Appendix 1 Record Offi ce Staff , 2009/10

County Archivist: Elizabeth Hughes BA, FSA

Archive Services

Senior Archivist, Document Services Christopher Whittick MA, FSA, FRHistS Senior Archivist, Public Services Philip Bye BA & Hove Archivist Andrew Bennett BA Archivist Anna Manthorpe BLib Outreach and Learning Offi cer Isilda Almeida-Harvey Conservator (p/t) Melissa Williams MA Senior Searchroom Supervisor Jennifer Nash Archives Assistants Izabella Bicsak-Snitter Andrew Lusted (p/t) and Sarah Jackson (p/t) (from August) Andrew Boulton General/Technical Assistant David Calvert Research Assistant (p/t) Andrew Lusted Saturday Assistants (p/t) Brian Phillips, Andrew Lusted, Monica Brealey, Sarah Woollard Project Offi cer (p/t) John Farrant MA, FSA

Records Management

Senior Archivist, Records Management Ellen Taylor BA Supervisor, Modern Records Julie Williams (to December) Suzanne Micthell (from March) Records Clerks Georges Reynolds Suzanne Mitchell (p/t to March) Senior Records Clerk, Brighton & Hove Sue Thomas (to July) Records Clerk, Brighton & Hove Gary Hook Appraisal Archivist Rebecca Cox (p/t from September) Records Management Offi cer David Myers

Other

Freedom of Information Offi cer Jane Bartlett BA Museum Development Offi cer Helen Derbyshire Programme Manager, The Keep Wendy Walker BA

30 Appendix 2 East Accessions

A list of the principal accessions received between April 2009 and the end of March 2010. The accession number of the documents is given in brackets; not all deposits are yet listed in detail and may not be available for consultation.

County Council: • Chairman’s offi ce, records, 1993-2008 (10248) • Chief Executive's Department: Legal and Community Services, electoral registers, 1996-1999 (10307); East Sussex Record Offi ce, Records Centre manuals, c2000 (10335); committee minutes, 1973-c2000 (10343) • Chief Executive’s Department: Trading Standards, record of convictions card index, 1974-1998 (10203) • Chief Executive's Department: Workforce Planning, records, 2006-2009 (10517) • Children's Services Equalities Team, Fear and Loving DVD, 2007 (10506); East Sussex Traveller Education Service, Coming and Going DVD, 2008 (10428) • County Treasurer, staff employment record sheets, 1945-1976 (10294) • Newhaven Economic Partnership, 1996-2003 (10317) • Peacehaven Youth Centre, records, 1977-1995, including minutes, 1985-1995 (10474) • Planning department, photographic negatives, 1970s-1980s (10382) • Safer Community Team, papers including Steering Group minutes, 2001-2008 (10296) • Transport and Environment: copy artist’s impression of the manor of Mote in Iden in c1500 (10415); photographs of bypass, 1975-1977, Strand Bridge, Winchelsea, 1932-c1970 and Monkbretton Bridge, Rye, 1937-1973 (10373)

Quarter Sessions: • Recorder's notebooks, and Rye, 1862-1882 (10301)

Sussex Police Authority: • Parade; the journal of the Sussex Constabulary Sports Association, 1968 (10300)

Health Authorities and Hospitals: • Hospital, wages books, 1946-1949 (10462)

River, Water and Sewerage Authorities: • Southern Water: Hastings Local Board of Health drainage plans, 1854-1857 (10424)

Other Public Authorities : • East Sussex Fire and Rescue Service, Brigade Management Team, agendas and papers, 1993-1999 (10498); amendments to manual, 2009 (10426) • High AONB, woodland survey and report, 2006-2007 (10234)

Borough and District Councils: • Borough Council: Communications, records, 2000-2001 (10334) • Hastings Board of Health, three reports relating to Hastings water supply, 1859 (10447) • Hastings Borough Council, terrier maps, c1950 (10290) • Lewes District Council, minutes, 1973-1986 (10211); Secretary’s and Treasurer’s Department records, 1921-1993 (10336)

31 Parish and Town Councils: • Beckley, records, 1895-1998, including minutes, 1951-1971 (10221) • , records, 1976-2005 (10379) • Kingston, records, 20th century (10246)

Ecclesiastical Parishes: • , scanned copies of drawings of the church, architectural features, and calligraphy, 1965-2009 (10219) • Berwick, plan of Berwick Common, [1752], tithe map and apportionments, 1838-1880 (10255) • Bishopstone, copy report on the fabric of the church, 2007 (10225) • , additional records, including registers, 1813-2006 (10419) • , parish records, [1852]-2005 (10388) • Crowborough, All Saints, curacy licence for Frederick John Pitts, 1908 (10287) • Ewhurst, additional records, including registers, 1867-2007 (10420) • Fletching, marriage register, 2005-2008 (10260) • Folkington, records, 1928-2009 (10385); 1977-2000 (10339) • Glynde, records including confi rmation register and vestry minutes, 1843-1994 (10422) • Lewes, St John sub Castro, marriage and baptism registers, 1956-1984 (10466) • Litlington, NADFAS report on church furnishings, 2009 (10359) • Mayfi eld, PCC minutes, 1953-1990 (10384) • Northiam, parish magazines and orders of service, 1982-2009 (10410) • Nutley, records, 1888-1982 (10417) • Ore, report on the fabric of the ruins of Old St Helen’s Church, 2008 (10224) • Ripe, Church Restoration Fund audio recording, 1980s (10344) • Southease, watercolours of wall paintings by EC Rouse, 1936 (10524) • St Leonards, Christ Church, records, 2007-2009 (10208) • Ticehurst, school records, 19th-20th century (10207) • , sermon notes of the Rev Arthur Miles, 1930s - 1950s (10463) • Tidebrook, marriage register, 1858-2000 (10431) • Wivelsfi eld, parish magazines, 1946-2008 (10383)

Other Churches: Baptist: • Seaford Baptist Church, marriage registers, 1936-2009 (10427) Catholic: • Seaford, St Thomas More, marriage register, 1990-2005 (10487) Methodist: • Central Sussex United Area of the Methodist and United Reformed Church, records, 1932-2009 (10304) • Eastbourne Central Methodist Church, Junior Church minutes, 1975-1979 (10239) • Eastbourne Methodist Circuit, records, 1971-2000 (10342); records, including Chapel baptisms register, 1875-[1980]; Flower Festival photographs, 2004 (10519) • Hastings, Bexhill and Rye Methodist Circuit, records, 1867-2003 (10406) • Mid-Sussex Circuit of the Methodist Church: Perrymount Road Church, Haywards Heath, circuit plans and records, 1953-1977 (10275); records, 1955-1993 (10486) United Reformed: • United Reformed Church, records, 20th century (10249)

32 Schools (see also Ecclesiastical Parishes): • Bexhill, Little Common School, records, 1985-2002 (10352) • Crowborough, Beacon School, photographs, 1930s (10279) • Eastbourne, Moira House, printed history, 2000 (10273) • Eastbourne, Ocklynge School, photographs, c1980-1990 (10353); diary, 1954-1959 (10476) • Eastbourne, West Rise Community Infant School, fi nancial ledgers, 1993-1997 (10282) • , Stoke Brunswick School, photographs, 1892-1940s (10375); photographs, 1980-1986 (10399); records, 20th cent (10444); school photographs, 1970-1976 (10446); scanned photographs and school magazine, 1960s (10512) • Framfi eld CE Primary School, governors' minutes, 2000-2007 (10233) • Lewes County Grammar School for Girls, school magazine, 1942, and newsletters, 1997-2009 (10387); library accessions register, 1924-1961 (10448) • Lewes, Wallands County Primary School, artwork, poems and DVD of project undertaken with ESRO, 2009 (10313) • Newhaven, Grays School, records including governors' minutes, 2003-2007 (10395) • Newhaven, Meeching Valley School, records including photographs, c1980-2005 (10272) • Plumpton Agricultural College, invitation to the school 21st anniversary and the unveiling of a war memorial, 1947 (10199); Memories of a Boy by Chris Chappell, 2009 (10526) • Seaford, Newlands School, school magazines, 1970-1986 (10513) • Uckfi eld Community College, records including photographs, 1980-2009 (10295)

Solicitors: • Barwells, solicitors, deeds of Claypits in Newhaven and Piddinghoe, 1796-1945 (10493) • TG Baynes, solicitors, Bexleyheath, Kent, deeds including Ersham Lodge and Wellcrofts, Hailsham, 1838-1901 (10244) • Castles, solicitors, Hurstpierpoint, deeds of 2 Mill Cottages, Uckfi eld, [Dec 1913] - Aug 1980 (10200) • Gumersalls, Epsom, Surrey, deeds of 71 Vicarage Road, Eastbourne and 15 Osmond Gardens, Hove, [1902] - 1971 (10511) • H and R Hughes, solicitors, Hailsham, client papers, 19th - 20th cent (10509)

Business: • HJ Chapman, estate agent and auctioneer, Lewes, records, 1832-1922, including auction book of Plumer Verrall, 1832-1839; rental of the manor of Isfi eld, 1864 (10489) • Parsons, stone and slate merchants, Eastgate Street, Lewes, letter, 1852 (10443) • SculptureCo Ltd, papers, 1998-2007 (10521) • Strutt and Parker, Lewes, map of land in to be exchanged between the Glynde Place and Glyndebourne estates, 1898 (10363) • Whitbread Group, banking accounts of Breeds and Co Ltd, Hastings, 1926-1970 (10490)

Manorial: • Buckholt, Glottenham, Hooe, Ore and Robertsbridge, records, 1616-1976, including Sussex and St Leonards Club, register of members, 1893-1976 (10302) • , photocopies of court rolls at the Centre for Kentish Studies, Maidstone, 1427-1613 (10350) • Mayfi eld, copies of rentals of the manor of Isted, [1285]-1330 (10311)

33 Estate and Family: • Adams, John Bodkin (1899-1983), general practitioner and suspected murderer, scanned photographs, 1920s-1930s (10405) • Alderson, Henry Ross, seaplane pilot, scanned copies of photgraph album of the base at Tidemills in Bishopstone and Newhaven, 1914-1919 (10389) • Barber family of Pellbrook Road, Lewes, papers, 20th century (10366) • Barchard of , two watercolours of The Rocks, Uckfi eld, c1840 (10250) • Bartholomew, Jim, research notes concerning Rodmell, 20th century (10281) • Bridger of Coombe Place in , release of legacies by Frances and Susan Bridger, 1761 (10333) • Brown, Councillor Ronald Ernest (1912-2003), diaries and transcripts, 1943-2003 (10213) • Caffyn, Harold Cecil, of Eastbourne, bank manager, family papers, 1924-1949 (10355); records including photographs of St Elisabeth's Church, Eastbourne, 1942-1960 (10398) • Capron family, aerial photograph of The Limes, Limes Lane, Buxted, c1965 (10218) • Carey, Frederick George, of JR Thornton and Co, auctioneers, records, 1868-1900, including day book of Thomas Carey of Crowlink Farm in Friston, 1868-1895 (10204) • Coghurst Estate in Ore, Guestling, Hollington and Westfi eld, sale particulars, 1925 (10243) • Comber family of Lewes, Ringmer and Calcutta, India, typescript family history by NJI César, 1982 (10231) • Courthope of Whiligh in Ticehurst, letters, 1813-1879 (10518); letter to GC Courthope from his wife Anna, 1842 (10271) • Crofts, James MF, Second World War memoirs, including posting at radar station, [1940]-2005 (10376) • Daniels of Glyndebourne in Ringmer, photographs showing Glyndebourne, Ringmer church and other locations, 1883-c1900, and an abstract of title and trust deed of the chapel, [1693]-1866 (10238) • Davies of Danehurst in Fletching, notebook on Sussex dialect, by Colonel Francis Davies, and letters to Mrs Francis Davies, c1840-1846 (10360) • Dolloway of East Hoathly, copy miniature of William Dolloway (1752-1823), excise offi cer, c1795 (10378) • Drewe of Oakover in Ticehurst and Castle Drogo, , papers, photographs, deeds and research notes, [1404]-1995 (10210) • Du-Val, Raye, musician, records (addnl), 1950s-1970s (10425) • Fane, Julian, writer, fi rst editions, 1956-2010 (10354) • Fleet family of Shortbridge Farm, Fletching, records, (10394) • French, Jeremiah, of East Hoathly, yeoman, probate, 1764 (10499) • Gage of , plan of the stables, 1801 (10322); photocopy illustrated history of Firle Place and the Gage family by Yvonne R Gage, 1928 (10253) • Gay and Corbett families of Horsmans Farm, Sedlescombe, fruit farmers, farming records, 1930-2009 (10245) • Geering of Tidemills in Bishopstone, scanned copy photographs, 1913-1920s (10390) • Glynde estate, letter to Mr Noakes, Bainden, Mayfi eld, from John Colgate, Beddingham [land agent for the Glynde estate], 1834 (10500) • Gould, Eric, sexton of East Hoathly church, copy photographs of East Hoathly, c1872-1920s (10496) • Grantham of Barcombe, including service of William Ivor Grantham in the 6th (Cyclist) Battalion of the Royal Sussex Regiment (Territorial Army), 1915-1985 (10269) • Green, William, of Hastings and Brighton, letters to his brother David Green, Westminster, 1821 (10502)

34 • Harcourt of Wigsell in Salehurst, letters from Elizabeth Harcourt to her daughter Mrs Ringer in , 1708-1709 (10464) • Hole family, photographs including Birling Gap Farm, East Dean, c1900-1995 (10501) • Kaye-Smith, Sheila, writer, letters, 1922-1923 (10288) • Kemp, Nathaniel, of Place, marriage settlement, 1875 (10507) • Lennard and Naylor of , papers relating to the sale of the estate of Thomas Lennard, Earl of Sussex, 1706-1717 (10263) • Levin, Caroline Louisa (c1824-1906), 3 Magdalen Road, St Leonards, papers, 1902-1906 (10430) • Lord family of Northiam and South Africa, papers (addnl), [1767]-1919 (10286) • Maplesden (née Pearce), May Elizabeth, schoolteacher, of St Leonards, records, 1846-1958 (10309) • Marshall, Thomas, of Rye, apprenticeship indenture, 1876 (10523) • Maryon-Wilson of Searles in Fletching: map of Wilson's Awcocks, Cox and The Mill Farms in Fletching by Henry Watson, 1764 (10341) • Packham of Splayne's Green, Fletching, records (addnl), c1885-1936 (10467) • Paine, Thomas, Thomas Paine Collection at Thetford; an analytical catalogue published by Norfolk County Library, 1979 (10345); copy certifi cate of Paine's marriage to Mary Lambert at Sandwich, 27 Sep 1759 (10358); separation agreement between Paine and his wife Elizabeth, née Olive, 1774 (10423); copy letter to John Hustler, 1789 (10450) • Parkin, Thomas, of Hastings, ornithologist, letters and papers, 1891-1924 (10323) • Potter, Peter, apprenticeship indenture to Thomas Wilmshurst, Lewes, blacksmith, 1812 (10240) • Rose-Innes, Jasmine (1915-1998), writer, artist and photographer, correspondence and papers, 1918-1998 (10362) • Sclater family of Sutton Hall and Newick Park, lists of miniatures and photographs, c1860-1960 (10364); scanned copies of family miniatures, c1800-1850 (10433) • Sheffi eld Park estate, pocket volumes of estate plans, 1820-1884 (10261); accounts, 1789, and letter to Lord Sheffi eld from Coutts and Co, 1881 (10421); estate valuation, 1769 (10442); land agents' papers, 1790-1980s (10522) • Stewart-Jones family, photographs of Southover Grange, 1912-1918 (10321) • Tanner, William, watchmaker, Gibraltar, family letters from Seaford and Horsebridge, 1814-1819 (10432) • Vincett, Walter, of Hastings, deed of partition of properties including Stonefi eld Road and Brook Street, Hastings, 1919 (10497) • Wells, John Campbell (1936-1998), writer and actor, scripts, 1977-1978 (addnl) (10310) • Wickham family of Nutley, photographs including Nutley Brass Band, c1900-1950 (10265) • Wilson of Eastbourne, correspondence of Anthony Trumble concerning the fortune of his stepdaughter Elizabeth Wilson, 1725-1277 (10470)

Charities: • Ditchling, Lucy Brangwyn Homes, copy Charity Commission scheme, 2009 (10214) • , Shernfold Apprenticing Fund (10326)

Clubs, societies and associations: • British Legion, Herstmonceux and Wartling Branch, photographs, 1962-1966 (addnl) (10348) • Cricket Club, records, 1957-2009 (10330) • Charleston Trust, newsletters, 1982-1993 (10451) • Civil Service Retirement Fellowship, and Willingdon Group, records, (10515); Eastbourne and District Branch, newsletters, 1973-2009 (10485)

35 • , terriers and minutes of meetings of owners and occupiers, 1760-1864 (10516) • East Sussex Federation of Women's Institutes: Manor Barn WI, Rotherfi eld WI, and Maresfi eld WI, records, 1919-2008 (10351); Sidley WI, and Manor Barn WI, records, 1964-2009 (10235); Kingston WI, records, 1962-2003 (10367) • East Sussex Fruit Growers, press report of annual meeting, 1924 (10460) • Eastbourne, Old Town Ladies' Bowling Club, fi xture list and list of offi cers, 1950 (10356) • Glynde and Beddingham Cricket Club, papers concerning victory in the National Village KO Cup at Lords, 2009 (10377) • Headstrong Club, Lewes, recordings of speakers, 2005-2009 (10340) • HMS Sussex (Sussex Division of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, including the Royal Naval Artillery Volunteers), photographs and newscuttings, 1877-1989 (10284); photograph and fi lms, [1904] - c1970 (10215) • Home Guard, 20th Sussex Battalion, commemorative booklet, 1944 (10397) • Kingston Players, records (addnl), 1976 (10241) • Lewes Archaeological Group, research notes of CE 'Jock' Knight-Farr concerning Ringmer, 1970s - c2003 (10481) • Lewes and District Talking Newspaper Association, records, 1982-1993 (10396) • Lewes Bonfi re programmes, 2009 (10404) • Lewes Cyclists' Club, lantern slide of a programme for a smoker and lantern show, c1900 (10266) • Lewes Druids Club, papers, 1920-1979 (10298) • Lewes Little Theatre, programmes and newsletters, 20th cent (10270); papers of Kenneth Rawlings, including newscuttings and letters, 1929-1960s (10285); records, c2000 (10401) • Lewes Road Safety Committee, records, 1953-1992 (10228) • Lewes U3A, records (addnl), 1985-2009 (10435) • Maresfi eld Lawn Tennis Club, committee minutes, 1948-1968 (10331) • Masonic: Wellington Lodge, Rye, minutes, 1982-1990 (10371); Mount Caburn Lodge, records, including lodge history, 1949-2003 (10407); Andredesweald Lodge, Battle, 1922-2004 (10438) • Northiam Over 60s Club, records including minutes, 1949-2005 (10409) • Bay Allotments Society, records, 1954-2006 (10491) • Southover Residents' Association, papers, 1988-1993 (10393) • Sussex Cattle Market Auctioneers Association, records including minutes, 1920-2009 (10205) • Thomas Paine Society, articles by George Hindmarsh, 1978-1998 (10140) • Wealden Buildings Study Group, site visit notes and summaries, 2009 (10429) • Woodland Trust, report concerning Brede by Nicola Bannister, 2009 (10391)

Maps and plans: • Barcombe, map of Banks and other farms, by William Figg, 1820 (10445) • Brede, Beckley, Ewhurst and Udimore, and Ivychurch, Kent, plan of William Coleman's estates by John Adams of Tenterden, 1823 (9286) • Eastbourne, contract drawing for alterations to Eastbourne Pier, 1899 (10566) • Hastings, plan by Thomas Brown Daniel of a perambulation of the boundary of the borough, 1820 (10565) • Maresfi eld, Buxted and Wivelsfi eld, maps of the estate of William Pettit by John Bowra, 1740 (10276) • Mayfi eld and Waldron, plan of Bell Reeds showing land enclosed from Beacon Down Common, c1820 (10251) • Rye, map of the town and surrounding country drawn to accompany a petition relating to the fl ooding of St Mary Marsh, 1571 (10314) • Seaford, Howard de Walden estate, photocopy plan and sale particulars, 1874 (10258) 36 Title deeds (see also Solicitors, and Estate and family): • Alfriston, Manor House, [1845]-1980 (10297) • Bexhill, Eastbourne, and St Leonards, [1835]-1945 (10318) • Crowborough, Heasmans Lodge Farm and Greenwood Gate Farm, 1879-1898 (10504) • Eastbourne, Lynmead, 49 Carlisle Road, 1887-1925 (10308) • Frant, Heathfi eld, St Leonards, Uckfi eld and , [1779]-1919 (10230) • Hailsham, land on W of the turnpike road to Eastbourne, 1898 (10289); land for the augmentation of the vicarage of Lullington, [Dec 1810] - Aug 1813 (10414) • Hastings, site for a urinal adjoining the Wheatsheaf Inn, Bohemia Road, 1891 (10332); deeds and papers, c1754-1972, including a draft petition from James Lamb of Rye, merchant, concerning privateer the Salamander, c1754 (10459) • Lewes, 47 The Avenue, [1894]-1967 (10256); 14 High Street, 1610-1829 (10268), 1829 (addnl) (10346); messuage in Cliffe High Street, [1809] - 1853 (10507) • Playden and East Guldeford, advowson, Sep 1714 - Sep 1922 (10324) • Ringmer Green, 1933 (10412) • Seaford, 20-21 Clinton Place, 1897-1990 (10306) • South Malling, covenant for production of title deeds, 1824 (10357)

Other records: • Barcombe, monumental inscriptions, 2003-2008 (10201); postcards including the forge and the mills, 1930s (10229) • Bexhill, sale particulars for the Woodsgate Park Estate, 1908-1911 (10365) • Brochures and postcards, including Rye, Brighton, The Hastings Embroidery, and Michelham Priory, 1967 - c1990 (10525) • Cliffe Bonfi re tableaux, DVD, 2007 (10327) • Eastbourne Flying Club Ltd, programmes of air displays, 1938-1939 (10274) • Eastbourne Royal Marine Sanitary Steam Laundry Company Ltd, paid cheques, 1892-1906 (10457) • Eastbourne, publicity brochures for the Downs Valley Estate, near Eastbourne, and the East Dean Downlands Estate, 1930s (10212); publicity leafl et for housing development, St Anthony's Hill, Eastbourne, 1930s (10434) • Fletching and Newick, midwifery register, 1943-1949; publications, 1977-2009 (10403) • Hartshorne, Nathaniel, recorder and town clerk of Rye, copy deposition concerning smuggled goods, 1692 (10226) • Hastings, programmes for performances by The Court Players, presented by Harry Hanson, at Hastings Pier Theatre, and White Rock Pavilion, 1940s (10242); programme for White Rock Pavilion, 1945 (10325); leafl ets and brochures concerning housing and holiday accommodation, 1955-c1960 (10338); scanned photograph of 135-137 All Saints Street, Hastings, c1892 (10452) • Heathfi eld, papers concerning natural gas, 1908 (10473) • Herstmonceux, sale particulars of the Herstmonceux Castle Estate in Herstmonceux and Wartling, 1910 (10349); album of photographs recording a walk from Windmill Hill, 1986 (10408) • Holroyd, General, letter regarding his deeds, 1888 (10441) • Lewes, scanned copy postcard showing the construction of Southway (10217); watercolour of Lewes Bridge from the NE, c1790 (10262); postcard of view from Lewes Castle, including the Maltings and Castle Lodge, c1930 (10305); Lewes (Fitzroy Memorial) Public Library, memories of Sylvia Still (née Murchie) and Basil Hunnisett, 2005 (10402) • Maresfi eld, notes concerning Horney Common, 1979-2001 (10413) • Newhaven and Bishopstone, copy plan of Seaplane Station, 1917 (10209)

37 • Northiam, panoramic photographs taken from Dixter Lane, c1930 (10222); papers of Marie Edwards relating to local community groups, 20th century (10411) • Postcards: to Miss H Simes, Forge Farm, , 1907 (10232); Beachy Head, lighthouse and the old Lloyds Watch Tower (scanned copies), 1930s (10278); Royal Sussex Regiment cavalryman, including Newhaven Fort, 1914-1918 (10312) • Rye Division of the Conservative Party, rosette, c1900 (10220) • Salehurst, research notes by Leonard J Hodson, 1829-1984 (10418) • Saltdean Estates Ltd and Peacehaven Estates Ltd, two publicity postcards, c1918 (10277) • Wartime crash at Wootton Manor, by Peter Tyrell, 2009 (10449) • Welland, Matthew, Crumbs for God's Sparrows, [1902] (10505) • Winchelsea, photograph of Old Mill, c1930; (10504) • , watercolour entitled Mr Adams house at , Kent by P Pullen (10280); Sussex Express photographs including visit by Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, 1977 (10454)

William Dallaway of East Hoathly (10378)

38 Appendix 3 Accessions

A list of the principal Brighton and Hove accessions received between April 2009 and the end of March 2010. The accession number of the documents is given in brackets; not all deposits are yet listed in detail and may not be available for consultation.

Brighton and Hove City Council: • Brighton and Preston jury lists, 1902-1959 (10437) • Brighton Borough Council, Civil Defence plans, 1939-2001 (10436) • Brighton, Hove and Portslade valuation books, 1934-1973 (10469) • Copy letter to Brighton Commissioners, 1828 (10458) • Menu card of the inaugural banquet of Bruce Morison, Mayor of Hove, 1905 (10293) • Parks Department, photographs and papers relating to Brighton in Bloom, c1995-c2005 (10471) • Registers of planning permission, 1937-1953 (10369)

Other Public Authorities: • Offi ce of Government Commerce (OGC), plans, agreements and bill of quantities for the building of Brighton Law Courts, Edward Street, 1965-1968 (10392)

Ecclesiastical Parishes: • Brighton, St Mark, Kemptown, writ of sequestration, 1965 (10206) • Brighton, St Peter, records and photographs, including First World War rolls of honour, 19th-20th century (10374); marriage register; 1980-2008 (10440) • Coldean, St Mary Magdalene, service registers, 1962-1993 (10453); marriage registers and parish magazines, 1957-1992 (10455) • , marriage register, 1983-2008 (10257)

Schools (see also Ecclesiastical Parishes): • Hove County Grammar School for Boys, school magazines, 1955-1956 (10329)

Solicitors: • Messrs Attree and Sons, Brighton, letters, 1824 (10267); 1806-1848 (10465); letter, 1840, and prescription envelope addressed to F Adams, Brighton, c1880 (10475)

Business: • Brighton Aquarium, in-letters, c1875-c1885 (10259) • Browett, Ashberry & Co, handbill sent to B Farringdon, 5 North Street Quadrant, Brighton, 1887 (10480) • London and Brighton Dairy Company Ltd, minutes, 1887-1892 (10319) • Theatre Royal and the Dolphin Theatre, Brighton, programmes, 1947-1949 (10370); Theatre Royal Brighton playbills, 1860s (10520); Theatre Royal, playbills; 1843-c1969 (10478) • QueenSpark Books, Brighton, rejected manuscripts, 1980s-1990s (10361); records, 1911-2010 (10468)

Estate and Family: • Boivin family of Brighton, illustrated history, c1796-2009 (10488) • Burghope family, Brighton, scanned photographs and pedigrees, c1895-1986 (10456) • Corbin, Flight Offi cer Harold Arthur, CGM, of Hove, papers, 1939-1946 (10252)

39 • Field, William Alfred, and family, Brighton, papers, 1850s-c1970 (10202) • Gasston/Scurfi eld, Anne, Brighton and Hove High School exercise books, c1908-c1938 (10400) • Gregory, Barnard, letter to [William] Etty, London, 1825 (10264) • Jowitt, Pamela, of Moulsecoomb and Patcham, papers, c1930-1950 (10216) • Sutton, Doreen, Women’s Land Army papers, 1940-1946 (10472) • Turpin, Eric, of Brighton, papers, 1901-c1960 (10223) • White, PWC, papers relating to the National Fire Service and Brighton Fire Brigade, 1938-c2009 (10494)

Clubs, societies and associations: • Brighton French Circle, records, 1931-2009 (10368) • Brighton and Hove Albion FC, match programmes, 1963-2009 (10320) • Brighton and Hove Archaeological Society Field Unit, 2006-2007 (10386) • Diocesan Training College, Brighton, magazine, 1930-1987 (10316) • James Gray photographic collection, 19th-20th century (10477) • Learning Network, Brighton, dyslexia therapists’ association, 1990-2005 (10247) • Letter in the Attic project, papers collected, c1870-c2005 (10701-10782) • Masonic: Brighton Mark Lodge, records including minutes, 1891-c2000 (10237); Burrell Lodge, minutes and membership records, 1920-2007 (10291); Duke of Richmond Lodge, Brighton, minutes and membership records, 1905-2009 (10328); Royal Lodge, Brighton, minutes and signature book, 1963-1993 (10482); Chapter, Brighton, minutes and signature books, 1874-2003 (10483) • Park Crescent Grounds Committee, Brighton, minutes and accounts, 1873-1985 (10292) • Regency Square Area Society, records, 2009 (10416) • Society, Brighton and Hove Albion football stadium inquiry papers, 2001-2007 (10283) • Streamline Associations of Hove and Brighton, scrapbook and photographs relating to the growth of the taxi drivers’ association, 1936-1945 (10227) • Women’s Royal Voluntary Society (WRVS), The Coldean Companion, DVD regarding the history of Coldean, 2009 (10514)

Title deeds (see also Solicitors, and Estate and Family): • Brighton: 38-39 King Street, 1874 (10495); 103 Queens Park Road, [1834]-1951 (10479); 55 , 1787-1881 (10315); 6 Terrace, [1761]-1998 (10299) • Hove: land on the north side of Kings Road, 1890 (10381); 139 Westbourne Street, 1882-1948 (10347); 4 Third Avenue, [1852]-1919 (10337); 59 Nevill Avenue, [1555]-1949 (10484)

Other records: • Johnston’s Midget Coaches, Brighton, photographs, c1950-c1990 (10510) • Letters and documents relating to Brighton and Polegate, 1782-1874 (10503) • Preston, photographic copy of a painting, c1830 (10303) • SS Brighton and Brighton Tigers, photographs and papers, c1934-c1995 (10439)

40 Now we are Sixty

The East Sussex Record Offi ce celebrated its Diamond Jubilee in January 2010. Christopher Whittick, an archivist at ESRO for 33 of those 60 years, gives a personal account of the development of the offi ce.

In the beginning Although at times I feel like an archive myself, my memory does not, of course, stretch back to 1950, two years before I was born. This essay attempts an overview of the progress of the offi ce during the 60 years of its existence, dwelling on a few themes, and recording for posterity some of the anecdotes which have entered the folklore of the institution. I have relied for the fi rst 25 years on The First East Sussex Record Offi ce, written by my immediate predecessor Janet Wallace and published in 1974, the year in which the old County Council came to an end; and for the period 1961-1992 on the assistance of Judy Brent, whose own 31-year service included two stints as Acting County Archivist. Both Judy and Roger Davey contributed their own recollections to the Annual Reports for 1986 and 1999-2000.

Why does East Sussex Record Offi ce differ so much from the equivalent at ? That is the fi rst question most newcomers ask; indeed having been interviewed at both offi ces in the course of 1977, it was one which occurred to me. There is no doubt about it, ESRO has always been the runner up; but why? The answer, of course, has its roots in history.

The county’s rolls and records, dating back to 1594, used to be stored in the basement of the Law Courts in a strongroom built for the purpose in 1812. In the spring of 1939, a County Records Committee, established in East Sussex to take responsibility for the archives in the council’s care, decided to move everything to the cellar of Pelham House in Lewes. But with the outbreak of war four months later, councillors had more pressing worries, and the need for a bomb-proof control room. Almost as soon as they had arrived, the archives were evacuated to the County Surveyor’s building (now Lewes District’s planning offi ce), which had just been built at the bottom of the Pelham House garden. Although re-appointed annually, the committee did not meet again until May 1947. Meanwhile, West Sussex County Council had appointed Bernard Campbell Cooke as its fi rst archivist in May 1946.

In 1949, the Committee sought the advice of Sir Hilary Jenkinson, head of the Public Record Offi ce and doyen of English archivists. His report recommended that, rather than appoint (as had been their intention) a county archivist for East Sussex, money should be saved by allowing the West Sussex archivist to act for both counties, appointing a deputy at Lewes. On 1 January 1950 Cooke began his new duties at a salary of £850-1000 a year, and seven months later Brian Redwood was appointed as assistant archivist at Lewes on £150-425; at this point, there were just 378 feet of shelving. It was not until 1959, when Cooke’s successor Francis Steer relinquished his dual role, that East Sussex appointed its own county archivist; but by then the die was cast. While the West Sussex archivist served as a chief offi cer, had the ear (as his personal archivist) of the Duke of Norfolk, and was a respected fi gure in the profession, his opposite number at Lewes languished in a third-tier post, grappling with a less well-resourced offi ce which for the foreseeable future would experience a perpetual storage crisis. East Sussex lacked the great landed estates of the west, the base of the diocesan bishop; and the authority of the eastern archivist did not extend to the county boroughs, which although they arguably dominated East Sussex, were entirely absent in the west. The careers of the county archivists are emblematic: while Chichester has enjoyed the services of just four heads of repository in 64 years, nine men and women have held the parallel position at Lewes in 60. For the fi rst half of its existence, ESRO was an offi ce from which to move on, WSRO a place to spread one’s wings in a well-resourced archival environment. On his retirement in 1981, the County Archivist Alan Dibben wrote ‘my stay here has not been a long one, though longer than that of any of my predecessors’. Remarkable too has

41 been the long list of male county archivists – seven out of the nine holders of the post have been men – in contrast to the experience of many other counties, whose early years were dominated by the personalities of archival femmes formidables.

On our own The fi rst pivotal moment in the offi ce’s history occurred in December 1959, when Richard Dell became the fi rst uniquely East Sussex county archivist; for slightly less than four years we enjoyed the benefi ts of his energetic and young intellect. Apart from establishing the offi ce in its own right, Richard’s greatest achievement was the publication of catalogues of the records of Rye Corporation and the Glynde Place archives (based on the work of Philippa Revill), which set a new and high standard for its successors in both counties. He also found time to produce an edition of the Rye shipping records from the reign of Elizabeth for the Sussex Record Society. Of equally lasting signifi cance, it was Dell who devised the terrier system of plotting pre-tithe maps onto a modern OS sheet. Although this brilliantly simple scheme has over the years saved tens of thousands of unnecessary productions of estate maps, to my knowledge West Sussex was the only other offi ce to adopt it; a rare example of ex oriente salus. The acquisition of two new strongrooms in the basement of the Law Courts marked the fi rst of many such pragmatic solutions to the natural tendency of archives to expand, and the Pelham House Lift, a creature with a personality of its own, enabled the establishment of a searchroom in the attic. Richard might have remained in his post longer, to the offi ce’s great advantage, had the County Council been more sympathetic to his fi nancial situation. With a large family, he made ends meet by working evening shifts at the Brighton telephone exchange. When this came to the ears of the Clerk of the County Council, Dell was summoned for a dressing-down, advised to surrender his nocturnal employment and consoled with the notion that to bring children up in the pure air of East Sussex would bring rewards of a different kind. In August 1964 he left for Glasgow to become City Archivist, then the fourth-highest paid job in archives.

The search room in Pelham House in about 1980

42 Richard Dell’s replacement was Mary Finch, who came to Lewes from Lincoln, a city rich in medieval buildings and documents. The situation at East Sussex came as something of a shock, and after less than a year Dr Finch, a considerable scholar, was forced to return to Lincoln when her mother, who had been advised to move south for her health, proved too frail to make the journey. She was succeeded by Cedric Holland, in whose fi ve-year reign the concept of non-qualifi ed archives assistants was fi rst mooted, an annual budget of £250 provided for the purchase of documents, a programme of indexing begun and the fi rst in-house document repairer established in the former County Education Offi ce in Fisher Street. Looking back over the offi ce’s development in 1968, Holland wrote: We are still largely at the stage of gathering up the fragments left by the natural destructive forces of time, and, to put the matter in its historical perspective, our attempts are to deal systematically in a few decades with the archival product of as many centuries.

LF Salzman, accompanied by Cedric Holland and Ken Dickens, plants a tree in honour of his 91st birthday, 24 March 1969

It was in 1967 that closer relations were developed with the Sussex Archaeological Society which, with a century’s start on the publicly-funded service, had accumulated a huge collection of documents, including the magnifi cent archive of the Gage family of Firle. This liaison paid immediate dividends in a strange way. As part of our new relationship, ESRO purchased several hundred boxes of archival quality into which the Society’s holdings could be transferred. These arrived one afternoon when the staff on duty at Pelham House consisted of just three individuals. Leaving the secretary Joan Elliott in charge, Judy Brent and Heather Warne went over to the castle gates where the driver had dumped the mountain of boxes, and proceeded to carry them up to the Barbican. The process took several hours, and left them physically and mentally exhausted. The following day, Heather was sent home to recuperate, and Colin Brent, then a searcher, intervened in very direct terms. The result was the almost immediate appointment of a strongroom assistant and porter, Mr Hemsley. One of his duties was to accompany the County Archivist to collect documents from depositors. In an era when suits were the norm in local government, Cedric Holland’s invariable work-wear consisted of a donkey-jacket, muffl er and heavy boots, and his transport a disreputable van. Hemsley was ashamed to be seen with so unconventional a fi gure, and found their outings an ordeal. Cedric’s unusual lifestyle and badly- managed diabetes resulted in extended periods of sick-leave, and he eventually resigned in January 1970. The stage was set for an archival revolution.

43 The Newtonian revolution The arrival of Carl Newton in 1970 brought an entirely new approach to East Sussex Record Offi ce. In his four years as head of the service, Carl transformed the offi ce, its methods and its ways with revolutionary fervour. The old accession registers were terminated and replaced with forms, searchroom regulations introduced, the repairers were re-designated conservators, and their workplace metamorphosed overnight from a Repair Shop to a Conservation Laboratory. In similar vein, Newton changed his own job-title from County Archivist to County Records Offi cer: out with antiquarianism, welcome archivist as information technocrat. In a truly Jacobin move, to prepare for computerisation even the references of the documents were changed, with descriptive names replaced with three-letter codes, albeit mnemonic ones; this, to some of his colleagues, must have been akin to the replacement of October by Brumaire. Under Cedric Holland more summary handlists had already superseded detailed published catalogues, but Carl concluded that the practice of listing in detail had led to an unacceptable backlog, and that the question of modern departmental records, although a constant worry, had not been systematically confronted.

His solution to these problems – ARC and PARC – were intended to provide an integrated programme of intellectual records control; they became famous throughout the world of archives, and put the name of East Sussex Record Offi ce at the cutting edge of professional development. I learnt about ARC – Archival Records Control – and PARC – Pre-archival Records Control – on the Archives Course in 1974-75, and marvelled over the purpose-printed stationary on which the data was entered for input into the County Council mainframe. A Record Centre was established, fi rst in Fisher Street and then at The Maltings, and new staff recruited.

But things were not quite as they seemed. Both systems relied on fairly primitive off-the-shelf library cataloguing software. PARC – for modern departmental records, deeds and agreements – worked well, and today’s computerised records management can fairly be seen as its lineal successor. ARC was much more problematic. Only a very limited number of characters was available to describe even the most complicated document, and the writing of almost every entry required an invidious Judgement of Solomon, with the user as the victim. Although Newton characterised their reaction as Luddite, the archivists felt undermined by the new regime and found the restrictions imposed by ARC a negation of their skills. There was much unhappiness and Jacqueline Berry, the assistant archivist responsible for ARC, left the offi ce after only two years in post. In a rearguard action Cedric Holland, by then at the Guildhall Library, completed his list of a group of medieval deeds in a manner so abstruse as to thwart ARC’s limitations. Thereafter the system was abandoned, although it enjoyed an after-life at the archive schools, until one Lewes-based pre-course trainee telegraphed its three-word death-knell to his tutor – ARC is dead. Although it polarised the offi ce, the Newtonian revolution did not displease everyone; in Fisher Street, Record Centre staff allied with conservators in welcoming the shock of the new regime.

But the changes experienced by the offi ce in the 1970s were not solely brought about by the head of service. As user-numbers grew exponentially – by 58% between 1973 and 1978 – the cosy atmosphere of the offi ce, particularly in the basement where searchers were often served with tea, had to move with the times. As Newton reported to his committee, ‘the personal relationship which existed between the searcher and the archivist in the early days of all record offi ces must inevitably give way to a more formalised system.’ That had little infl uence on Sid Hewson, the strongroom assistant whose underground empire provided a searchroom for house-historians. Rather in the manner of an old-world draper’s assistant, he would draw rolled maps from the shelves with the words ‘this might suit you, madam’ or ‘we fi nd this one very popular’.

44 As a reaction to these changes, plans were fi rst made for the move of the offi ce from Pelham House to a new home, and in 1973 the idea was mooted to convert The Maltings to serve as a record offi ce; the estimate came in at £137,000. Even then, it was realised that the site would not have the storage- capacity which would eventually be required; the solution was to be a branch offi ce at Hastings, soon to lose its independent status as a county borough.

Carl Newton’s departure for British Steel in 1974 came to some as a relief, and elements of his reforms were soon abandoned. But we were the fi rst county record offi ce to mechanise any aspect of its operation and Newton’s systems, described by his successor, often with a characteristic thump of the table, as ‘totally idiosyncratic’, were a generation ahead of their time; the fundamentals of today’s offi ce are largely built on the foundations which he laid. We must also remember that these events took place during the lead-up to the re-organisation of local government in 1974. Our ability to cope – more than cope – with this upheaval, which brought about the abolition of three independent county boroughs and the transfer of 13 parishes and their records to West Sussex on 1 April 1974, was largely due to Newton’s surveys of over 20,000 records of the soon-to-be-superseded local authorities.

The Newton experience also had unintended consequences, which I think were ultimately benefi cial. Whereas the records management section continued to exploit the potential of electronic aids in controlling its increasingly vast hoard of fi les, the antipathy to the use of computers to list archives meant that for well over a decade – word-processing was introduced only in 1991 – ESRO turned at least its archival back on automation. In so doing, we avoided many of the false starts and blind alleys which enticed some of our colleagues who had not experienced the aversion-therapy of ARC, and were able to enter the automated world only once it had settled down. What is more, our sister offi ce at Chichester was exposed to none of these innovations. Until 1970, although better funded, more fully staffed and with more space, the two Sussex record offi ces had more similarities than differences. The Newtonian Revolution was to change that too, and change it for good.

Something completely diff erent The arrival of Alan Dibben from Coventry brought a complete contrast in the offi ce of County Archivist. Quick-minded, by nature a scholar and the antithesis of a whiz-kid, although Alan was bemused by computers and personally uninterested in records management, he saw in an instant that here at least was an area of archives in which the East Sussex Record Offi ce could shine. To that end, it was early in his tenure that both Conservation and Records Management moved into The Maltings, and the appointment of Margaret Whittick to lead the RM section in 1977 marked the beginning of a massive expansion of that service; I joined the archives side of the offi ce at the same time. For the fi rst time, the searchroom was entirely supervised by non-professional staff, allowing the assistant archivists to devote more time to fi eldwork and specifi cally the collection of records at risk. The passing in 1978 of the Parochial Registers and Records Measure brought about a huge infl ux both of parish documents and people wanting to use them, and I took advantage of my background in law to conduct a charm- offensive among the county’s legal community. But whereas the parish registers and records were listed and made available more-or-less as they arrived, many records from solicitors’ basements and attics, some of them medieval, remain listed only by box.

Alan Dibben was a complex and sensitive character, assertive and deferential by turns. Relations with the Sussex Archaeological Society were soured when it failed to extend a formal welcome to the new County Archivist, and the County Council itself incurred opprobrium when persons unknown failed to ensure that Carl Newton’s blotter was not replaced as a mark of respect to the new head of service. Sitting in the next offi ce gave the archivists ample opportunity to listen to the ruminations caused by the blotter incident. In Pelham House days letters were dictated and sent on cassette to the typing

45 pool. While pausing, Alan tended to accompany his thoughts with a Victorian parlour song; I recall that I’ll take you home again Kathleen and Some enchanted evening were the great favourites. The musical accompaniment to Alan’s letters was immensely popular – he was known affectionately to the typists as The Great Dictator.

Alan had worked at the West Sussex Offi ce under Francis Steer and was very attached to Paddy Gill, who had succeeded Steer as County Archivist in 1968. That link, the personal friendships of the Whitticks, Hudsons and McCanns, and the shared problem of the orderly distribution of the holdings of the Sussex Archaeological Society, brought the two offi ces into closer and friendlier contact in the 1980s than they perhaps had been at any time since 1959.

Turning-points Four events during the Dibben era can, in retrospect, be seen as of lasting signifi cance: the expansion of records management to all departments of the County Council; the appointment of a Panel of the Libraries and Records Committee to examine the vexed question of accommodation; the foundation of FESRO – the Friends of East Sussex Record Offi ce – in 1980; and the purchase of large elements of the Sheffi eld Park archive at auction in the following year.

The advance of Records Management On Margaret Whittick’s appointment in 1977, the records management section of the offi ce was a highly organised but limited operation, confi ned to the fi les of our parent County Secretary’s Department; by the time of her death in 1995, the fully automated system held over 160,000 items, and extended to every department of the authority. These so-called ‘modern records’ were not just managed – they were listed too, in meticulous and I could even say loving detail – to hear Margi wax lyrical on the South Downs Preservation Bill or the Advertisements Regulations Acts was a joy in itself. As well as her RM responsibilities, Margi continued her long-standing interest in the records of

It was 30 years ago today; Christopher helps Margaret Whittick review a trolleyload of fi les in preparation for the move of Records Management to Brooks Road

46 other public bodies – borough, district and parish councils, and hospitals – all of which she surveyed, collected and listed. The result of her labours, in the words of her obituarist Michael Cook, is that East Sussex has ‘what may be the most comprehensive and informative series of local government archives in the country’. It was her establishment of ESRO’s records management system as a pan-authority service which placed this insignifi cant division of the County Secretary’s Department at the heart of the authority’s corporate policy, and ensured that it was to the Record Offi ce that it turned when called upon to assume the responsibilities of Freedom of Information and Data Protection legislation.

The Maltings – a solution of sorts For the fi rst time since the 1930s, in 1979 the County Council decided to take a serious look at record offi ce accommodation; in a sense it was that decision, taken over thirty years ago, that laid the intellectual foundations for The Keep. The panel of members decided that the Record Offi ce should move out of Pelham House and into The Maltings, where space would be created by the evacuation of Records Management to warehouse accommodation. As part of this same review, the Panel invited us to present a brief paper setting out the future needs of the record offi ce. I well remember the meeting which produced our six-point plan; it took place in Alan Dibben’s offi ce in the south-east turret of Pelham House (now a luxury bathroom) on a darkening autumn afternoon. As we drew to a conclusion, I hazarded the question of a post-Maltings record offi ce. The discussion led to the following fi nal aim:

the provision of a purpose-built, adequately-sized, adequately-staffed and adequately- equipped building when The Maltings becomes inadequate (in about 20 years’ time).

Nobody was more surprised than I when this ungrateful demand – we had not yet moved into The Maltings – was adopted as policy at the next meeting of the Libraries and Records Committee.

The fi nal stimulus for the move to The Maltings was provided at a meeting of the Museums, Libraries and Muniments Committee of the Sussex Archaeological Society, chaired by Colin Brent, at which the County Planning Offi cer Andrew Thorburn was encouraging the Society to develop Lewes Castle as part of a wider tourism strategy. The discussion came round to the Barbican, arguably the most interesting element of the site, yet prohibited to visitors. ‘Why is that?’ asked Thorburn; the answer was easy – because it is full of documents which the County Council agreed to take more than a decade earlier. It was not long after that serious planning for the move to The Maltings began.

The Records Management section moved out of The Maltings in 1982, when in a single day a local fi rm of removers shifted the entire contents of the building to Brooks Road. Their tender for the work was so much below that of the other fi rms that its accuracy was questioned; ‘would you like us to knock a bit off?’ was the encouraging reply. The entire collection of the Sussex Archaeological Society was re- packaged into 520 boxes by Philippa White (now at London Metropolitan Archives), carried through the Gun Garden by hand and driven up to The Maltings (there were then no bollards and indeed no offi ce van either), thirty boxes at a time, in my Morris Traveller. Andrew George (now at Lichfi eld) and I completed the whole job over a couple of weekends. The new Record Offi ce opened its doors to the public on Monday 1 August 1983, and at an offi cial opening-ceremony a month later I was sternly ticked off for expressing the heretical opinion to the chairman of the County Council – I think my actual words were ‘you know this won’t do for long’ – that the building was inadequate as the long-term home of the service.

While the move to The Maltings had transformed the public’s experience, it had done very little for the documents: even by retaining the Pelham House strongrooms, comparatively little shelving was

47 The monarch of all he surveys: Sid Hewson contemplates his domain at The Maltings, the central area cleared to receive mobile shelving, 1988. gained; indeed some of the Records Management racking had already been colonised by archives, a stratagem which still continues. The problem was eased in 1988 when the central void (above) was fl oored over and new racking added, but as Alan Dibben had written in 1980, ‘there is, after all, a limit to what even our ingenuity can achieve by raising and lowering existing shelves and discovering obscure corners in which a few extra racks can be inserted’. Thirty years on, despite the provision of a top-quality strongroom at Newhaven to replace Pelham House, sold into private ownership in 2003, the space-problem and our response to it remain very much as Dibben described them.

In 1994, two major fi res – one rather too close to home – again concentrated the mind of the County Council on our diffi culties. In August, Norwich Central Library and County Record Offi ce was destroyed by fi re in little over an hour. By a triumph of repository design the archives, stored in the basement of the building, survived almost entirely unscathed; the only losses were a result of pilfering by the casuals hired to evacuate the archives. The same year ESRO acquired the science block of the former Girls’ Grammar School in Southover, which was converted to receive the documents formerly stored at overfl ow repositories at Newhaven and Brighton. Late in the afternoon of 20 December, I was called to respond to what I imagined would be another false alarm. An appalling sight greeted me: fl ames a yard high were bursting from the windows, and the west side of the building was well alight. The seat of the fi re turned out to be the caretaker’s room, and arson was suspected. So good had been the conversion of the building for our use that no smoke whatsoever had penetrated the fi re-doors. Nothing at all was damaged; but it was a nasty shock, and brought to mind what would have been the much more serious consequences of a fi re at The Maltings. As a result of these two confl agrations, any plans to complete the conversion of the building were abandoned, and the search began for an entirely new solution to our needs – a purpose-built offi ce, such as our colleagues at Chichester had enjoyed since 1989.

48 Archives for Sale Although most documents enter our custody by gift or deposit, it has always been the case that a few are offered for sale. By the time I began work in 1977, the idea was gaining ground that it was somehow unethical to purchase documents – we would be ‘encouraging a market’ or ‘buying and selling our documentary heritage’. Such nonsense had never established itself in museums or galleries, and it is curious that archivists could allow themselves the self-indulgence of such unworldly views. A glance at the fi rst accession register makes it clear that the early, unqualifi ed custodians had no such qualms – many purchases are recorded on its pages. Ideas of this sort have now worked their way through the system, and many repositories have raised large amounts to purchase family archives, mostly ones which have been on deposit with them for decades. And compared with the amounts required to ‘save for the nation’ pictures brought to Britain by grand tourists in the 18th and 19th centuries, the sums involved are modest. The consequence of failing to purchase is not simply the obvious one – the disappearance of an archive from public view. The market acts as a centrifuge, and failure to acquire an intact archive can condemn a repository to an infi nite pursuit of its dismembered parts.

In 1979, the offi ce became aware that a large element of the archive of the Earls of Sheffi eld had survived in a private house in Fletching. Minor sales had been taking place at Sheffi eld Park since 1954, but it was clear that a huge effort would soon be required to keep the papers together. That story will be told elsewhere, but the imminent threat to this major East Sussex archive was the motivating force behind the foundation of the East Sussex Record Offi ce Society in 1980. The birth was not an easy one. The inaugural meeting, in Pelham House on 16 September 1980, was presided over by the chairman of the County Council, who faced hostile questioning and some barracking from a militant tendency of academics, who saw the proposed Society as a mechanism for the authority to evade its archival responsibilities. This assault was fought off, and thirty years on it is fair to say that FESRO (as the Society became in 1985) has saved some of the county’s most outstanding documents for posterity, and established ESRO as a respected force in the marketplace.

In retrospect the Sheffi eld Park sale, which took place on 2 July 1981, was not a complete success, although at the time we were deliriously happy to have bought all the lots of Sussex interest at a price of a little over £10,000. Alan Dibben more or less left the campaign to me, and my fi rst recourse was to Godfrey Davies, the rather fearsome secretary of the Historical Manuscripts Commission. ‘You must treat the auctioneers entirely at arm’s length’ was his unequivocal advice, although it seemed more of a command. I had unfortunately already visited Messrs Phillips, and after a shaky start when my hostility to what had occurred was all too apparent, I gradually gained the confi dence of Jane Flower, who had wrested the papers from the philatelic department to which they had initially been consigned. Jane, the niece of the West Sussex proto-archivist Walter Peckham, knew far more about documents than I, and her Sussex roots made her sympathetic to the despairing 28-year-old who stood before her. Working together, we made sure that the papers were lotted in groups, and crucially in an order that would make it possible for ESRO to bid for them; furthermore, masses of deeds and estate-papers were separated from the correspondence and sold to us by private treaty.

When the great day came, I travelled to London with Bill Head, an enforcer from County Treasurer’s, whose sole role I think was to contain my enthusiasm – the bidding was done on our behalf by Quaritch. We bought all that we had set out to acquire, and a couple more lots besides. To celebrate the day, I bought myself a silk suit in Bond Street which, like the result of the sale itself, pleased me for many years. I have now literally outgrown it, and my memory of the sale itself is no longer entirely comfortable either. If I had not encouraged the owners to deposit their documents temporarily at the offi ce, would the Sheffi eld Park archive still be safe in their attic? Although we attempted to co-ordinate bids by other relevant counties, the archive as such was dispersed – today we would undoubtedly have tried to keep it all together. But despite this self-doubt I value the experience, and that it should

49 have been gained so early in my career, for several reasons. I (and indeed ESRO) made lifelong friends in Jane, Daniel Waley of the British Library and Anthony Malcomson of the Public Record Offi ce of Northern , all of whom I fi rst met in the course of the Sheffi eld affair. The sale taught me the relative ease with which money can be raised for archival purchases, from both public and private sources, so long as the appeal is suffi ciently eloquent – virtually the whole purchase was externally funded – and that archivists have more to gain than to lose by the closest possible co-operation with the saleroom, still viewed by so many of my colleagues in other offi ces as the enemy. I am eternally grateful to Godfrey Davies for the vehemence of his advice: it was obvious from the outset that the right course would be to ignore it.

Building on this beginning, we have gone on to make regular purchases of documents, some stunning, and some mundane. In 1988 we bought the cream of the cartographic archive of William Figg of Lewes. The papers had descended through several generations to the architectural practice of Fuller and Askew, and many of the drawings had been given to the Archaeological Society in the 1960s. A couple of years before the sale we visited the fi rm and inspected yet more maps, as well as a roof-full of 20th-century architectural drawings. One day I was standing in the offi ces of a building society, when refl ected in the security glass I saw the unmistakable fi gure of Alan Fuller walking along the High Street with a bundle under his arm. They were maps and he was heading for the saleroom. My pleas for a private treaty sale, not least as a means of keeping his fi rm’s archive intact, fell on deaf ears, and soon we were dealing with the genial fi gure of Leslie Weller of Sotheby’s Billingshurst. Derek White was bidding for us at the sale, and prices were if anything rather below the ambitious estimates. But I was particularly worried about one map, a survey of the Plumpton Place estate of the 1730s, on which the scale is borne on the shoulders of an elephant (see p63). The owner of the house had very deep

Councillors Harry Spillman and Mrs Ann Moore with Christopher Whittick and the Repton Red Book of Heathfi eld Park, 1993

50 pockets, and as the bidding mounted way beyond my instructions, it became obvious that we were up against his agent. I guessed that the agent would have a limit, and (to throw the room off the scent) asked Alan Shelley to come in with a single bid once the price went above £10,000. The stratagem worked, and to the discomfi ture of our hapless opponent, unable to exceed his authority, the elephant map was ours, setting what was then a world record for an estate map. In all, 42 consecutive lots were knocked down to us, one after another, creating a sensation in the room. I was in serious trouble when I got home, until I pointed out that, had we not bid the elephant map up to fi ve fi gures, I would have returned without the star item in the sale, and an unspent grant exceeding its hammer-price by a factor of three or more. This line of argument succeeded in mollifying my critics. As has almost invariably been the case, none of the £28,869 which we spent on the maps came from County Council funds.

Other major purchases since 1993 have been the Repton Red Book of Heathfi eld Park of 1794 (opposite), William Green’s map of Brighton in 1773, Ambrose Goreham’s photograph album of the inhabitants of Telscombe in 1904 (a snip at under £500), the Book of John Rowe of 1635, a volume of watercolours by the James Lamberts showing Herstmonceux Castle before its demolition in 1777, Tom Paine’s separation agreement of 1774 and further tranches of Sheffi eld Park material. In recent years we have also bought hundreds of documents, mostly on eBay. These have all been very cheap and apparently trivial, but beware – if it is your thirty-year quest that is solved by a 20th-century diary or a Victorian letter, the fact that it cost £8.50 is of no possible consequence – to you it is the most important document in the world.

The transfer ceremony of the Manor of Sheffi eld records: Sir Martin Nourse, Professor Cynthia Herrup, Mrs Phyllida Stewart-Roberts and Councillor Richard Stevens, 24 July 2000

But one major acquisition cost us nothing, and set a record of a different kind; again the source was Sheffi eld Park, and as so often the source of the initial tip-off was Hilda and Derek Rawlings. In her research on Colin Godmans in Fletching, Lady Wolseley made use of ‘the court rolls of Sheffi eld Park’ and drew attention to a particularly fi ne volume, which seemed ‘too good to be handed over to an

51 estate-offi ce’. It was clearly not too good to be sold, and in 1954 it and other volumes, dating from 1598 to 1808, were purchased at Sotheby’s in London for the sterling equivalent of $36.40 by Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. Their export to the USA had been in contravention of the Manorial Documents Rules, and in June 2000 Duke University generously returned the documents to East Sussex, where they were received by the acting Master of the Rolls and the Lord Lieutenant in her capacity of Custos Rotulorum at a ceremony on 24 July. Instrumental in the negotiations was Dr Cynthia Herrup of Duke, whose fi rst week as a research student at ESRO in 1977 had coincided with mine as an assistant archivist. According to the Historical Manuscripts Commission, this was the fi rst time since their promulgation in 1925 that the Rules had been invoked in order to repatriate such material. This was also the fi rst occasion on which we had involved the Lord Lieutenant in the offi ce’s work, a connection which has developed, to our great pleasure, ever since.

The man from Withdean Another custodial horror-story, with a less satisfactory ending, emerged in 1993, although there had, in retrospect, been many straws in the wind. We were all aware that several special documents were missing from the collections of the Sussex Archaeological Society. Bitter tears had been shed by generations of researchers over the disappearance of a map of the demesnes of the manor of Alciston of 1647, and Goodwin’s crucial rental of Brighton, 1665, but nobody had noticed that many of the less imposing absentees formed a circle with an area of suburban Brighton at its centre. Between 1951 and 1969 Norman Edward Stanley Norris (1915-1991) had served as museum curator of the Society, which made him an honorary member in 1978. During his childhood, the garden of the family home at Withdean had been equipped with two concrete castles, three miniature mines, a replica chemist’s shop and a museum. The entire family were avid collectors – in 1907 his father had attempted to buy a mummifi ed hand from ‘Cross, King of Wild Beast Merchants’ in Liverpool – and much of their material was legitimately sourced. On his death, Norris bequeathed his house and contents to the National Trust, and the extent to which he had enriched his own collection at the expense of the Society’s depositors immediately became clear. There was Goodwin’s rental, there the Alciston map, along with almost every document with any mention of Withdean. In fact deeds, maps, manorial documents, accounts and papers of all sorts emerged, derived from virtually every archival group on deposit with the Society. It seems that Norris was the only member of staff to own a car, and whenever documents were to be collected, it was he who went out to fetch them. He presumably returned via Withdean, where the more interesting papers were creamed off. It would be kind to treat Norris’s actions as the eccentricities of an antiquarian whose mind could not quite distinguish between his home and work existences – a syndrome with which I am all too familiar. But his consistent efforts to remove all traces of references from the documents he appropriated suggest that he was perfectly aware of his misdeeds. In 1993 the National Trust deposited over 550 documents at ESRO, with material relating to other counties distributed by the British Records Association, but would not hear a word against their benefactor; the Society was required to purchase three missing printer’s sample-books from the collection. The house at Withdean was then cleared but with very little care; Norris material continues to appear in the saleroom to this day.

A new beginning The arrival of Roger Davey in the January of 1982 was a signal that moves to address our accommodation problems were afoot – in his previous post at Winchester, he had supervised the transfer of the Record Offi ce to a converted church. Lacking the eccentricities of his predecessor, Roger was also of more or less the same generation as most of his colleagues, and led from the front. The convoluted moves of 1982 and 1983 were accomplished entirely uneventfully, and as well as a new searchroom, the offi ce acquired a comprehensive guide to its contents, written by Judy Brent.

52 Underneath the Arches: Roger Davey braves the worms and mould to sort the Brighton building plans, 1983

A problem of monumental proportions arose early in Roger’s time here, when the records of building control in Brighton, as well as 45 series of Borough Engineer’s plans from Abattoirs to Vaults, were made available to us. Stored for years in the arches under Kings Road, many of the drawers were crawling with worms; and there was some spectacular mould. This material was transported to the records centre, spread out on the mezzanine fl oor, and patiently sorted, cleaned and listed by Roger and his team. The series begins in the 1830s (although the fi rst 200 alterations plans have never been found) and stretches to 1948; it is a wonderful resource for the history of buildings in Brighton.

53 For many years West Sussex Record Offi ce had enjoyed the services of an Education Archivist, but at Lewes, partly through lack of space, only desultory attempts had been made in the direction of schools. An unemployed teacher was retained during the 1980s to create packs of copy documents for school use, but it was only with the secondment of Dr Anthony Freeman in 1991 that anything of merit was produced. Captain Swing, an archive kit comprising documents and materials for pupils and background information for teachers, was a fi rst-class piece of work, but failed to get the attention it deserved when the National Curriculum circus moved on. Only with the appointment of an Outreach Offi cer in 2009 has ESRO again addressed the question of the use of archives in education.

A parish register indexing project at Lewes Prison, which I began in Alan Dibben’s time, was extended by Alison Bowman, who replaced Andrew George in May 1982. Similar work of a rather more voluntary nature was carried out under Roger Davey’s guidance at The Maltings, where mostly FESRO members indexed criminal convictions from the Quarter Sessions rolls, Land Tax Returns, obituaries from local newspapers and tenant-right valuations among the records of local land agents; some of the people concerned have continued this work under their own steam.

Before leaving to read for ordination in 1986, Alison Bowman conducted a very effective campaign to encourage the deposit of the records of urban Victorian parishes, as well as carrying out all the surveys under the Parochial Registers and Records Measure. A major programme of microfi lming was undertaken by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1983-84, although the decision of the diocesan authorities to give incumbents a power of veto resulted in permissions from only 50% of the 169 parishes approached. The availability of microfi lm, and its virtually compulsory use, nevertheless had a dramatic effect on productions, and brought an abrupt end, at least for the parishes sensible enough to permit fi lming, to the gradual damage which had been suffered by the originals – over 4000 fewer documents were produced in 1986 than in the previous year. Another form of surrogate was provided when the Sussex Genealogical Index was acquired, with a large number of transcripts, in 1987. The following year we introduced County Archives Research Network readers’ tickets, and acquired our own receptionist-typist in the person of Rosemary Muddle. No longer having to rely on the typing-pool was a blessing, and Rosemary’s experience at a Lewes fi rm of solicitors meant that she

Philip Bye, who succeeded Alison Bowman in November 1986, gets to grips with an 18th-century deed

54 took the often abstruse legal vocabulary of some of our lists in her stride. As Roger wrote in the 1988 Annual Report, ‘It has already become very diffi cult to imagine how we coped before’. As well as typing our letters and new catalogues, Rosemary was crucial to our precocious programme of retroconversion, and keyed a very large proportion of our old typescript, and some manuscript lists into Microsoft Word; this was to prove invaluable when digitisation came. 1988 also marked the fi nal alteration to The Maltings – the mezzanine fl oor, air coolers in the searchroom (which must have spent at least 20% of their lives out of commission, inevitably in the summer) and the fi rst talk of an out-store at Newhaven.

A diff erent way of doing things In 1985, Margaret and I inaugurated the Society of Archivists’ exchange programme, visiting Dick van der Vlis and his wife Jossy, another professional partnership. Dick was the archives inspector for the province of Friesland, and we stayed with them at their home in Leeuwarden, birthplace of Mata Hari. The experience was a revelation to both of us, trained as we had been in the anarchic world of British archives. The Dutch, in common with most Napoleonic administrations, have had an integrated service since the 1790s, with local offi ces acting as branches of the state archives. Going from one local offi ce to another, unnerving in the UK, is in the Netherlands a seamless process – opening-hours, fi lm readers, lists, charges, even the price of pencils is standardised nationwide. Archivists are all centrally trained, and the rules for both physical and intellectual control are enforced by a network of inspectors. Also new to us was the profound Dutch belief that the creation of records brings with it fi nancial responsibility for their management and custody. Dick and Jossy’s return visit – they sailed their yacht to – was an equally revelatory experience.

Beneath the palms In 1991 the County Council generously granted me unpaid leave to travel to the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California, to work on the medieval archive of Battle Abbey, purchased in 1922 by Henry Edward Huntington, an industrial magnate who had shocked his East Coast friends by transferring his private library to his Californian ranch. ESRO had been buying microfi lm of elements of the collection since the 1960s, but even that had proved diffi cult since the Huntington had never listed the papers in any detail – a bookseller’s catalogue of 1835 remained its only guide. With the aid of a British Academy fellowship I travelled to Los Angeles in the January of 1991, and at the end of this fi rst visit, I had managed to calendar 907 medieval charters, and produce an overview of the entire collection. A further visit followed in 1993, when I completed the catalogue of 703 post-dissolution deeds.

Life at the Huntington could not have been more different from home. All I had to do was to cycle to work, calendar medieval deeds until noon, enjoy lunch under the palms with stimulating company and then work until the bell rang at 4:45. Knowing exactly how many deeds I had to do and the number of days available, I was able to pace myself and devote one day a week to the medieval topography of Battle, work which had been started by Councillor Mrs Ann Moore of Hancox and is about to be brought to publication by David Martin.

Although the archive was in no sense a disappointment, I very soon made the discovery – obvious enough in retrospect – that the Battle Abbey archive was anything but that; what lies at the Huntington is the archive of the Webster family. When Battle passed into the hands of the crown in 1536, the Court of Augmentations gathered up its voluminous archive, and distributed it to the new owners – the estates lay in many counties, and there were many new men to reward for their loyalty. Battle itself was granted to Sir Anthony Browne, but Alciston, for example, passed to Sir John Gage of Firle. The bureaucrats of the court did a magnifi cent job in ensuring that each new owner received the right documents, even providing copies when single volumes covered the whole estate. But although some with high hopes of my visit had to be disappointed, the corresponding reward lay in the Websters’

55 own archive, and those of the many families, mainly London merchants, into which they had married. Sir Thomas Webster, Battle’s purchaser in 1721, clearly had a penchant for ruins – he went on to buy both Robertsbridge Abbey and Bodiam Castle. The records of those Sussex estates, as well as the voluminous papers relating to many other counties, were an unexpected bonus and some compensation for the lack of a more extensive archive of the religious house.

A decade of progress In 1989 the job-title of the head of repository reverted to that of County Archivist, ‘refl ecting a usage which is almost universal elsewhere in , and one which is more familiar to users’. We fi nally abandoned our strongrooms under the law courts in Lewes High Street, closing the fi nal chapter of the authority’s association with the building, erected as a County Hall in 1812. For the fi rst time, the Annual Report carried illustrations. A genealogical research service was begun, allowing us to keep abreast of a sizeable increase in the number of postal enquiries. By the same year, what in 1983 would have been the unthinkable happened – on several days the searchroom was full to capacity. Once-a-month Saturday opening was introduced in May 1994, and with it we acquired an extra archivist, both to run the extra day and as a much-needed addition to the archives side of the offi ce; a second Saturday was made possible by the appointment of an Outreach Offi cer in 2009.

A weekly staff training session was introduced at the beginning of 1993, interspersed with a monthly staff meeting. In the same year, four new strongrooms were acquired at Southover School, and in 1994 we began what has now become an annual two-week closure for stocktaking. It became clear over the course of the next couple of years that we were faced with another re-organisation of local government, with a unitary authority covering Brighton and Hove the likely outcome. Much preliminary work was undertaken, and Caroline Ferris was appointed on a six-month contract to identify Brighton and Hove material, both at ESRO and in the offi ces of those authorities.

The ESRO Home Guard musters for Roger Davey’s leaving-card, photoshopped by Chris Hankin, 2000 (R/C 108/4)

56 When the new body took power in April 1997 we were delighted with its decision that ESRO should continue to provide an archive service; the following year Wendy Walker was appointed as permanent Brighton and Hove Archivist, in which post she was succeeded by Andrew Bennett in 2003. The advent of the new authority also brought about profound changes in the running of the County Council; one of the more major, at least from our perspective, was the demise of the Libraries and Records Committee, to which the County Archivist had reported since the creation of that post. We have nevertheless continued to enjoy the interest, support and close involvement of elected members in our work.

Something of a setback was incurred in 1997 when the Dunn family decided to withdraw their deposited family archive and Lloyds Bank, having absorbed the Trustee Savings Bank, opted to centralise all its records in London. Writing in his Annual Report, Roger Davey observed that it was the fi rst time that the heading Documents Withdawn had been called for. Both owners generously allowed their documents to be fi lmed before withdrawal, and a stay of execution while the work was carried out. This was no small task in itself, and the budget of £3920 was met entirely from grants, for which the Pilgrim Trust and the Wealden Iron Research Group – always ready to help the offi ce with fi nancial assistance in appropriate cases – deserve special mention. It is of course entirely within the rights of depositors to withdraw their archives – those are precisely the terms on which most of them have been received – but for any archivist such losses are matters of bitter regret, particularly considering that the Dunn archive had been in public custody since the 1930s.

Another milestone was passed in 1999 when, with the deposit of the parish records of Ditchling, we completed our holdings of records from all the ancient parishes of the county. A similar event occurred in 2005, when with the deposit of the building regulations plans by Eastbourne Borough Council we achieved complete coverage of all the local authorities in East Sussex to at least 1948.

The Annual Report for 1999 includes the fi rst mention of the Internet, deemed to have stimulated the increase in visitor-numbers experienced that year. The offi ce acquired an e-mail address in 2000, which introduced ‘a welcome new class of enquirer (often very informal, to the extent that surnames may not even be given).’ Unrealised fears that the offi ce’s electronic systems would not be ‘millenium-proof’ led to the acquisition of the proprietory database CALM2000 and replacement PCs. This software, now virtually industry-standard, marked ESRO’s re-entry, after more than a quarter of a century, to the world of computerised listing which it had once pioneered. But how to transfer our data to the new system? That, and the very live question of our future accommodation, was among the many problems facing the offi ce when Elizabeth Hughes succeeded Roger Davey as County Archivist on 2 October 2000.

A baptism by fl ood But Elizabeth’s fi rst challenge was an unexpected one. After three days of torrential rain onto already saturated ground, on the night of 12 October the Ouse broke its banks, fl ooding large areas of the town and causing devastating damage in the Cliffe, the location of our records management warehouse. These were the worst fl oods in Lewes since 1960, when it is said that the actions of a well-meaning policeman in opening a sluice to let Princess Margaret’s car through a fl ooded road at Barcombe inundated the town. Staff spent the morning clearing the bottom shelves at Brooks Road until their forced evacuation by the emergency services, while at Southover School, inundated in 1960, Julian and Chris Moore and Ben Walker helped with the same task; we moved the last box at two in the morning. In the end, Southover escaped unscathed, but at Brooks Road several thousand semi-current fi les were saturated with contaminated water. We had been provident enough to enter into a freeze- drying contract, and within days the fl ooded fi les were on the road, bound for several months of icy incarceration, from which they returned in a crinkly but entirely legible state.

57 The scene at the Record Centre on the morning of 13 October 2000

The county library service, without unique material to worry about, were able to adopt a much simpler response: they hired a couple of skips, into which thousands of written-off books were dumped. After the clean-up, most of which took place without electricity, we felt unable to risk using the lower shelves at either location, adding yet further to the already critical pressure on space. It was as a direct result of these apocalyptic events that the records management section was relocated to Newhaven (where elements had been based for some years) in January 2002.

Storage and the lack of it The impending sale of Pelham House brought our accommodation crisis into even sharper relief, and the consequent inspection by the Public Record Offi ce highlighted our lack of storage-space and the poor quality of much of it. Our licence to hold Public Records was extended against the undertaking to provide accommodation meeting the BS5454 for archival storage. Unit Y at Newhaven was initially shared with the Art and Museum Service; we moved the contents of Pelham House (via our records management units) in the autumn of 2003, and obtained possession of the whole building in 2008.

From the time of Elizabeth’s appointment, plans for a purpose-built record offi ce had been under active consideration, but in August 2003 received a stimulus from an improbable event – the death of Godfrey Webster in the Brazilian jungle. Webster, described by the Telegraph obituarist as ‘an idiosyncratic character ill-suited to life in a democratic era’, was the son of the last private owner of Battle Abbey. Only late in the process of winding up his estate did his trustees remember the existence of the archive, dating largely from 1835 but including the abbey’s royal charters, on deposit at ESRO since 1961. No provision had been made for the consequent increase in value, and the papers were soon accepted by the Treasury in lieu of inheritance tax. The question of their allocation led to another inspection by The National Archives (formerly the PRO), which took the opportunity for a further review

58 of our accommodation. This time the pressure was increased – recognition was withdrawn from The Maltings and transferred to Unit Y, and although the Battle Abbey archive was provisionally allocated to ESRO, at a rather tense meeting it was announced that not only Battle but all our Public Records would be taken away if measureable progress was not made towards the provision of a new building within fi ve years. In October 2006 Wendy Walker was appointed project offi cer for The Keep, which an inspired Jennifer Nash had coined as a working name during a brainstorming session on 9 April 2003. As I write, Brighton and Hove City Council is considering a planning application for the new building; further discussion of the topic is best deferred until the outcome of that, and potentially more far-reaching decisions, next year.

The tenements in Battle High Street as depicted by the cartographer Richard Budgen (above) with his charming vignette (below) of the Abbey buildings in 1724 (BAT 4421/12)

59 Retro-conversion As well as the all too familiar question of accommodation, the last decade has been marked by a series of digitisation projects, each accompanied by a matching grant application. In 1999 the Public Record Offi ce launched the Access to Archives project, which had the ambitious aim of creating a single fi nding-aid for the nation’s local repositories on a dedicated website. Under the titles Landlord to Labourer, Unlocking the Past, The Works, Aladdin’s Cave and The Parish Chest, and often in partnership with colleagues in neighbouring offi ces, ESRO succeeded in making almost 90% of its existing lists available remotely via A2A. As originally devised, A2A relied on lists being marked up in the originating offi ces with felt-tip pens, each colour representing a different level in its hierarchy. The bundles of paper were then shipped in containers to , where the data was keyed into EAD – encoded archival description, a necessary fi rst step to mounting on the web. Each list was reportedly keyed twice over, and the results compared electronically to detect errors; participating repositories were charged a guinea a page – £1.05 – for this service. We employed a number of archivists on short-term contracts to manage this work, the technical expertise for which was provided by John Farrant. Rather to the displeasure of the PRO, John evolved a way of writing our existing machine-readable lists – mostly the result of Rosemary Muddle’s keying over several years – directly into EAD, thus saving us several thousand pounds and speeding up the process immensely. We were determined to modernise our more ancient lists, and in the course of the A2A project I personally re-catalogued the entire archive of the Gage family of Firle, the Maryon-Wilsons of Fletching, and thousands of documents in the Additional Manuscripts series. Large elements of the Rye Borough archive were listed in detail for the fi rst time, and the Winchelsea list expanded from 81 to 272 pages. All the references of documents from the post-1894 local authorities were overhauled, and many of them listed in detail. Year after year, we achieved the highest number of hits of all the repositories on the site except Lancashire, which had mounted calendars of its entire Quarter Sessions holdings.

Details of the Alciston Manor fl ock in 1377-78, from the Gage archives (SAS/G 44/33)

At its high-water mark, A2A contained lists of 9.45 million records held in 418 repositories. In 2008, as a result of the instability of the platform, TNA brought A2A into its own website, with a loss of much of the site’s functionality. Although the information is still available, it is as it were frozen in time – no more entries have been added since, and it is impossible to rectify errors, or to add accruals. Since then, many record offi ces have developed their own online lists, a path which ESRO hopes to follow. The loser is the searcher, who no longer has the ability to interrogate hundreds of archives with a single click. And yet Access to Archives produced benefi ts which went far beyond its original aims, and which were probably never envisaged by TNA.

As well as producing a virtual national archive on the web, the need to analyse the lists before data could be entered imposed a consistency of approach across the wildly diverse UK archives sector which it had never previously experienced. In fi ve years, A2A did more to produce common standards of intellectual control among the nation’s archivists than had been achieved by half a century of professional training or as many years of government inspection. Its effective demise is little short of a tragedy, marking as it does an abandoned opportunity to move towards the seamless archival provision of some continental countries.

60 Futurology All previous authors of recollections such as this have closed with an attempt to predict the future, a temptation which I shall try to avoid. As she looked back on 25 years of the offi ce’s history in 1986, Judy Brent posed several questions about the future development of the service, which it is now possible to answer.

Will documents be deposited in the same numbers? Emphatically so, and more. Leaving aside the takeover of material from other repositories, accessions hovered around the 200 mark until 2006, after which their growth has increased signifi cantly – in 2010, we look set to take in over 350. Several factors are at play. Our interests are much broader and more recent than those of our predecessors; we have raised our profi le to a considerable extent, so that many more people know that their documents can fi nd a safe home with us; the electronic auction eBay, and the publicity given by television to antique collecting, has resulted in many more purchases; and fi nally changes in the way we live have brought about the disbandment of many of the clubs and societies which sustained both urban and rural life in the past. We now hold, for example, 5744 documents from 186 Women’s Institutes, many of them as a result of closure.

Will the less bulky records created by the new technology help with our accommodation problem? Almost certainly, but not for a considerable time. We are currently deciding what to do with ‘born digital’ records and how to list and control them; but there is still a vast mountain of paper to make its way through the sausage machine. I have today returned from Eastbourne, where for the fi rst time we have been driven to make a selection from the records of the Building Control process. Even after appraisal, the records for 1965-1972 fi ll 85 boxes, a tightly-packed vanload. And this is just one series of documents from one of six local authorities in East Sussex, before considering the records produced by the County Council itself.

Will the public come in increasing numbers? Patterns of use have shown some fascinating trends, and continue to do so. In 1961 there were 536 visits to the record offi ce, and nearly ten times as many, 5009, in 1983, the last year in Pelham House. The opening of the much larger searchroom at The Maltings produced a discernable increase of only 500 or so. Visits continued to rise steadily to a peak of 7182 in 1999. Since 2002, numbers have decreased signifi cantly; in 2010, it looks as though the total will be roughly 4300, a fi gure of the kind last seen in 1979. But the number of documents produced per visit are even more interesting. In 1961 there were 4900 productions, 9.1 per visit. In each year from 1984 to 2001, each visit generated between two and three productions, but in the last ten years each searcher has examined seven or eight documents every visit; in 2005 a staggering 40,000 documents were produced.

How is all this to be interpreted? What is going on? The answer is two-fold – mechanical and intellectual. To begin with, there is a fundamental difference between the two types of fi gures. A production is a quantifi able event – a document is requested, located, produced, consulted, returned and re-shelved. The user fi gures are far more nebulous; to begin with, they represent not visitors but visits. If an individual works at the offi ce every day for a year, that will add 240 to the total, whether they stay for fi ve minutes or fi ve hours, and whether they consult one document or a hundred. We conclude that the way to read these fi gures is as follows. The user-base, particularly in the early days, was relatively small – there were a lot of regulars, who would consult a range of documents for an hour or so, and then go home. There was then an intervening phase, when the offi ce’s effort, whether through the production of microfi lm or transcripts, was directed towards self-service for an increasing number of family historians – and productions went down accordingly. Crucially, the searchroom was the only place where information about our holdings was available, and the lists themselves

61 and a card-index the only means of access; the search for the documents, as well as the search of the documents, had to be done on the premises. Access to Archives changed all that in the course of a couple of years. To sit down and read through our lists – they stretch to over 45 feet – would have taken months, and of course nobody did so. Once transferred to A2A they could be searched by keyword in an instant. Users sit at home and effi ciently prepare for their visit, arrive armed with a long list of queries, and stay with us much longer. No document can hide, and our previous policy of storing obscure classes in out-stores was rendered redundant overnight – in an electronic age, nothing is obscure any more. We are undoubtedly busier – the searchroom and production staff particularly so, and the great increase in productions from out-stores has imposed more pressure on staff and documents alike.

But undoubtedly the most powerful infl uence on numbers has been the massive rise in family history as a leisure pursuit in the course of the last two decades. To be sure, even in the 1950s the offi ce was visited by genealogists, but most of the regular users were engaged in some form of scholarly endeavour, and the older records formed a much higher proportion of our holdings. The realisation that everyone had ancestors, not just the gentry, was encapsulated in Sir Alec Douglas Home’s riposte to Harold Wilson’s sneer that he was the fourteenth Earl: ‘I suppose Mr Wilson is the fourteenth Mr Wilson.’ The democratisation of family history has not just infl uenced numbers – it is arguable that the entire development of ESRO, and indeed of all UK record offi ces, has been directed by it. The documents we choose to preserve, and the facilities we provide for their storage and consultation, are largely – arguably excessively so – responses to this current trend.

Will they have to use more microfi lm for various reasons? In the 24 years since that was written, microfi lm has become an outdated technology: nowadays, not only do we digitise lists – the next step down the electronic road is undoubtedly the digitisation of the records themselves. Microfi lm was used for two main reasons: to make available documents held in other repositories, and to prevent damage to popular classes of which we hold the originals. Digitisation fulfi ls both these needs, although the remote repositories, chiefl y The National Archives, have made far more progress than ESRO; our efforts have so far been limited to tithe and estate maps. And in that respect digitisation has a potential which microfi lm did not possess – that of turning a profi t. Family history websites such as Ancestry.com are very big business indeed, and TNA has learnt to franchise the electronic dissemination of its popular classes in return for sizeable royalties. Local repositories such as ESRO, particularly if they band together, have the potential to achieve some measure of success.

As long ago as 1993, Roger Davey observed the beginnings of this trend: ‘it may not be too fanciful to envisage in a very few years the consultation of archival material on screens at remote sites – even ultimately at home.’ But is the digitisation of one source after another an unalloyed good? Will there come a time when searchers assume that there is little point in visiting a record offi ce, because ‘it’s all on the web’? Or will they make the cold calculation, perhaps rightly, that if 80% of the information can be garnered at home, sitting comfortably in the kitchen with a cup of tea, that the extra 20% will not be worth the inconvenience of a visit to a distant record offi ce? Will visitor numbers continue to fall, until they reach 1961 proportions, and record offi ces are visited only by scholars intent on reading the sort of records which it is not cost-effective to digitise? When will the tipping-point, at which providers decide that public access is no longer viable, be reached? Or have we already seen the Indian Summer of free remote access, with providers increasingly imposing higher charges on their addicted users? It is not merely for reasons of fashion that the next generation of record offi ces tend to style themselves historical resource centres.

62 And fi nally, the most interesting question of all: can the computer be harnessed to help us with listing and indexing? The answer is emphatically yes, and in ways probably not envisaged by the question. The retroconversion of our lists, the use of a database – this morning it contained 538,929 entries – and an electronic location system have allowed us far greater physical and intellectual control over our holdings than ever before. Indeed it is remarkable that human memory still has any role to play in our work. But the perhaps unforeseen benefi t of new technology is the ready availability online of an increasing amount of externally held data: census returns, PCC wills, calendars of public records, the clergy database, maps; the list is virtually endless. When Richard Dell was preparing the introduction to the Glynde Place Archives in the 1960s, every fact had to be established or checked either by a personal visit to a library or by correspondence; using the internet, we can now undertake such research at our desks. Like most labour-saving devices, the computer actually creates work – now we have to resist the temptation to turn every list of every document into a mini-article. But such additional information undoubtedly adds value to the descriptions of what we hold, and crucially sets them in context, both with other records at ESRO and material elsewhere. It will be interesting to see how our successors respond to what will emphatically be a massive increase in online information.

An elephant bears the scale on Thomas Pointin’s map of Plumpton Place, c1730 (ACC 5179/13)

63 In conclusion Because ESRO emerged, like Adam’s rib, from the established service at Chichester, I have frequently looked westwards to illuminate my narrative: particularly after the balancing of the two new authorities in 1974, West Sussex Record Offi ce has been, in Alan Dibben’s words, ‘our natural point of comparison’. But it should be remembered that there are many other record offi ces and, despite the gradual homogenisation of standards, almost as many ways of doing things. ESRO’s development, and particularly the different course it has taken when compared with its western neighbour, is a perfect example of the inequality of provision of the same public service so typical of British archives which many of our continental colleagues fi nd so puzzling. The ethos of the two offi ces was perhaps always going to be as different as the two counties themselves, and up to a point East and West Sussex have evolved archive services which refl ect their other differences – the West traditional, conservative, confi dent and well funded, the East run on a shoestring, embattled, radical and experimental. Between 1970 and 1974, ESRO went out on a limb with a daring experiment in computerisation which only half worked, but set the offi ces off on diverging courses. The events of the last decade, largely external forces, are bringing us back together; in ten years’ time, we may yet again have more similarities than differences; if there are further reorganisations of local government ahead, we may even be part of the same service.

The information revolution, glimpsed in the distance in 1986, is now fi rmly upon us, and accelerating. Its effects have been particularly profound in the world in which we work, and it is diffi cult to predict the future with any confi dence. We should not be afraid of being swamped with information – information is our business. What might be a greater concern is a neglect of more old-fashioned skills in this welter of change. Until recently, our professional staff have all been trained in what are now somewhat scathingly referred to as the ‘traditional skills’ of an archivist – all could have read a medieval charter with ease. How long such abilities will be available in this or any other record offi ce is very much a matter of debate – or should I say doubt, for there has been very little debate about the consequences for a service in which no member of staff can read or interpret documents more than 300 years old. Such, within the decade, will be the fate not just of ESRO, but of all county record offi ces in the UK unless Latin is reintroduced to schools and the training courses undergo an unlikely change. It is something of an irony that an archival world which prides itself in its ability to access information should look upon the future irretrievability of its oldest and scarcest records with apparent equanimity.

We are undoubtedly fi tter and better prepared for the future than ever before. Largely thanks to the democratisation brought about by family history and our commanding role in records management, the profi le of East Sussex Record Offi ce has never been higher, both inside the authority and in the county. These are perhaps improbable factors for me of all people to identify as having given us our edge, but the fact is inescapable, as is the truth that it is family historians and not academics who have been our most loyal, vocal and generous supporters. We stand on the threshold of another revolution, and as we do so we must continue to keep sight of the needs and interests of our users, both corporate and individual – it is by listening closely to them, and employing a fair degree of pragmatism, that we have been able to thrive as we have, and carved out our own very distinct path with the resources at our disposal. I am confi dent that the same spirit will carry us forward and enable us to build on our achievements. I profoundly envy my successor who, sixty years on, will doubtless chronicle ESRO’s onward march.

64 County Archivists of East Sussex 1950-1953 Bernard Campbell Cooke (1897-1953) 1953-1959 Francis William Steer (1912-1978) 1959-1964 Richard F Dell 1964-1965 Mary Elizabeth Finch (1923-2007) 1965-1970 Cedric G Holland (1932-1983) 1970-1974 S Carl Newton 1974-1981 Alan Arthur Dibben 1981-2000 Charles Roger Davey 2000-2010+ Elizabeth Margaret Hughes

The shape of things to come? A computer-generated view based on our plans for The Keep, including a projection-wall on the front elevation. eastsussex.gov.uk

East Sussex Record Office Report of the County Archivist April 2009 to March 2010 2010/11_411 Front cover: The Maltings from Lewes Castle, c1930 (ACC 10305), with details of the Paine separation agreement, 1774 (ACC 10423) Back cover: Bathing beauties from the inaugural programme for SS Brighton, 1935 (ACC 10439)