Untold lives blog

The Endangered Archives Programme is now accepting grant applications for the next round of funding. Since it was established ten years ago, the Programme has so far funded 244 projects in 77 countries worldwide, with grants totalling over £6 million.

The Programme is funded by Arcadia, in pursuit of one of its charitable aims to preserve and disseminate cultural knowledge and to promote education and research. The aim of the Programme is to contribute to the preservation of archival material worldwide that is in danger of destruction, neglect or physical deterioration. The endangered archival material will normally be located in countries where resources and opportunities to preserve such material are lacking or limited.

EAP643 Manuscript collection at Santipur Bangiya Puran Parishad, West Bengal, India

The Programme’s objectives are achieved principally by awarding grants to applicants to locate relevant endangered archival collections, where possible to arrange their transfer to a suitable local archival home, and to deposit digital copies with local institutions and the British Library. The digital collections received by the British Library are made available on the Programme’s website  for all to access, with currently over 3 million images from 106 projects online. Pilot projects are particularly welcomed, to investigate the survival of archival collections on a particular subject, in a discrete region, or in a specific format, and the feasibility of their recovery.

EAP443/1/3/2: Births; District Freetown [13 Apr 1857-12 Apr 1860] 19thC documents in Sierra Leone Public Archives relating to Liberated Africans & the slave trade

To be considered for funding under the Programme, the archival material should relate to a ‘pre-modern' period of a society's history. There is no prescriptive definition of this, but it may typically mean, for instance, any period before industrialisation. The relevant time period will therefore vary according to the society.  The term ‘archival material’ is interpreted widely to include rare printed books, newspapers and periodicals, audio and audio-visual materials, photographs and manuscripts.

EAP001/1/1: Photographs from Esfahan taken by Minas Patkerhanian Machertich [1900-1970s]

It is essential that all projects include local archival partners in the country where the project is based as the Programme is keen to enhance local capabilities to manage and preserve archival collections in the future. Professional training for local staff is one of the criteria for grant application assessment, whether it is in the area of archival collection management or technical training in digitisation. At the end of the project, equipment funded through the Programme remains with the local archival partner for future use.

EAP117/2/1/1: Horn Manuscript TK 37 (Manuscripts from the highlands of Sumatra, Indonesia)

The Programme is administered by the British Library and applications are considered in an annual competition by an international panel of historians and archivists. Detailed information on the timetable, criteria, eligibility and application procedure is available on the Programme’s website. Applications will be accepted in English or in French. The deadline for receipt of preliminary grant applications is 7 November 2014.

How many Untold Lives could you help to preserve and share?

As a historical source, an autobiographical novel presents the problematical challenges of both fiction and autobiography, and often doubles as a polemic for the author’s own world view. However, King Silence: A Story written by Arnold Hill Payne has provided me with insight into the lives of Victorian deaf children that I did not find in more traditional sources. 

  Title page King Silence

Arnold Payne was the hearing son of Benjamin Payne who was the deaf principal of the Cambrian Institution for the Deaf and Dumb in Swansea between 1876 and 1909.  Prior to attending a local school at the age of seven, Arnold’s everyday companions were deaf children boarding in this very well respected institution. Like his parents he was a passionate advocate for sign language in a time when ‘oralism’, or teaching the deaf to lip read and speak, was decreed to be the better method of communication.

The Cambrian Institution for the Deaf and Dumb - from Annual Reports of the Cambrian Institution at Swansea Central Library 

Arnold Payne became assistant chaplain to the Royal Association in Aid of the Deaf and Dumb in London, regularly speaking against oralism as he believed that signing enabled deaf people to be better educated and to interact with each other. He also wrote a comprehensive entry for ‘the deaf and dumb’ in the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica and spent a year at Gallaudet College in Washington DC, the leading higher education establishment for deaf students.

The descriptions of the fictional ‘Sicard College’ in Washington DC which featured in King Silence were recognisable as Gallaudet College. His father, Benjamin Payne can also be identified in the book as ‘Mr Gordon’, the principal of the fictional institution remarkably similar to the Cambrian Institution in Swansea.

Cambrian Institution Schoolroom - from Annual Reports of the Cambrian Institution at Swansea Central Library 

The depiction of one pupil in King Silence highlights the loneliness and isolation experienced by a deaf child. A seven year old boy who had been born deaf stood ‘silent, lonely, passive, patient’ while his mother discussed his admittance to the institution with the principal. When another pupil entered the room and used signs and gestures to the boy, he was transformed by the ‘sudden revelation that there was someone here who talked in a language he could comprehend’. He had been accustomed to people around him talking about him, while keeping him ‘in ignorance’ of what they discussed. Here however were children who could communicate with him and had also experienced his isolation, ‘the sensitiveness, the shame, the loneliness’; the boy burst into tears because he felt he was ‘no longer alone!’.

Principal Benjamin Payne would have been familiar with these feelings of isolation, even though he had not been born deaf, and although the above account in King Silence is tinged with sentimentality, it is nevertheless a recognisable portrayal of discovering one is not alone. Indeed, Benjamin Payne used isolation as a punishment, preferring to forbid pupils from talking to a miscreant for a short while, rather than using corporal punishment. Some institutions beat pupils for using forbidden sign language and some reportedly tied the pupils’ arms to their sides for the same ‘offence’.

In King Silence, Arnold Payne enhances our understanding of the feelings and emotions of deaf children sent away from home in the nineteenth century. For many children, the experience was a positive one which enabled them to befriend and communicate with other deaf children, possibly for the first time.

Lesley Hulonce
Historian and Lecturer, Swansea University

Further reading:

Arnold H Payne, King Silence: A Story, London: Jarrolds, 1919. British Library 012603.g.16.

Paddy Ladd, Understanding Deaf Culture: In Search of Deafhood, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2003.

Lesley Hulonce, ‘”Likely to conduce to the happiness and advantage of the inmates”? Victorian Education for Deaf Children’, Workhouse Tales  

Specialist professions such as these are just some of the fascinating details about life in India which are revealed by the reports of the ten-yearly Census of India. It’s a familiar source of information, but each time I look at it, I am amazed by the way in which it records minute details about everyday life. The buffoons, ear-pickers and sherbet-sellers feature in the tables of occupations in the 1891 report on the Punjab. Interestingly, the table of statistics records the number of people dependent on an occupation, including women and children, not just the people employed in the work. Buffoons were a great rarity with just 20 people in the British territory in the Punjab supported by their efforts to entertain. Ear-picking supported 144 people so this was also a minority profession compared with selling and preparing sherbet which provided for 2,047. ‘Undefined and disreputable’ occupations are listed, including prostitution which supported 6,193 men, women and children.

A Muslim barber, Add. 27255 f.211v
Images Online

 Education and literature supported 11,752 and 6,650 people respectively, and included teachers, authors, reporters, private secretaries and clerks, students and pandits. It is pleasing to note the inclusion of 'library service' under literature. However, people working in libraries may have been even more rare than ear-pickers, supporting only 121 people!

Portrait of Diwan Babu Ram with papers, books, pen-cases and spectacles, Add. Or. 1264
Images Online

Agriculture, manufacturing and commerce were of course the major sources of income. Civil and military service, ranging from people employed as officials and officers to ‘menials’, provided for 182,239 people while ‘professional’ occupations supported 135,834. Reflecting the almost obsessive drive to gather and organise information, these figures are broken down into sub-sections. For example, professional occupations include religion, education, literature, law, medicine, engineering and surveying, other sciences, pictorial art and sculpture, music, acting and dancing, sport, and finally exhibitions and games, which is where I found the buffoons. A separate table shows how people combined an interest in the land with other occupations. Regional variations are revealed by the statistics for individual districts. These statistics, far from being dry and boring, provide a fascinating snapshot of life in the Punjab in 1891.

Summary created from the detailed statistics relating to Districts and States 
Census of India, 1891: the Punjab and its Feudatories, Vol XIX Part II: Imperial Tables and Supplementary Returns, IOR/V/15/46

The Punjab volume of the 1891 Census of India includes text which explains the methodology underlying the statistics and makes observations on history and society. Subjects include population, religion, marriage, health, language, migration, occupations, and of course the perennial obsession – castes, tribes and races. Maps illustrating population changes, migration, religion, the distribution of lepers and blind people, and the proportion of male to female children highlight the interests of the British information-gatherers.  


Frontispiece to Census of India, 1891: the Punjab and its Feudatories, Vol XIX Part I, IOR/V/15/46

Although the Census of India reflects British preoccupations, observations and understanding of India, imaginative reading of the source provides marvellous insights into how people lived and worked. It is also a reminder of the importance of knowledge in maintaining a position of power.

Further reading
IOR/V/15 Census Reports 1853-1944
These comprise the decennial census of India 1871-1941 and a few earlier provincial census reports.

Penny Brook
Lead Curator, India Office Records

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One of the aims of this blog is to inspire new research and encourage enjoyment, knowledge and understanding of the British Library and its collections.  So we are delighted to tell you about the work of writer Jamie Rhodes which ticks all those boxes!

Jamie has written several short films and teaches creative writing and screenwriting at school and community group workshops.  He is a folklore enthusiast and his writing is often inspired by rare and unusual stories. So collaboration with Untold Lives is a match made in heaven! 

Jamie contacted us through Twitter in June 2013 and we met for a chat which resulted in Jamie contributing guest posts to the blog.  Then in 2014 Jamie received a grant from the Arts Council to write a book of historical fiction inspired by stories which have been posted on Untold Lives.  Each of the short tales uses the archive collections as a starting point and seeks to explore how ‘a writer can bring alive a not altogether impossible re-imagining of our past’.  Jamie believes that in order to create good fictional characters, it is necessary to observe ‘the small but beautiful details of real lives’.  Documents in the British Library have given him a window to observe people of the past and he has imagined the personalities behind the pens.

Dead Men’s Teeth and other stories from Voices Past will be published later this year.  The stories in the collection are - Dead Men’s Teeth; Quarantine; Arrowhead; Mary March; How I Did Long fer a Tattie Pasty!; Death or Australia; Printed on the Thames; Ignatius Sancho’s Shop; Vulture Temple; and Stolen from India. Fans of this blog will spot some familiar titles there! 

J E Millias, Christmas Story Telling from The Illustrated London News (1862) Images Online

Jamie Rhodes will be hosting an event at the British Library on Monday 20 October 2014 at 18.00 Raising the Dead: Tales of Untold Lives.  Join us for a spine-tingling evening of Gothic horror-themed readings from his collection of short tales.

And please do let us know if you have been inspired by Untold Lives!

Margaret Makepeace
India Office Records

Amid the more famous items in Enduring war such as Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Soldier’ and Siegfried Sassoon’s Statement nestles a letter from Mabel Dearmer dated March 1915 (Society of Authors Collection, Add MS 56690, f.151) which refers to the fact that both she and her husband were imminently going to Serbia to work for the field hospitals there. How did this children’s writer and artist come to serve as a linen orderly in Serbia for a unit of women doctors and nurses led by another Mabel - Mrs Stobart? 

   From: Round-about Rhymes. Written and pictured by Mrs. Percy Dearmer. London: Blackie & Son, [1898]. (B.L. shelfmark: 12809.u.27.). Dedicated to Geoffrey and Christopher. 

Mabel Dearmer, born in 1872, was primarily known as a dramatist, writer and artist. She was opposed to the war on the basis of her Christian faith but threw herself into work with the Women’s Emergency Corps, as Chairman of the Publicity Department, and into fundraising for Belgian refugees. Her younger son Christopher enlisted soon after the outbreak of war followed by his elder brother Geoffrey (subsequently renowned for his war poetry). In March 1915, busy organising the production of one of her own plays, she attended a farewell service for the Third Serbian Relief Unit to support a friend. There she heard her husband, Percy, then vicar of St. Mary’s Primrose Hill, announce that he had just been appointed Chaplain to the British units in Serbia and would soon be departing there. 

Mabel made the sudden and dramatic decision to volunteer to join the Third Serbian Relief Unit and approached Mrs Stobart at the end of the service. Although Mabel’s own account, quoted in Letters from a field hospital and Mrs Stobart’s in The Flaming sword in Serbia differ in a few details, both agree that Mrs Stobart was not gripped with instant enthusiasm for the idea and made a few brisk observations about Mabel’s suitability. However, she agreed to take her as a hospital orderly.

Mabel left for Serbia in early April, appointed orderly in charge of linen. She proved an efficient and effective member of Mrs Stobart’s team in Serbia and describes her happiness there (slightly guiltily) in a letter of 16 May. However, by June 1915 she had fallen ill with enteric fever (typhoid). Although she subsequently appeared to rally, another letter in the Society of Authors Collection, dated 23 July, tells of the sad conclusion to this story, namely that Mabel died in Serbia on 11 July 1915 (Add MS 56690, f.153). Poignantly her son Christopher died at Suvla Bay (Gallipoli) only a few months later in October 1915.

Alison Bailey
Co-Curator, Enduring war

Further reading:
Mabel Dearmer, Letters from a field hospital. With a memoir of the author by Stephen Gwynn. London: Macmillan and Co., 1915. British Library shelfmark: 9082.gg.34.
Mabel Annie Saint Clair Stobart, The Flaming Sword in Serbia and elsewhere. London; New York: Hodder and Stoughton, 1916. B.L. shelfmark: 09082.cc.12.

Enduring war: Grief, grit and humour until 12 October 2014
The Folio Society Gallery - admission free

Queen Anne, last of the Stuart line of monarchs, died on 1 August 1714.  Three hundred years later, she is still brought to mind through the expressions ‘Queen Anne is dead’ and ‘As dead as Queen Anne’. 

‘Queen Anne is dead’ is a response made to someone who has relayed stale news or stated the obvious.  One explanation of the origin of this rejoinder is that the Queen’s death was kept quiet until the Hanoverian succession was assured.  However news leaked out and so by the time an official announcement was made the death was already common knowledge.

Egerton 2572, f.18 Anne, queen of Great Britain and Ireland.  Images Online 

The phrase ’As dead as Queen Anne’ appears frequently in articles and letters in the British Newspaper Archive.  It is used to describe a surprising number and variety of concepts, objects and creatures: women’s suffrage, Irish partition, Sunday closing, sewage disposal, square dances, insects, weed control with corrosive acid, and the traditional social order.

Queen Anne’s funeral effigy can be seen in the museum at Westminster Abbey. Effigies were modelled from actual death masks and used at the head of funeral processions, then placed for a time above the tomb.  They are still dressed in original clothes belonging to the dead person.

In 1928 the Abbey’s display of effigies was the subject of newspaper articles. It was said to be ‘the grimmest waxwork show in the world’, more frightening than the new Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s.  Eleven wax effigies stood ‘staring pallidly at each other’.  King Charles II was ‘a strange figure, with his little fierce black moustache, piercing eyes and claw-like hands’.  An Abbey guide remarked that the death-mask of Queen Elizabeth Tudor was the one true portrait of her, being the only one that did not seek to flatter. He added ‘There is proof that Queen Anne is indeed dead, for here is her death mask’.

King William and Queen Mary were shown as they appeared at their coronation.  William’s effigy was standing on a cushion which he had ordered to raise his height and bring him level with his taller wife. A child visitor pointed to the couple and exclaimed ‘”Daddy put a penny in, and make them jump about”.

Although Nelson was buried at St Paul’s Cathedral, his effigy was given to the Abbey.  The Admiral’s blind eye had been cleverly reproduced and there was a large pin on the shoulder of his Navy uniform to mark the site of his fatal wound.

The Duke of Buckingham held a gold walking stick and wore long-toed white shoes.  His face was ‘extremely pale, depicting a consumptive’.  The Duchess of Richmond, said to be the model for Britannia on coins, was accompanied by her stuffed pet parrot.

The fragility of the clothing was described, the once fine lace, rich furs and velvets ‘in many cases hanging in shreds, dusty and faded’.   Yet the London correspondent of the Evening Telegraph found the effigies ‘so lifelike that they are most uncanny.  One begins almost to suspect that life is not altogether extinct in those silent figures that stare through the dusty glass of the cases containing them’.

Margaret Makepeace
Curator, India Office Records 

Further reading:

British Newspaper Archive

Nottingham Evening Post 2 May 1928

Yorkshire Evening Post 2 May 1928

Evening Telegraph 22 May 1928

Eldred Pottinger came to prominence in the service of the East India Company in the 1830s as an assistant to his uncle Henry Pottinger, Resident at Cutch, and through his travels in Afghanistan. When the uprising against the British presence in Afghanistan broke out in 1841, Pottinger was serving as a political officer in Kohistan, a district north of Kabul. During what came to be known as the First Anglo-Afghan War, Pottinger received a serious leg injury, and was detained as a hostage by the Afghan leader Akbar Khan. On his return to India in 1842, he was granted medical leave and travelled to Hong Kong where he died on 15 November 1843.

 
Dr William Brydon,  the only survivor of the 4,500 British soldiers and 12,000 camp-followers who left Kabul on 6 January 1842 to escape, arriving at Jelalabad with news of the disaster, on 13 January © UIG/The British Library Board

At the time of his death, Pottinger was in dispute with the Company over compensation he felt was due to him for the loss of his property in Afghanistan. The India Office Records holds a memorial prepared by him, and submitted to government after his death by his younger brother Lieutenant John Pottinger of the Bombay Artillery. John hoped the Company would give the compensation he felt had been due to his older brother to his mother and sister living in Jersey, and he pointed out that three of his brothers had died in the Company’s service.

 
Bazaar at Kabul in the fruit season (X 614, plate 19) Images Online

Enclosed with the memorial is a list of Eldred’s property taken by the enemy in the castle of Laghman in the Kohistan of Kabul on 5 November 1841, and it gives an interesting glimpse into what a Company officer on political service felt he needed to do his job and to preserve the dignity of his position. There is a long list of books on a wide range of subjects such as history, botany, geology, mathematics, engineering, and politics. Not all seem to be directly related to his posting. There are volumes of poetry by Chaucer, Shelly, Byron and Wordsworth. Gillies’ History of Greece and Leland’s Life of Philip of Macedon sit alongside Robertson’s History of Scotland and Burke’s Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful, and the satirical The Clockmaker, or Sayings and Doings of Samuel Slick. The collection of Eldred’s books and maps alone was valued at £715 in 1843.

Title page of Burke’s Sublime and Beautiful (RB.23.a.18100) Images Online

As well as the books and maps, Eldred listed scientific equipment, guns and swords, European and Persian clothes, furniture (tables and chairs, bookcases not surprisingly), Persian carpets, dinning implements (plates, knives, forks, spoons, some in silver), wine, beer and spirits, and six horses. The total value of his lost property was taken as £2,322 or roughly £102,000 in today’s money!

The opinion of the Governor General of India was that Eldred Pottinger was only entitled to the same compensation as if he had sustained the loss on military, rather than political service, and that the compensation should have no relation to the value of the property lost, but only to the value of the property an officer ought to have with him on service.

John O’Brien
India Office Records

Further Reading:

Memorial from Lieutenant John Pottinger of the Regiment of Artillery respecting certain claims of his late brother, Major Eldred Pottinger for allowances and compensation alleged to be due to him for loss of his property in Afghanistan, October 1842 to June 1844 [IOR/F/4/2058/94289]

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

Historical currency converter

George Bernard Shaw, playwright and polemicist, was born in Dublin on 26 July 1856. So we decided to post a story about Shaw to mark this anniversary . But a little research revealed that Shaw would not have been flattered or pleased – he never celebrated his birthday.

 
Add. 50582 f.38 George Bernard Shaw Images Online 

Shaw’s antipathy to birthday celebrations is revealed in newspaper articles by journalists who were eager to congratulate him.  They describe the various ways that they were rebuffed by Shaw.  A representative of the Daily News asked him on his 60th birthday how young he felt. Shaw replied that ‘The day is not really different from any other, except that when you saw me last I was between 50 and 60 and now I am between 60 and 70, not young enough to be really proud of my age and not old enough to have become really popular in England’ (Aberdeen Evening Express 27 July 1916).

In July 1929 Shaw was asked if he would give the world a message to mark the ‘notable occasion’ of his 73rd birthday. Shaw replied, ‘Please send out a brief message suppressing the fact that it is my birthday’.  During that month he was busy directing rehearsals for his new play The Apple Cart which was to be performed at the Malvern Festival.  His secretary confirmed that Shaw would be working as usual, adding ‘He does not believe in birthday parties’ (Gloucester Citizen 25 July 1929).

Gloucester Citizen 25 July 1929 British Newspaper Archive 

The Evening Telegraph was nevertheless not deterred from running an article pointing out that, at the age of 73, Shaw was still as active as ever: dodging buses like a man of 25, and never taking a drive in a car without breaking the law.

On his 74th birthday, Shaw declared to a reporter: ‘The more my birthday is forgotten, the better I am pleased. By deed poll I have discarded my birthday forever’ (Evening Telegraph 25 July 1930).  When a brave young reporter from the Sunderland Echo telephoned Shaw to ask him about his birthday in 1935, Shaw said:’Young man, you know not what you do.  If ever you are 79 you won’t want to discuss the fact.  And who is the least interested in my birthday?’  On being told that everyone was interested in George Bernard Shaw, the writer retorted: ‘But not in my having birthdays.  I am not distinguished by having birthdays. Public interest in me depends on the things I can do that nobody else can do. Anybody can have a birthday’.  He then declined to discuss the matter further (Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette 26 July 1935).

 
Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette 26 July 1935 British Newspaper Archive

Newspapers continued to commemorate Shaw’s birthdays up to the year of his death in spite of his pleas. His 94th birthday in July 1950 was marked with an article in the Aberdeen Journal stating that G.B.S. was as mentally alert as ever, although physically a little frail.  The playwright spent his final birthday at home in Ayot St Lawrence Hertfordshire: ‘He did not celebrate it – he never does’.

Margaret Makepeace
Curator, India Office Records