Transcribing BT 51: Designs registered for copyright protection (1884–1888)

Olivia Gecseg, Visual Collections Principal Records Specialist, November 2024

Introduction

Turning the pages of a volume of a design register, you never know what you might come across. Patterns for printed calicoes follow designs for tea sets, bicycles, metal bedsteads and curtains. At the quirkier end of the scale, you might see a design for the ‘shape [of] fluted salad bowl with lobster handles’.

Now thanks to a new volunteer cataloguing project, this extensive and rich data for designs registered for copyright protection will be made more readily accessible. Owing to the hard work of a team of volunteers, transcriptions of the register entries in the original volumes in series BT 51 for the period 1884-1888 will make the designs discoverable in our catalogue.

In this blog, I introduce the collection, the transcription work being carried out and highlight some examples of records transcribed so far.

What are registered designs?

Since 1839, to ensure legal copyright protection for an original design, it had to be registered with the Designs Registry, an office within the Board of Trade and later a part of the Patent Office. To register a design, the prospective proprietor had to send a representation of it to the Designs Registry and pay a fee. Once registered, they had exclusive rights to manufacture goods using the design for a set period.

The variety in the content of these records is astounding; to pick out a few examples from the recently transcribed records, there are designs for shoes, stoves, vases, many thousands of cotton textile patterns, as well as poultry feeders, toast stands, and buttons. There is also an extensive coverage of regional industries, from Lancashire cotton mills to Birmingham metal works, alongside records from further afield: Berlin, Paris, Philadelphia and Yangon. We can see the names of important British manufacturing companies: Wedgwood, Coalbrookdale, Carron, Edmund Potter and Jaeger.

For each record, from 1839-1991, The National Archives holds a visual representation of the design, in the form of a drawing, photograph, or material sample. For the 19th-century, these representations are housed in large bound volumes, which present a challenge when you want to know what designs are contained inside them.

What is being transcribed?

For each registered design, there are two parts to The National Archives’ record: a representation of the design and a corresponding entry in the register. These parts are held in separate catalogue series. For the period covered by this project, representations are in BT 50 and the registers in BT 51, ‘BT’ denoting ‘Board of Trade’.

Thanks to earlier cataloguing projects, most designs from 1839-1883 have item-level descriptions in Discovery. This current project picks up where prior projects left off, in 1884.

Volunteers are currently transcribing entries from forty-seven volumes of the register in BT 51 up to 1888. For each entry, the information recorded was:

• the name of the proprietor (copyright owner)
• their address
• their occupation
• a brief description of the design
• the material class under which it was registered
• the date of the registration
• the design number assigned through the registration process

These details will provide descriptions for almost 200,000 items in Discovery once complete, making it possible to search the catalogue for these details to pinpoint particular records or to create datasets around search results.

Creating opportunities for research

Examples of records transcribed by volunteers so far demonstrate the exciting potential for research from the resulting cataloguing data.

One aspect is the opportunity to survey the designs produced by particular businesses or a number of businesses within a particular industry.

Thomas Hoyle and Sons were a Lancashire-based calico printing firm, known for their use of a purple, madder dye that they applied in endless variations of patterns to cotton cloth. They registered large numbers of designs regularly throughout the 19th century – we already have nearly 20,000 item-level catalogue descriptions for the designs they registered between 1843–1884. As we are finding out from transcription of the BT 51 volumes for 1885, they continued to register large batches of their printed calicoes.

Another aspect is the potential to surface the names of women attributed to particular designs or products when registered in their own names.

Some of the designs seem to be drawn from personal experience. Volunteer Emily Mitchell highlighted an entry she transcribed for Mary Hannah Hambly. Her occupation given as ‘Gentlewoman’, she registered ‘an adjustable binder belt for ladies, which adjusts itself to any figure and affords the most perfect comfort to the wearer’ on 7th March 1885. Mary’s name is entered in the register as ‘wife of Thomas Hambly’, a reminder that in this period she may have been an entrepreneur but she was also a married woman.

We are still at the beginning of the project and these are just a couple of examples from the 7,000 designs volunteers have transcribed so far. The next steps will be to check the data before our Cataloguing team works on uploading these entries to Discovery. The project is scheduled to be completed by Spring 2026.

I am very grateful to the hard-working team of volunteers who are making this cataloguing work possible.