how to identify, prepare and use many common plants for medicinal purposes, based upon his knowledge of herbal medicine and medical astrology. Under this belief system, the 12 astrological signs were closely associated with different parts of the body, and influenced various diseases and treatments.

Now discredited as pseudoscience, medical astronomy was a widespread practice in medieval and early modern times. Flawed as his ideas were, it was his methods rather than his ideas that made Culpeper deeply unpopular amongst his peers. Culpeper deliberately published his books in vernacular English and kept them inexpensive to enable the poor to access treatment without resorting to expensive physicians and apothecaries. He believed the health of the population could be improved by educating people, including on how to use the herbs and plants freely available in the countryside.

The Society of Apothecaries was displeased, but ultimately were unable to prevent him publishing a number of medical texts. Our copies of The English Physitian or Complete Herbal, as it came to be known, are from the 18th century, and popular demand ensured that the book was never out of print.

Culpeper believed that colds were caused by ‘an obstruction of perspiration’, but noted – somewhat more correctly – that: Would people sacrifice a little time to ease and warmth, and practice a moderate degree of abstinence [from large quantities of solid food and strong liquor] when the first symptoms of a cold appear, we have reason to believe that most of the bad effects…might be prevented…

People affect to treat them with so much

indifference and neglect, merely because they are only colds.

Along with rest and a moderate diet, Culpeper recommended various plants that may help. A drink of liquorice – described as a blue-flowered, brown-rooted plant under the dominion of Mercury – boiled with figs in water could treat dry coughs, hoarseness and wheezing. Lung-wort was used for similar conditions, although Culpeper also recommended boiling it in beer to treat ‘broken-winded’ horses. This is a chronic respiratory condition similar to allergic bronchitis, and a better treatment is preventing further exposure to the allergen.

Culpeper’s remedies sound much more palatable than Margaret Willoughby’s concoction, but were probably as ineffective.

If you’d like to see these books, please contact us to make an appointment to visit our Reading Room on King’s Meadow Campus. We have a vast collection of rare books and manuscripts related to health and medicine, including the Medical Rare Books Collection, the Nottingham MedicoChirurgical Society Library, and various Nottinghamshire Hospital archives.

If you’re looking for medical advice, however, then a much better source of information is the NHS Choices website.

Treatment for a cough from G Markham, A Way To Get Wealth, Book 2 p17, Special Collection S509.M2, barcode SC2475

Heritage Digitisation Service We provide high quality digital imaging of heritage, archive and research collections.

Manuscripts and Special Collections The University of Nottingham t: 0115 951 4565 e: mss-library@nottingham.ac.uk

www.nottingham.ac.uk/ heritagedigitisation

• Books and bound volumes, including fragile bindings • Manuscripts and archival material • Two dimensional works of art and flat textiles • Photographs, slides and glass plates • Large format material, such as maps • Small objects such as coins, medals and plaques