The Untold Lives blog has included several posts on the Granville Archive over the last couple of years.  The archive was acquired by the British Library in 2019, along with a supplementary collection of family papers previously hidden from public view, thanks to support from the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF) and other funders.

Trunk of papers from the Granville Archive

Like so much else, the project to repackage and catalogue the archive was held up by consecutive lock-downs.  Now, at last, the work is complete: catalogue descriptions for both the main and supplementary collections are available on the British Library’s Explore Archives and Manuscripts online catalogue (Add MS 89317 and Add MS 89382).  Readers can now directly request access any of the material in the BL reading rooms.

'Per Balloon Post': congratulatory postcard sent by balloon post to Castalia Leveson-Gower, Lady Granville, inscribed with a charitable appeal to the Countess from the finder, a Rev H Woodhouse, 30 April 1872
(Add MS 89382/4/23, f. 40)

The archive is large.  The main collection consists of 883 volumes and files of correspondence and papers, and the supplementary collection a further 96 (as well as a satin purse in which some of the letters were stored).  The collections span several generations over three centuries.  Of particular importance are the papers of Granville Leveson-Gower, 1st Earl (1773–1846), diplomat and politician, and his son Granville George Leveson-Gower, 2nd Earl (1815-1891), diplomat, foreign secretary and close friend of Gladstone. 

'This is my 10th attempt to print': the 2nd Earl Granville’s struggle with a typewriter. Letter from Granville George Leveson-Gower, 2nd Earl Granville, to Castalia Leveson-Gower, Lady Granville, 6 March 1876
(Add MS 89382/4/11, f. 142-143)

Women members of the family are well represented, including Lady Susanna Leveson-Gower (1742-1805), wife of Granville Leveson-Gower, Marquess of Stafford; Lady Henrietta (Harriet) Leveson-Gower (1785-1862), wife of the first Earl Granville; and Castalia Leveson-Gower (1847-1938), wife of the 2nd Earl Granville.  Henrietta Ponsonby, Countess of Bessborough (1761-1821) and her sister Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (1757-1806) feature prominently in the supplementary collection.

'My dearest Granville'. Letter from Lady Stafford to her 17-year-old son, Granville Leveson-Gower, later 1^st Earl Granville, 22 February 1791 (Add MS 89382/1, f. 150)

Anyone interested in 18th-19th century diplomacy and foreign affairs, national politics, aristocratic society and intimate family life, the development of higher education, and national museums is likely to find material of interest in the Granville Archive and supplementary papers.

Self-portrait with dog on the shore below the cliffs at Hastings, by Lady Bessborough.  Enclosed in a letter to Granville Leveson-Gower, later 1st Earl Granville, while he was away in St Petersburg, Russia, 19 October 1804
(Add MS 89382/2/22, f. 70)

To find out more about some parts of the archive, see the previous Untold Lives blogposts, and enjoy a detailed account of innovative conservation treatment for locks of hair in the collection by BL conservator Veronica Zoppi (listed below).

Tabitha Driver
Cataloguer, Modern Archives & Manuscripts

Further reading:
Lord Granville Leveson Gower: Private Correspondence, ed. Castalia Granville (London, 1916)
Hary’o: the Letters of Lady Harriet Cavendish, 1796-1809, ed. George Leveson Gower and Iris Palmer (London, 1940)
Edmond Fitzmaurice, The Life of Granville George Leveson Gower K.G. 1815-1891. 3rd ed. (London, 1905)
Janet Gleeson,  An aristocratic affair: The life of Georgiana's sister, Harriet Spencer, Countess of Bessborough (London, 2006).
The political correspondence of Mr Gladstone and Lord Granville, 1868–1876, ed. A. Ramm, 2 vols. (London, 1952).

Cache of hidden letters in the Granville Archive
Ciphers and sympathetic ink: secret love letters in the Granville papers
A rebus puzzle
Conservation of the Granville Archive papers

 

The Modern Archives collections holds many of the personal papers of the Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom.  These are rich and extensive papers, which offer an incredible insight into the British political establishment over two centuries.  Our new collection guide introduces our holdings relating to British Prime Ministers.  The collections listed are valuable resources that can offer first-hand accounts of the some of the most prominent political personalities and infamous events of modern British history.  The papers include dialogues with Royals, correspondence from politicians, petitions, personal diaries and drafts of legislation.

We have selected a few items from this huge collection that highlight some of the fascinating stories hidden within these papers.

The folio below is from the copybook of letters of the John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute, Prime Minister from 1762 to 1763.  In this volume of transcripts of the Earl of Bute’s letters are a number of letters to the Prince of Wales, the future King George III.  The Earl of Bute offers his personal advice to the Prince, the transcript below offers insights into the tone of these letters.

Earl of Bute’s advice to the future George III, Add MS 36797, f.66v. 

The papers of Lord North, Prime Minister from 1770 to 1782, offer insights into the British State’s response to the American Revolutionary War.  Among the papers are various letters from Loyalists including a petition of prisoners requesting assistance.  The folio below is a letter from Richard Clarke on behalf of his son Isaac who was one of the merchants chosen by the English East India Company to deal with tea consignments in Boston.  He refers to the violence that erupted during the event known as the Boston Tea Party, which brought suffering to his son and ended his employment.  From here, he appeals to Lord North for compensation for his son’s loss of income.

Letter to Lord North from Richard Clarke recalling his son’s experience of the Boston Tea Party, he was ‘greatly exposed to the violence of the rioters, even before those teas were destroyed’. Add MS 61864, f.25. 

The papers of George Canning, prime minster in 1827, include files relating to the campaign to abolish slavery within the British Empire. The British trade in slaves had been illegal since 1807; however, ownership of slaves in British colonies was still legal until 1833. Some of Canning’s papers explore slavery within the British Empire, like the folio below concerning the case of a man who was contesting his enslavement in British Guiana.

Papers considering the case of Barra[h/k], a man who was contesting his enslavement in British Guiana. Canning Papers, Add MS 89143/1/8/2. No foliation. 

The extensive Gladstone Papers cover his four premierships and offer a unique insight into an expansive range of policy interests and political issues over the 19th century.  This letter is one of many from women’s suffrage campaigners. Millicent Fawcett writes to Gladstone’s office to thank Gladstone for his sympathy towards her sick husband.

Gladstone Papers, Letter to Gladstone from Millicent Fawcett, 1885, Add MS 44156, f.191v. 

These fascinating examples from the collection are just a few folios from a vast set of collections that offer unique perspectives on the history of governance, policy, power and politics in Britain from the 17th to the 20th century.

Jessica Gregory
Curatorial Support Officer, Modern Archives

Further Reading:
Prime Ministers’ Papers and Correspondence

 

A man of great personal charisma and thorough-going radicalism, Percy Bysshe Shelley – sleep-walker, hallucinator, someone who believed his own father had contemplated committing him to an asylum – may have been a hypochondriac living on his nerves.  But he was also a thinker and activist trying to bear witness to a new kind of environmentalist morality.  His ethics, often insufficiently recognised as such, engaged with the entirety of the natural world and viewed humankind as part of that whole.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) from Joseph Gostwick, English poets. Twelve essays ... With twelve portraits (London, 1876) British Library Images Online

While shifting focus from human relationships ran the risk of personal unreliability, it created space for the radical, pacifist vegetarianism Shelley first articulated in the Notes to Queen Mab (1813).  This dismisses even cooking as ‘screening… the horrors of the shambles’ : the register suggests visceral disgust, and his argument links a carnivorous diet to violence, criminality and war.  Formed by a Christian upbringing despite the atheism he embraced, Shelley revisits the Christian symbolism of man who ‘slays the lamb that looks him in the face’ in the accompanying poem, and implies the killing of any animal is a kind of moral cannibalism.

Over the next nine years, culminating in his unfinished ‘The Triumph of Life’, Shelley developed a poetics capable of rendering the quality of aliveness.  The famous invocation in ‘Ode to the West Wind’ (1819) – ‘Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere; /Destroyer and preserver’ – celebrates change as the agent of both life and death.  The idea of mutability as loss recurs in ‘Mutability’ and ‘Ozymandias’, for example.  But in poems of celebration like the Ode, ‘Mont Blanc’ and ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’, flux becomes revolutionary life force.  Here, Shelley’s all-one-breath lines tend not to pause for sentence endings, but keep rushing onward through his em-dashes.  We sense the attempt to capture animation itself.

Cwm Elan from R. Eustace Tickell, The Vale of Nangwilt - a submerged valley (London, 1894) 

There’s a sense too that clustered ideas are themselves already always in motion: social and political revolution, the new experimental scientific sense of a natural, not supernatural, animating life force, the personal quest for meaning.  In reality of course these developed by stages.  The poet’s schoolboy chemistry is well-known.  Arguably less familiar is his encounter with the landscape of the Elenydd in west Wales, which I’ve explored while researching the original radicalism of the Romantic encounter with the natural world.  Sent down from Oxford for atheism, in July 1811 Shelley went to stay on an uncle’s estate, Cwm Elan, in the ‘highly romantic’ Cambrian mountains. Five years before his first trip to the Alps, letters show him grappling with this experience.  On 26 July he wrote to Elizabeth Hitchener:

Rocks piled on each other to tremendous heights, rivers formed into cataracts by their projections, & valleys clothed with woods, present an appearance of enchantment— but why do they enchant, why is it more affecting than a plain, it cannot be innate, is it acquired?

Atheism may have entailed his desire to locate meaning.  But the sense that it could be found either within or outside human observers implicates them in the natural world and its goings-on.  This interactive sense of being alive within the living world is a key Romantic step: the same one being taken a little earlier, in Germany, by Romantic Idealist philosophies.  As Shelley would articulate this five years later, in ‘Mont Blanc’:

The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves…

‘Rapid waves’ indeed.  By 1904, as if to illustrate Shelleyian mutability, both Cwm Elan and nearby Nantgwyllt, to which Shelley brought his new wife in 1812, had vanished under Birmingham Corporation’s controversial reservoirs.

Cwm Elan House in the Elan Valley in a postcard view of 1903 with the rising waters of the Caban Coch reservoir very close to the front of the house. © Powys County Archives Office 2022 People's Collection Wales

 

Professor Fiona Sampson
Fiona Sampson’s new book is Starlight Wood: walking back to the Romantic countryside (Little, Brown, September 2022).

Further reading:
Percy Bysshe Shelley biography
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Shelley's A Vindication of the Natural Diet

 

A recent donation to the India Office Private Papers is an ensign’s commission granted to Anthony Merry who joined the East India Company as an army cadet in 1798.

Commission as ensign granted to Anthony Merry – India Office Private Papers Mss Eur F759

Anthony Merry was baptised at Great Warley in Essex on 2 September 1783, the younger son of Anthony Merry and Margaret (née Hornby).  When Anthony senior died in 1785, his will confirmed the marriage settlement made with Margaret together with a further £200.  The settlement appears to have included the manor of Hayleys in Epping.  Anthony did not mention his children.  The bulk of the remaining estate went to his sister Elizabeth Pinnell and other relations.

Margaret Merry re-married twice.  In 1786 she wed widower William Dowson of Chamberlain’s Wharf Southwark, and their son William was born the following year.  Dowson died in 1791, leaving Margaret £100 and the use during her lifetime of Millfield House in Highgate.

In 1795 Margaret married another widower Henry Coxwell, a chemist and druggist in Fleet Street London.  They had a son Charles in 1795 and a daughter Elizabeth in 1797.  Coxwell was a member of the Committee of Chemistry at the Society for the Promotion of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, and the inventor of concrete lemon.

Invention of concrete lemon by Henry Coxwell - Bath Chronicle 7 March 1799 British Newspaper Archive

Concrete lemon was crystallized lemon juice, ‘the pure acid part of the fruit in a solid and dry form, resembling in appearance white sugar candy’.  Coxwell signed each package sold as a guarantee of its authenticity.

Handbill advertising Coxwell's concrete lemon - British Library General Reference Collection Cup.21.g.24/5

The crystals were said to be ‘convenient and elegant’, dissolving instantly in cold water, and cheaper than fresh lemons or lemon juice.  They could be used to make punch, lemonade, or sauces.  Ships of the Royal Navy and East India Company were supplied with Coxwell’s concrete lemon to help guard sailors against scurvy.

Thomas Trotter, Medicina Nautica; an Essay on the diseases of Seamen vol III (London, 1803), p.76

Henry Coxwell died at Millfield House in 1832, ‘deeply and deservedly lamented by all who had the pleasure of his acquaintance’.  His library was sold three years later.  This included a collection of modern medical books together with others on a variety of subjects – travel, plant, insects, literature, philosophy, politics.

Advert for the sale of Henry Coxwell's library - Sun (London) 19 October 1835 British Newspaper Archive

Anthony Merry died before his stepfather, in 1831.  His career in the Madras Army had been very brief.  In February 1801 Lieutenant Merry was stationed at Seringapatam with the 1st Battalion, 2nd Regiment Native Infantry.  He wrote to  his commanding officer, Major Thomas Riddell, expressing his wish to resign the Company’s service and to proceed to Europe at the first opportunity.  Major General Brathwaite recommended that this request be granted, given Merry’s general character and conduct.  Merry was permitted to resign and told to go immediately to Madras and be ready to embark for Europe.

After his return to England, Anthony Merry served as an officer in regiments of the Royal Militia.  He married Elizabeth Strivens in 1805 and settled in Kentish Town in north London.  It appears the couple had four children: Margaret, Robert, Eliza (died in infancy), and William Henry.  Anthony’s East India Company commission was carefully preserved and passed down the family before being gifted to the British Library.

Margaret Makepeace
Lead Curator, East India Company Records

Further reading:
Commission as ensign granted to Anthony Merry – India Office Private Papers Mss Eur F759.
Baptism of Anthony Merry – India Office Records IOR/L/MIL/9/108 f. 466.
Papers in Madras Military Proceedings 1801 about Anthony Merry’s resignation - India Office Records IOR/P/254/70 pp.1788-1791, 1794-1795.
Will of Anthony Merry 1785 – The National Archives PROB 11/1127/339.
Will of Anthony Merry 1813 - The National Archives PROB 11/1785/332.
Will of Anthony Merry 1835 - The National Archives PROB 11/1849/369.
Will of Sukey Merry 1840 - The National Archives PROB 11/1921/375.

 

A recently catalogued collection of India Office Private Papers is now available to researchers in the British Library’s Asian & African Studies reading room.  This is the papers of Penelope Valentine Hester Chetwode, travel writer, tour guide, and historian of Indian temple architecture.

Penelope Chetwode and her father General Sir Philip Chetwode seated with the Rajah of Bilaspur in their garden in Shimla from The Bystander 5 August 1931 British Newspaper Archive

Penelope Chetwode was born on 14 February 1910 at Aldershot to Sir Philip Chetwode and Hester Alice Camilla Stapleton Cotton (Lady Chetwode).  In 1928, she travelled to India for the first time when her father was appointed Chief of the General Staff in India.  In 1933, she married the poet John Betjeman in London, and they had two children Paul and Candida.  In 1963, Penelope returned to India for the first time in 30 years, falling in love with the country again, and developing a fascination with the architecture of north Indian temples.  She would subsequently visit India regularly on research trips, and to lead groups of tourists around different parts of the country.  It was while leading a tour from Shimla to Kulu that she died on 11 April 1986.

Notebooks from a trip to India in 1973 - Mss Eur F741/2/20

The collection consists mostly of Penelope Chetwode’s India papers.  On her visits to India she kept notebooks with her observations and sketches of the places she visited and the people she met.  Many of these notebooks have survived and can be found in the collection.  There are files relating to the holiday companies she worked with when leading tour groups to India, particularly West Himalayan Holidays which organised package tours to north India.  These give a fascinating flavour of the early years of package holidays and mass tourism.

Tourist leaflets - Mss Eur F741/16/6

Penelope developed an enthusiasm for the traditional architecture she encountered in north India, particularly that of temples.  She visited many of these structures, later writing articles and giving lectures on them.  The collection contains copies of her articles, along with correspondence with other writers and academics around the world who shared her interest in this area.  In 1972 she wrote a book about her visit to the Kulu Valley in north India, and the collection has her handwritten drafts of the book, as well as correspondence with her publishers, and letters of congratulations from appreciative readers.  Shortly after the book was published, Penelope made a film titled ‘A Passion for India’ for the BBC, which was first screened on 30 January 1974.  The collection contains papers on the making of the film, including correspondence and a copy of the script.

Booklets on horses - Mss Eur F741/11/6

Penelope Chetwode had a passion for horses and riding, and the collection contains material relating to this.  In 1961 she undertook a riding tour across Andalusia and wrote about about her adventures.  The collection has notebooks and correspondence written while on the tour, and a rough draft of the book.  There are also copies of articles, newspaper cuttings, printed materials and photographs on the subjects of horses and horse riding, along with part of a never completed memoir about her life with horses titled ‘Memoirs of an Undistinguished Horsewoman’.

John O’Brien
India Office Records

Further Reading:
Papers of Penelope Valentine Hester Chetwode, Lady Betjeman (1910-1986), are searchable on Explore Archives and Manuscripts, collection reference Mss Eur F741.
Penelope Chetwode, Two Middle-aged Ladies in Andalusia (London: John Murray, 1963).
Penelope Chetwode, Kulu: the end of the habitable world (London: J. Murray, 1972).
Imogen Lycett Green, Grandmother's footsteps: a journey in search of Penelope Betjeman (London: Macmillan, 1994).

 

Shortly after midnight on Sunday 2nd September 1666, a fire broke out at a bakery in Pudding Lane. In the days that followed, the fire proceeded to destroy around 80 percent of the old City of London. 

THE GREAT FIRE OF LONDON IN THE YEAR 1666, W Birch, 1792, Maps K.Top.21.65.b, via BL Flickr Commons

Robert Hubert (c. 1640-1666), the son of a Rouen watchmaker, later confessed to starting the fire. He was indicted at the Middlesex sessions on 16 September 1666 and imprisoned at the White Lion prison in Southwark. Just over a month later, he would be executed for a crime that he did not commit.

Alongside his alleged accomplice, Stephen Peidloe, Hubert claimed to have created a crude fire grenade by placing gunpowder, brimstone and other flammable material onto the end of a pole and pushing it through the open window of the bakery on Pudding Lane. The only supporting evidence for Hubert's confession lay in his ability to go to the site of the bakery and to describe its appearance. His claim that he pushed a fireball through a window was entirely falsified, as even the owner of the bakery maintained that it had no windows. Later, the testimony of the captain of the ship on which Hubert sailed from Sweden would further prove his innocence, by confirming that Hubert had not arrived in England until two days after the fire started.

Evelyn's annotation on Hubert's letter, Add MS 78316, f 8v

Yet in the Evelyn papers held at the British Library, we see that contemporary writer, diarist and horticulturalist John Evelyn possibly still held Hubert responsible for the conflagration. Evelyn made copious annotations of his letters in later life, and on the reverse of a letter written to him by one Estienne Hubert, written in 1650, Evelyn noted

'I thinke this was the Father of the villain [that] was hanged for setting fire on London 1666'. 

Evelyn was not  alone in his belief that Hubert had deliberately and maliciously started the fire. As a foreigner, Hubert became an easy target for those seeking to explain away the many misfortunes that befell the city in the mid-17th century. Despite the fact that both he and his family were known to be Protestant, Hubert can be seen depicted on the frontispiece to Pyrotechnica Loyalana, Ignatian Fire-Works (1667), an anonymous work suggested that the Fire had been deliberately started by Catholic arsonists, acting on the instructions of the Pope.

Frontispiece to 'Pyrotechnica Loyalana, Ignatian Fire-Works' (1667), British Museum 1868,0808.13197, © The Trustees of the British Museum. [Licensed under Creative Commons 4.0]

In the etching above, Hubert exchanges a hand grenade with a Jesuit priest labelled 'Pa.H'. It has been suggested that this may refer to Harcourt, a notable Jesuit priest who would later be arrested and committed to Newgate Prison on the charge of complicity in the fictitious Titus Oates plot to kill the king. A gallows is depicted behind the pair, indicative of Hubert's fate.

Although Hubert's confession was fraught with contradictions and the authorities largely accepted that the fire was an accident, Hubert had confessed to the crime and was therefore hanged at Tyburn on 27 October 1666. Hubert's motives for confessing remain as mysterious today as they were to the authorities present at his trial, although there is some evidence to suggest that the young man was suffering from mental illness. Several witnesses remarked on Hubert's state of mind during his trial, and it was Lord Chancellor Clarendon's opinion that he was a 'poor distracted wretch, weary of his life, and chose to part with it this way'.

Rachel Clamp
PhD Placement Student, Modern Archives and Manuscripts

Further reading
Stephen Porter, ‘Farriner, Thomas (1615/16?-1670), baker’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 
Tinniswood, Adrian, By Permission of Heaven (London, 2011)

 

Politicians and journalists have a strange love/hate relationship.  A newspaper can bring down a politician (think The Guardian and MPs Jonathan Aitken and Neil Hamilton); equally a politician can spell trouble for a newspaper (see Tom Watson’s campaign against phone hacking).  However, they also depend on each other: politicians need to be in the public eye; newspapers need stories, ideally with sources close to the heart of government.  That relationship is important today but imagine how much more important it was in the 1930s and 1940s when, without the internet, no television to speak of, and really just one channel on the radio, the only truly mass media was newspapers, which sold in their millions every day across hundreds of local and national titles.  So the correspondence of a government minister and the owner of the country’s best selling newspaper could be expected to be rich with stories, gossip, and tips.  The letters of Brendan Bracken to Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook, spanning more than 30 years and acquired by the  British Library in April 2022, do not disappoint.

Brendan Bracken by Elliott & Fry, bromide print, 13 January 1950. NPG x86452 © National Portrait Gallery, London

The two met around 1923, possibly through their mutual friend, Winston Churchill, and soon struck up a firm friendship.  They had much in common.  Bracken had a background in financial journalism.  He became an MP in 1929, was appointed Churchill’s Parliamentary Private Secretary in 1940 (Bracken was to be one of Churchill’s closest allies throughout the latter’s long political career), and Minister of Information the following year.  Beaverbrook was an MP from 1910 to 1916 before being created a baron, and had himself served as Minister of Information in 1918.  He had been involved in British newspapers since 1911, and was the owner of the Daily Express, which by 1937 was the country’s best selling newspaper and post-war became the world’s largest selling newspaper.  When Churchill appointed Beaverbrook Minister of Aircraft Production in 1940, (the first of three War Cabinet posts he was to hold), Bracken and Beaverbrook found their interests and politics merging at the very centre of power, with all the access to information and gossip that would bring.

William Maxwell Aitken, 1st Baron Beaverbrook by Howard Coster, half-plate film negative, 1930 NPG x2803 © National Portrait Gallery, London

Bracken’s letters are full of behind the scenes rumour, news, and comment relating to politics and the press.  The letters touch on every major event and crisis of those turbulent times: the rise of Nazi Germany, appeasement, the Czechoslovak crisis, World War II, Churchill’s leadership, the reforming post-war Labour government, the economy, factions in both the Conservative and Labour parties, decolonisation and the end of empire, and the Suez crisis.  There is comment on all the major political figures of the period: Chamberlain, Churchill, Attlee, Dalton, Bevin, Bevan, Morrison, Butler, Macmillan, and Eden.  The letters also discuss major figures in diplomacy and international affairs, business and industry, the newspaper trade, Anglo-American relations, and post-war South Africa under its National Party government.

Bracken’s letters have a relaxed, informal, conversational style about them and should not just be seen as a source of political and press tittle tattle.  They can also be read as a record of a genuine friendship.   Real warmth comes through, and they contain the discussions of health, hospitality, birthday gifts, and visits to see each other that one would expect from letters between any two old friends.  These two old friends just so happened to be two of the most powerful people in the country!

Michael St John-McAlister
Western Manuscripts Cataloguing Manager

Further reading:
Add MS 89495 Letters from Brendan Bracken to Max Aitken, Baron Beaverbrook, 1925-1958
Richard Cockett, ed., My Dear Max: the Letters of Brendan Bracken to Lord Beaverbrook, 1925-1958 (London: The Historians’ Press, 1990)
Charles Edward Lysaght, Brendan Bracken (London: Allen Lane, 1979)
Charles Williams, Max Beaverbrook: Not Quite a Gentleman (London: Biteback, 2019)

 

This month sees the 75th anniversary of the partition of pre-1947 India and the creation of the modern states of India and Pakistan.  The British Library holds a wealth of resources relating to these events.

Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru & Mr M.A. Jinnah, walking together in the grounds of Viceregal Lodge Simla. 11 May 1946. British Library Photo 134/2(28) Images Online

India Office Records:
These are the official records of the India Office, the British Government department responsible for the administration of pre-1947 British India.  Created in London or received from India as part of the normal business of government, for example correspondence or copied reports, they complement the huge collections of official records in archives in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Front cover of Top Secret report on the Punjab Boundary Force  1947-1948 IOR/L/WS/1/1134

The most significant series for the study of independence and partition are:

• Fortnightly reports: Governors, Chief Commissioners and Chief Secretaries 1937-1948, and British High Commissioners and Deputy High Commissioners 1947-1950 (IOR/L/PJ/5/128-336).
• Public & Judicial Collection 117: law and order, 1933-1947 (IOR/L/PJ/8).
• Transfer of Power Papers 1942-1945 (IOR/L/PJ/10).
• Indian Political Intelligence files, 1913 to 1947 (IOR/L/PJ/12).
• Files on political and constitutional development, 1916-1947 (IOR/L/PO/6).
• Private correspondence: printed series and file copies, 1914-1947 (IOR/L/PO/10).
• Political papers and correspondence with Provincial Governors and their Secretaries, 1936-1948 (IOR/R/3/1/1-178).
• Records relating to Gandhi and the Civil Disobedience Movement, 1922-1946 (IOR/R/3/1/289-370).
• Files of the Bengal Governor’s Secretariat, 1936-1947 (IOR/R/3/2/1-86).

Map of pre-partitiion India from Mountbatten's last report showing which parts became Pakistan IOR/L/PJ/5/396/15

India Office Private Papers:
These collections of papers differ from the official records through being created or kept by individuals, families or organisations separate from government.  They provide alternative perspectives on official business and insights into individuals’ lives, and include significant collections relating to independence and partition. To take just a few examples:

• Secretaries of State for India, such as Sir Samuel Hoare (Mss Eur E240) and the Marquess of Zetland (Mss Eur D609).
• Viceroys, such as the 2nd Marquess of Linlithgow (Mss Eur F125), Lord Wavell (Mss Eur D977) and Earl Mountbatten of Burma (IOR Neg 15538-67).
• Provincial Governors, such as Sir Maurice Hallett (Mss Eur E251) and Sir Francis Mudie (Mss Eur F164).
• Permanent Under-Secretaries of State for India, 1920-1948 (Mss Eur D714).
• Military men, such as Major John McLoughlin Short, Civil Liaison Officer to the Sikh community 1940-42, and Personal Assistant to Sir Stafford Cripps during Cabinet Mission to India 1946 (Mss Eur F189).
• Indian political leaders and supporters of independence such as Gandhi (several small collections), Mahomed Ali Jinnah (IOR Neg 10760-826), and Sir Fazl-i-Husain (Mss Eur E352).
• The struggle for freedom during the last three decades of British rule in India was the backdrop to the lives of many British families in India.  Not surprisingly, it often features in memoirs, journals, diaries and letters home found in numerous small collections of private papers.  For example: a letter, dated 26 Sept 1947, from Freda Evelyn Oliver, wife of the Deputy Commissioner of Bahawalpur State, describing her family's journey from Simla to Bahawalpur during the disturbances following partition (Mss Eur A168).

Map showing the partition of Punjab IOR/L/WS/1/1134

The Library holds a mass of other source materials for the study of independence and partition, including photographs and newspapers.   There is a wonderful collection of Indian publications banned or ‘proscribed’ by the British Government as they were considered seditious or liable to incite unrest.  In addition, one of the most fascinating resources the British Library holds is the Oral History collections, allowing researchers the ability to hear the voices of the people who lived through those momentous times.

John O’Brien
India Office Records

Further Reading:
The Transfer of Power, 1942-7: Constitutional Relations between Britain and India, edited by Nicholas Mansergh, 12 vols. (London, 1970-1983).

Gandhi and Civil Disobedience: Documents in the India Office Records 1922-1946 by Amar Kaur Jasbir Singh (London, 1980).

Indian Independence Collection Guide

Publications proscribed by the Government of India: a catalogue of the collections in the India Office Library and Records and the Department of Oriental Manuscripts and Printed Books, British Library Reference Division, edited by Graham Shaw and Mary Lloyd (London: British Library, 1985).

Oral History collections relating to independence and partition: Oral histories of migration, ethnicity and post-colonialism - scroll down to the section on ‘British rule in India’.

Titles of English language Indian newspapers are listed on the Explore the British Library catalogue, and British newspaper reports can be found online by searching the British Newspaper Archive.

Collections in the UK on Indian Independence and Partition