DISCOVER

Newsletter Winter 2015

The University of Nottingham’s Manuscripts and Special Collections

INSIDE:Going global: A history of our University

DH Lawrence’s ‘smuggled’ treasure

Beeton knows best

Welcome to the first edition of Discover, The University of Nottingham Manuscripts and Special Collections newsletter.

This first edition includes information on recent acquisitions including the purchase of a typescript of DH Lawrence’s Pansies, which has excited Lawrence scholars worldwide; news of our latest exhibitions; details of improvements to the reading room; and an article on how we are using social media to enhance our catalogues.

A recent review revealed that we had too low a profile and not enough people knew about us, our collections or our work. We hope that this newsletter – which will appear three times a year – will bring Manuscripts and Special Collections to the attention of a wider audience, so please pass it on to friends and colleagues. Details on how to be added to the mailing list can be found elsewhere in the newsletter.

Our review resulted in a new five-year Forward Plan and 10 strategic priorities:

To raise the profile of MSC across the University and the wider community

• To acquire and develop collections according to published Acquisitions Policies

• To preserve collections according to national standards and reduce the conservation backlog

• To increase the discoverability of collections and reduce the cataloguing backlog

• To provide high quality customer services

• To provide improved support for teaching and learning

• To increase research use of the collections

• To increase use of the collections to support public and alumni engagement

• To develop and implement a digital archive framework

• To establish a funding strategy

A new staffing structure has been established to take these priorities forward, with some staff taking on different roles and new staff being recruited.

Underneath the Forward plan we have an Annual Service plan and staff are busy implementing this. We were very pleased to receive a Wellcome Trust grant to scope the cataloguing, conservation and digitisation needs of our collections and their future research potential. This will help prioritise some of our cataloguing activity in the immediate future. In the same way, we have also carried out the Preservation Assessment Survey to help us establish our preservation priorities. Much work has also been undertaken on a Digital Archive Framework looking at digital preservation and a new digitisation strategy.

Last but by no means least staff are all contributing to our application for Archives Accreditation, a new national standard introduced by The National Archives.

If you would like to find out more about these activities or any other aspect of our work please do not hesitate to contact me. Meanwhile I hope that you enjoy discovering more about Manuscripts and Special Collections.

Welcome

If you’d like to make suggestions of items for inclusion in future issues or would like to write a short piece about your research or discoveries in our collections please contact Hayley Cotterill, Discover Editor. e: hayley.cotterill@nottingham.ac.uk t: 0115 951 4565

If you’d like to be added to our mailing list for the newsletter, please contact us:

e: mss-library@nottingham.ac.uk

Mark Dorrington Keeper of Manuscripts and Special Collections

Regular visitors to our reading room may have noticed a few changes.

We’ve had a couple of new pieces of furniture and have introduced some new procedures, with the aim of improving our service to readers.

The most obvious additions to our reading room are the new exhibition case and book display stand.

The exhibition case will be used to highlight items from our collections, with a new display every month.

With over 3m archival documents and 60,000 rare books in our collections we won’t be short of material to display! Have a look at what’s been chosen this month.

Our book display stand will be used to showcase material from our East

Midlands Collection, a loanable collection of local studies books, periodicals and pamphlets.

Another new addition is a set of lockers.

All visitors are now asked to leave their coats and bags in a locker while using the reading room.

We’ve also added additional power sockets to make it easier for readers working on laptops and have created extra seating for readers, with two additional tables.

If you have any comments or suggestions about the reading room or Manuscripts and Special Collections please speak to a member of staff or fill in a feedback form.

Changes in the reading room

Weston GalleryOur dedicated exhibition space, the Weston Gallery, is based in Nottingham Lakeside Arts on University Park Campus. The gallery is open 11am to 4pm Monday to Friday and 12 noon to 4pm at weekends.

Where can you find us?Manuscripts and Special Collections is based on the University’s King’s Meadow Campus in Lenton Lane, just five minutes from University Park by hopper bus. Anyone can visit and use the collections. The reading room is open 9am to 6pm Monday to Thursday and 9am to 5pm on Fridays.

Manuscripts and Special Collections

New buildings were required, but no land was available in the town centre. The pharmaceuticals entrepreneur Jesse Boot provided the solution to this problem, gifting the College 30 acres from his estate at Highfields on the western border of Nottingham.

Boot was a great benefactor of University College and was committed to helping it become a full university. Aside from giving the land, he also funded the new College building which we know as the Trent Building.

The Foundation Stone was laid on 14 June 1922. Massive stabilizing foundations had to be sunk to counter any tendency for the building

to slip forward towards the lake. This partly explains the time taken to complete the building.

King George V and Queen Mary opened the building on 10 July 1928, and most of the academic departments, the library and the laboratories transferred from the city for the academic session beginning in October.

Most commentators were favourable, highlighting the reserved dignity of the new building, and the way in which it blended in with the surrounding landscape. D.H. Lawrence was less appreciative, describing it as built in a ‘grand and cakey style’.

By the 1920s the University College buildings on Shakespeare Street were no longer sufficient for the number of students attending courses.

The building

Sir Jesse Boot, later Lord Trent, shown here in a portrait by Noel Denholm Davis from the 1920s. This portrait is owned by

the University and hangs in the Council Chamber. From University Collection, UMP/2/4/1/1

King George V and Queen Mary arriving for the opening of the Trent Building, 10 July 1928. The view of the lake and old pavilion to the right is now obscured by trees. From University Collection, UMP/2/1/4/1

Nottingham University College, c.1928. From University Collection, UR 1393

Ground floor plan of the Trent Building, c.1928. Virtually all the departments, together with the library, administration and catering, transferred to the new building in autumn 1928. From Nottingham University College by B.S. Townroe (1928). From East Midlands Collection Oversize, Not 5.E2 TOW.

trent

Going global Trent building board.indd 1 31/07/2015 11:32

Manuscripts and Special Collections has a programme of exhibitions in the Weston Gallery at Nottingham Lakeside Arts on University Park. Our autumn exhibition is Going Global: A History Of The University Of Nottingham.

The exhibition traces the history of the University, from its beginnings as a University College in 1881 right up to today’s global institution. It draws on material from our collections to focus on key events in the University’s history, including the granting of a full University charter in 1948 and, in more recent times, the building of the University Hospital and the opening of the Jubilee, China and Malaysia campuses.

Visitors will be able to watch film footage of life at the University in the Second World War, the procession of the first graduates in c.1951, student life at the School of Agriculture, Sutton Bonington, in 1950s and other memorable moments in the University’s past.

The exhibition has been jointly curated by Manuscripts and Special Collections, Professor John Beckett (School of Humanities) and Dr Andrew Souter.

Going Global runs in the Weston Gallery until Sunday 3 January. Admission is free. Gallery opening hours: Monday-Friday 11am-4pm Saturday, Sunday, bank holidays noon-4pm

nottingham.ac.uk/manuscriptsandspecialcollections/exhibitions

The Going Global exhibition will be accompanied by a series of events. All talks will take place in the Djanogly Theatre, Nottingham Lakeside Arts, between 1pm and 2pm.

Places are limited so please book in advance on 0115 846 7777.

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.

Get in touch

From Modest Beginnings to Global Institution

Monday 7 December Emeritus Professor Malcolm Jones has been linked to the University since he arrived as an undergraduate in 1958.

As a student, lecturer and a professor he went on to become Dean of the Arts Faculty, Pro-Vice-Chancellor and Honorary President of Convocation.

He will offer glimpses into how the University has changed since the 1950s, combining institutional history with personal reflection.

Inspiring Beauty will celebrate 80 years of Boots’ iconic No 7 brand. The exhibition

will be jointly curated by Dr Richard Hornsey, Manuscripts and Special Collections, and the Boots archive.

It will open in January 2016.

EXHIBITIONEVENTS

On 30 June 1881, Prince Leopold officially opened the University College building on Shakespeare Street, Nottingham. The new College had a staff of four professors, six lecturers and 12 teachers. Students could enrol from the age of 14. At a time when free elementary education ended at 11 the aim of the Victorian founders was to provide the people of Nottingham with access to a university education. Hundreds of students passed through its doors, perhaps most famously the author D.H. Lawrence — who submitted a poem to the student newspaper which was turned down!

Drawing on manuscript sources, printed materials and artefacts, the majority from The University of Nottingham’s collections, the exhibition highlights aspects of the University’s development since those early days, including the move out of the city, the addition of new disciplines and departments, the astonishing growth in student numbers, and the more recent expansion into Asia.The displays draw attention to various aspects of the University’s life, with an emphasis on what it was like to be a student at different times in the past.

The exhibition has been jointly curated by John Beckett, Professor of English Regional History, Dr Andrew Souter of the School of Humanities, and Manuscripts and Special Collections at The University of Nottingham.

The University of Nottingham opened its doors in 1881 for local young people wanting to learn technical and scientific subjects. Today it is a global organisation with well over 40,000 students, and campuses in China and Malaysia. This exhibition looks at aspects of its history from the earliest days to the present, with a particular emphasis on the life and work of students.

The official opening of University College on Shakespeare Street by H.R.H. Prince Leopold, Duke of Albany, K.G., on 30 June 1881. From University Collection, UR 1396

Laying of the foundation stone, University College, 27 September 1877. This stylised picture from the Illustrated London News depicts Warren Bowers, Mayor of Nottingham, laying the stone. The Liberal politician W.E. Gladstone made a long speech on the occasion. From Illustrated London News, 6 October 1877, East Midlands Special Collection Over.X Not 5.E6.E77

Manuscripts and Special Collections

Staff and students outside University College, c.1907. J.E. Symes, the College principal, is in the middle of the second row. D.H. Lawrence is on the right side of the second row from the back. From D.H. Lawrence Collection, La Phot 1/4

Frank Clowes, one of the four founding professors (Chemistry), was also the first principal of the college, 1887-90. From University Collection, UR 1382/1

going global board 1 introduction 13.37.27.indd 1

31/07/2015 11:29

Beeton helpfully includes a template that poor chastised Martha should follow... which leads to the bizarre image of a family dutifully copying one another boilerplate letters in lieu of any meaningful communication.

BEETONKNOWS BEST

When it comes to naughty children, unpaid bills, and an unwanted marriage proposal from a missionary...

It’s a problem that I’m sure many of us will have faced at some stage: how does one decline a marriage proposal from a missionary about to be posted to Africa without causing offence?

Not to fear, because the answer to this and many other awkward situations is found in Beeton’s complete letter-writer for ladies and gentlemen: a useful compendium of epistolary materials gathered from the best sources, and adapted to suit an indefinite number of cases, c.1873 (Ref: Special Collection PE1483.B4)

Most people will probably associate the name Beeton with Mrs Isabella Beeton of The Book of Household Management. This Beeton, the author and publisher Samuel Orchart Beeton (1831-1877), was her widower, and so continued the family tradition of informing the public how to conduct their lives. The book is full of templates, apparently based on real letters, covering a range of circumstances, from advertising for staff, breaking off an engagement, deferring payment of money owed, inviting friends and strangers to social events, applying for employment, offering sympathy on the death of a friend’s wife, and letters from parents to children who are away at school.

Some of the advice on forms of address may have been helpful, and it’s possible that the simple business letters could have been copied without much alteration. Letters for tradesmen seeking payment are elegantly phrased but increasingly insistent, beginning with “I trust you found my statement correct, and were satisfied with the quality of the articles supplied…”. Perhaps this was known to be ineffective because, after several unsuccessful attempts to extract payment, Beeton advises warning that “were I in a position to wait longer for a settlement it would afford me pleasure to do so, but at present it is quite out of my power”.

Few employers nowadays would accept an application from the parents rather than by the prospective job-seeker, but if you desired to send your teenaged son to sea, inform your

nearest ship’s captain that he is “strong, healthy and active, and, if afforded opportunities of learning seamanship, he would, I think, prove a reliable sailor by the time the term of his apprenticeship had expired.”

For parents whose daughters are poorly-behaved at boarding school, Beeton recommends writing to the tutor that “Your letter of yesterday caused me great pain, as I thought it likely that your excellent system of training would repress, if not eradicate altogether, the faults in Martha’s disposition, which I and her father so often deplored…. I am writing to Martha expressing our sorrow at her wicked

conduct and explaining that we shall be excessively angry unless she begs for your forgiveness”.

Beeton helpfully includes a template that poor chastised Martha should follow (“I have indeed been very wicked to distress you and my dear father as I have done. I cried when your letter came…I have prayed to Christ to forgive me and love me once more”), which leads to the bizarre image of a family dutifully copying one another boilerplate letters in lieu of any meaningful communication.

Beeton advises a maid-servant who has received an unwanted proposal to write “Do you think I could marry a man I have always tried to avoid?...if I ever encourage a fellow servant to speak to me, he much have better qualities than I know you possess”.

Presumably Beeton was unconcerned about hostile workplace environments.

To return to the tricky situation mentioned in the opening paragraph, how does a young lady refuse such a proposal? With much more tact than her maid-servant, and by deflecting blame onto her parents, who “consider I am constitutionally unfitted to reside in a climate so trying as Africa, and wish me to remain with them”.

It’s difficult to imagine a practical use for this advice, but the book very much conjures up a different world of strict gender and class divisions, and where protocol and politeness was of the utmost importance.

YOUR LETTER OF YESTERDAY CAUSED ME GREAT PAIN, AS I THOUGHT IT LIKELY THAT YOUR EXCELLENT SYSTEM OF TRAINING WOULD REPRESS, IF NOT ERADICATE ALTOGETHER, THE FAULTS IN MARTHA’S DISPOSITION, WHICH I AND HER FATHER SO OFTEN DEPLORED…

The stereotypical, romanticised view of archives is one where researchers delve into a box of yellowed, long-forgotten papers to uncover clues and solve a mystery. But what happens when the boxes present more questions than they answer?

For the last few months we’ve been turning to social media to try to find out more about some of the documents we have. The focus has been on material, particularly photographs, from within the last 100 years. This is just on the brink of living memory, and we hope that someone will recognise a grandparent or remember the details of a story they were told.

The first image (inset) is a photograph from the Records of High Pavement Presbyterian (Unitarian) Chapel, Nottingham, 1576-1982, among a very small group of small portraits collected by prominent member of the congregation and Warden of the Chapel, John Crosby Warren (d 1931). It dates from about 1900, and as most of the other men in the photos have been identified as clergymen, it seems likely that this gentleman was too. Do you know who he is?

The second item that we are hoping to discover more about is MS 57. Behind its peacock-feather cover are 133 small watercolour paintings and 15 photographs, mainly of Canada from 1884. This album is a gem and it’s such a shame we know relatively little about it. The only clue to the identity of the artist is an inscription on the title page reading “(With the British Association) Our Silver Wedding Trip illustrated by camera and brush. IMM 1884”.

The paintings and photographs record a journey to Canada from Liverpool in 1884. Most of the images are of landscapes, including the following: the River Mersey, icebergs, Quebec, Niagara Falls, Toronto, and various lakes, waterfalls and rapids along the American-Canadian border. The watercolours are simple but strikingly pretty, and convey the scene much better than some of the photographs.

Compare the drawing and photo of Niagara Falls – the

lack of colour and murkiness caused by the spray can’t capture the beauty of the waterfall and rainbows the way the watercolour can.

The British Association for the Advancement of Science held their meeting in Montreal in 1884. A report in The Times suggested that some 800 members made the trip, which didn’t narrow down who this mystery artist (IMM?) and their

spouse of 25 years could be. Can you?

Finally, one of our most frustrating mysteries surrounds the owner of a recipe book (Ref: MS 355). The inscription inside the cover reads “Caroline Waeick, from her affectionate mother, May 20th 1839.

The volume describes over 150 recipes in 189 manuscript pages, all written in the same hand, presumably that of Caroline’s mother. The recipes in the collection cover all types of cooking and preparation of food, including fruit preservation, fish and meat dishes, puddings, wine and beer. Most of the recipes are fairly standard including ones for Bakewell Pudding and boiled fish.

Who was Caroline Waeick? Was the recipe book a present on her marriage or majority? Ordinarily an unusual surname is very helpful in tracing people, and records of births,

marriages and deaths in England and Wales reveal only a few entries for this surname during the 19th century, all in London. Of the two Carolines mentioned, one was a baby girl who was born and died in 1841 and the other a woman who married in 1855, neither of whom seem the right age to be receiving a recipe book in 1839.

Unfortunately material becomes divorced from its context all too often. How many of us have family photos with nothing more than a familial descriptor (or even worse, just the word ‘Me’) hastily scribbled on the back?

If you have any information about these documents then we’d love to hear from you.

And please – label your photos!

Canada, cake and clergymen

Using social media to uncover the stories behind finds

‘Smuggled’text our

latesttreasure

We have had an exceptional influx of exciting acquisitions to Manuscripts and Special Collections. The growth of our collection depends very much upon the generosity of our donors and depositors but on occasion we are able to make purchases for items relating to our collections.

The first of three recent purchases is a journal of Catherine Anderson Louisa Tisdall (1796-1882), later Mrs Marlay. This volume continues the fascinating account of her trip to Europe in the early 1820s begun in an earlier journal which has lived in our Marlay Collection (My 2175) at Nottingham since the early 1940s! The two items were clearly separated at some time but are now happily reunited in our collections!

The newly purchased journal relates particularly to the family’s stay in Florence and the marriage of Catherine’s half brother Lord Tullamore, to Harriet Beaujolais Campbell. The journal details gallery visits, social occasions and people she meets, as well as family matters such as her father’s illness and family concern about the marriage. She also comments on current events, referring to the march of 5,000 Austrian troops on their way to Naples to put down an insurrection and to the death of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1821.

Our second purchase has a more local interest: a deer book for Wollaton Park, listing buck, ‘fullheads’ and doe venison used both ‘at the house’ and given by Lord Middleton to friends and acquaintances from 1839-1848. The volume has multiple functions, including general accounts for milk, a recipe for Drink for Cow and the prose passage beginning Tranquil Pleasures last the longest. Inscriptions record that the volume has been preserved by the family of Lord Middleton’s onetime gamekeeper, Isaac Wibberley.

Our most exciting purchase is a typescript of DH Lawrence’s collection of poems, Pansies, with his holograph corrections, accompanied by a letter from him to Charles Lahr from Paris in April 1929. During early 1929 two typescripts of Pansies were seized and confiscated on the grounds of indecency. An unexpurgated edition was published in August 1929, following the earlier publication of the expurgated edition by Secker in July 1929. It seems likely that our text was ‘smuggled’ into England by one of Lawrence’s friends to avoid it being seized by the police. That, and the fact that the typescript appears to have been in private hands and never before seen by the academic world, makes this a fascinating addition to our DH Lawrence Collection. The survival of the letter with the text adds contextual value. The University is extremely grateful to the Arts Council England/Victoria and Albert Museum Purchase Fund and the Friends of the National Libraries whose generous support enabled us to make this purchase.

The University has recently taken in the papers of another East Midlands born writer, Colin Wilson (1931-2013). Wilson came to prominence in the 1950s when his first book The Outsider was published to great critical acclaim. He was a prolific writer, penning fiction and non-fiction works on philosophy, true crime, the supernatural and many other themes. The collection of books and pamphlets contains almost 500 titles wholly or jointly written by Wilson, including many rare titles and signed first editions. Cataloguing of the archive material is underway. There are boxes of

correspondence, drafts, projects that were never realised – even a Colin Wilson tea-towel! Much of it has never been seen before and we plan to launch the completed catalogue to coincide with a conference about the author next summer.

Accruals to our collections comprise a significant number of our annual accessions. The British Radiofrequency Spectroscopy Group, whose papers we acquired in the 1980s, has added minutes, conference papers, photographs and other papers recording the group’s activities into the 21st Century. These papers supplement the considerable archive resource we are developing within the field of spectroscopy and magnetic resonance imaging, a resource which includes the papers of Professor Sir Peter Mansfield, Professor Raymond Andrew and Dr Brian Worthington.

Other acquisitions include papers of the Sealed Knot Society, a collection of typescript short stories in Russian, theatre programmes, documents about the lace industry, and items relating to the Ken Coates memorial lecture at the University in June 2015. The University archive has gained photographs of sports teams, halls of residence and alumni events, as well as more official series of minutes and reports.

We have been adding descriptions to our online catalogue mssweb.nottingham.ac.uk/catalogue. Recent additions include descriptions of testimonials of Richard Bates, Clerk of Works to University College Nottingham 1881 (MS 961), personal papers of the Kuczma/O’Connor family of Bulwell, Nottingham, 1920s-1990s (MS 955) and records of the Manor of North Wheatley, Nottinghamshire, 1633-1935 (NWM). A few of the recent acquisitions have also been catalogued, including Pansies (La L 29) and the Wollaton Park deer book (MS 962). We are also working on our programme to enhance catalogue descriptions, created by our predecessors as long ago as the 1940s.

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

mssUniNott