Hubert Hall (1857–1944): Archival Endeavour and the Promotion of Historical Enterprise Thesis submitted in accordance with the requirements of the University of Liverpool for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy by Margaret Ruth Procter February 2012 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract iii Abbreviations iv Acknowledgements v List of Figures vi Introduction 1 Chapter 1 Family and Early Life 18 Chapter 2 A Working Life: 1879 to the Start of 20th 43 Century Chapter 3 Using the Records: Writing and Teaching 66 History (1870s to the Early 20th Century) Chapter 4 The Red Book Affair 91 Chapter 5 A Working Life: the Promotion of Historical 131 Enterprise Chapter 6 Developing Education and Training: For 173 Historians, Archivists and Record Workers Chapter 7 Hall and the Development of Archival Practice 19 6 and Theory Conclusion 229 Manuscript Sources 233 Bibliography 235 ii | P a g e ABSTRACT This thesis examines the career of Hubert Hall (1857–1944). Hall began work at the Public Record Office in 1879, ending his career there as an Assistant Keeper in 1921. At the same time, and until 1939, he was heavily involved with many organizations and institutions, most notably the Royal Historical Society, the London School of Economics and the Royal Commission on Public Records. His numerous activities as a ‘historical worker’ were aimed at the ‘promotion of historical enterprise(s)’. Before 1900 his writing, on historical topics, and his editorial work were carried out primarily independently. After that date much of his published work derived from his teaching work (most successfully from seminar-based collaborations); this included works which addressed archival science and archival management. The shift in the type of work produced can be attributed to the furore, orchestrated by John Horace Round, surrounding his edition of The Red Book of the Exchequer, a dispute which had a notorious public airing in the late 1890s, but a longer and more private genesis dating back to the previous decade. The context for this examination of Hall’s career is the professionalization of history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the period during which he also began and ended his PRO career. The consolidation of the professional infrastructure of history by the early 1920s also signalled the divergence of archival management and academic history as separate disciplines. As a result, archivists in particular lost sight of their professional antecedents, with received opinion now dating the start of British archival thinking to the appearance of Hilary Jenkinson’s Manual of Archive Administration in 1922. These antecedents include a rich seam of archival writing (both theoretical and practical) by Hall and his PRO contemporaries (notably Charles Johnson and Charles Crump) and the work of a generation of women historical workers, many of whom have been identified as benefiting from Hall’s teaching, and his support. The ‘disappearance’ of these women from university-based history after the 1930s has been well documented in the literature; it is anticipated that future research would identify their re-emergence in, or their transfer to, the post-World War 2 archival domain. iii | P a g e ABBREVIATIONS AHA American Historical Association BMD General Register of Births, Marriages and Deaths CEIP Carnegie Endowment for International Peace CKS Centre for Kentish Studies, Maidstone HSC Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion IHR Institute of Historical Research HMC Historical Manuscripts Commission (Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts) KCL King’s College London JRULM John Rylands University Library, Manchester LSE The London School of Economics and Political Science NLW National Library of Wales PRO Public Record Office RCPR Royal Commission on Public Records RO Record Office RNVR Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve RHS Royal Historical Society VCH Victoria County History Publications AHR American Historical Review BIHR Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research EHR English Historical Review ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography RBE Red Book of the Exchequer THSC Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion TLS Times Literary Supplement TRHS Transactions of the Royal Historical Society iv | P a g e ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Emeritus Professor Christopher Allmand, Dr John Cantwell, Sue Carr (RHS), Dr Michael Cook, Dr Andy Davies, Professor Michael Hughes, Dr Chris Lewis, Professor Elizabeth Shepherd, and all those mentioned individually in the footnotes. Caroline Williams, Clare Gibson, Julian Davis. Bryn Marsh and Eleanor Marsh. v | P a g e FIGURES Page Fig. 1 Hubert Hall, aged 62 2 Fig. 2 Poole Court, Yate, Gloucestershire 22 Fig. 3 Hubert, Winifred and Richard (Dickie) Hall in their garden at 33 ‘Cartref’, Walderslade, Kent, Summer 1938 Fig. 4 ‘Mr. Hubert Hall reading a Paper, in the Literary Search-Room, 4 9 Record Office’, 1886 Fig. 5 Hall in his Cambridge D.Litt robes, 1920 154 vi | P a g e INTRODUCTION Duco ergo ad vos chartarum custodem et editorem, Hubertum Hall1 Why this thesis? This thesis grew out of the serendipitous discovery in the University of Liverpool Library of British Archives,2 a book published in 1925 by Hubert Hall, and thus evidence that more individuals had given thought to archival management, its practice and principle, than received wisdom suggested. Generations of archive students3 have learnt that archival literature began with Hilary Jenkinson and continued with Theodore Schellenberg. For many British and Anglophone archivists, there is no (archival) life before Jenkinson. Hall’s book appeared as part of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) series, the Economic and Social History of the World War. This prestigious commission suggests that his views on archives were considered as valuable as those of Jenkinson, whose Manual of Archival Administration appeared in the same series. (Its extended title, including the Problems of War Archives and Archive Making, omitted from the second edition, makes its origins clear.) On the bookshelves at least these two archival works have parity; they were commissioned (though not published) at the same time,4 and both authors were highly experienced officers at the Public Record Office (PRO). However, only Jenkinson’s work has survived, to become an iconic founding text and accepted as a groundbreaking statement of archival principles.5 The identification of Hall as an author embodying British archival expertise in the early 1920s suggested that received wisdom about the beginnings of British archival theory might benefit from some revision. Having identified Hall as a significant figure, I wanted to explore that landscape through his experience. Looking beyond the accepted narrative provided the opportunity to discover the wealth of archival literature which existed in the 1 Oration, Hon. DLitt presentation 4 Dec. 1920, Cambridge University Reporter, 7 Dec. 1920, p.386: ‘I present to you therefore, Hubert Hall, keeper and editor of records’. 2 H. Hall, British Archives and the Sources for the History of the World War (London, 1925). 3 Both British and, as P. Wosh, has recently pointed out, North American, Waldo Gifford Leland and the Origins of the American Archival Profession (Chicago, 2011), p.368. 4 See Chapter 5. 5 See e.g. T. Eastwood, ‘Jenkinson’s Writings on Some Enduring Archival Themes’, American Archivist, 47 (2004), pp.31–44. 1 | P a g e Fig.1 (from TRHS, 1946) 2 | P a g e late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In examining the milieu from which this material emerged I also rediscovered Hall as an exemplar of a world which no longer exists, the world of the ‘historical worker’. Hubert Hall ‘The outstanding feature of his great mass of achievement’, stated Hall’s obituary in The Times6 . was its pioneer quality. When hardly anyone in England had thought of teaching people to read medieval writings he thought of it and did it. While others still saw little of interest in the Public Records beyond the Chancery enrolments he was exploring the port books. When for most people archives were only collections of documents to be valued according as they served or did not serve the known interests of the present, he saw in them parts of one vast body whose unlimited usefulness must be safeguarded for the unknown interests of the future. He blazed the trails which many now follow. Knowledge of this apparently substantial contribution to the archival world appears, like his writing, to have been lost to archival tradition. I shall also attempt to remedy that here. In using Hall as an exemplar, but also specifically, this thesis will argue that his work and the contribution of his generation to archival practice and theory has, largely, been disregarded and that Jenkinson’s continuing pre-eminence has been artificially bolstered by those same factors which were to divide historians and archivists in the 1920s. In 1921, when Hall retired from the PRO, the infrastructure of professional history was only recently fully constructed; his gradual withdrawal from professional work from the late 1920s and early 1930s coincided with the consolidation and separation of historians and archivists as separate disciplines, a process in which he was too late to play a part. That same process of consolidation allowed Jenkinson (some 25 years younger than Hall) to achieve his position as pre-eminent British archival theoretician, his work ultimately being disseminated through a developing network of county record offices, through university- based archival education and the establishment of archival associations. I will use Hall’s career to illustrate the nature of what I call ‘archival endeavour’ before those changes came about. In what is, in effect, his professional biography, I will examine 6 ‘Hubert Hall’ [obituary], The Times, 3 Aug. 1944, p.8. 3 | P a g e his 40-year career at the PRO, his published writing, in particular his work on economic history and on archival science, his activities within the Royal Historical Society (RHS) (where he was Literary Director for 50 years) and his highly influential teaching roles.