My current work at The National Archives is a catalogue enhancement project focusing on the Detached Papers. This is a challenging collection concerning transatlantic slavery from the 1750s to the 1820s.
The Detached Papers form a subseries of T 70, the records of the Committee of the Company of Merchants trading in Africa. That entity was set up by Parliament in 1750 when the more widely-known Royal African Company was dissolved. As revealed in an earlier blog, sources within the Detached Papers provide powerful insights into the experiences of West Africans during these decades.
In an earlier phase of this cataloguing work, my predecessor produced item-level descriptions for the contents of 46 boxes in the subseries (the latest being T 70/1554). What was learnt in the process served only to increase The National Archives’ sense of these records’ importance and commitment to making them more accessible.
We have since made the current phase of cataloguing, focusing on the last 50 or so boxes, an integral part of a programme of activities under the new Partnership for Transatlantic Slavery Scholarship, Archiving and Global Exchange (PASSAGE), funded by Lloyd’s Register Foundation.
Previous efforts
We are, however, far from the first custodians of these records to publicly recognise their importance.
An archives official highlighted the subseries’ significance in a talk at the Royal Historical Society in London in 1912. The speaker, Hilary Jenkinson, had developed some familiarity with the Detached Papers from about 1908 (PRO 15/7) in one of his early roles at the Public Record Office (PRO), The National Archives’ predecessor.
Yet, by comparison with other parts of the T 70 series, the Detached Papers have been underused. This blog investigates the reasons for this.
Past dampeners
Reconstructing this archival history involves exploring some of the practical challenges the subseries has posed since its transfer to the PRO from the Treasury in 1846. Sources reveal that these papers were loose and extremely disordered at the time. Serious subsequent efforts were made by archival officials to arrange the papers into bundles (and later boxes) by year. But this was achieved to a limited and rough extent. PRO’s Cumberland Henry Woodruff admitted as much in his contributions to a handwritten finding aid in 1894.
A finding aid of the series, revised in March 1894 by Cumberland Henry Woodruff. Catalogue reference: OBS 1/1023/19
Such efforts were consistently hampered by the condition of the documents. The problem, as Woodruff described it, was that many later documents in the subseries were found by officials to be ‘illegible’, ‘decayed’, or even ‘destroyed’, with the culprit in many cases identified as ‘damp’.
1792 – Miscellaneous letters - Bills - Acts of Council &c [etc] (the whole of which are nearly illegible through damp)
Abstracts of bundle contents, described in Woodruff’s finding aid. Catalogue reference: OBS 1/1023/19
This problem did not go away. The first public user we are certain to have dipped into the Detached Papers explained in a 1922 published article that she had been deterred by their ‘damaged’ state. Instead, she used information ‘in more accessible form’ found in other T 70 sub-series.
Storm of 1846
But what had happened to the records to make them so damaged? The answer probably lay partly in this collection’s decades in the hands of the Company, and partly their 20 years languishing in the Treasury Chambers in London. But it seems they were far more damaged by a dramatic incident that occurred just as their scheduled move to the PRO drew near in 1846.
A report appended to the Annual Report of the Deputy Keeper of the Public Records reveals, in extraordinary detail, the events that led to an earlier and immediate transfer.
While this work was in progress, an event happened, namely, the great storm of thunder, hail, and rain on the 1st of August, by which many public buildings at Westminster were damaged. I took an early opportunity of visiting the places in which the Old Records were deposited, at the Treasury Chambers; where I found all the skylights broken in the Loft, and many of the Books, and some of the sacks of Papers, saturated with wet; and in the Vault, a drain, which runs under the pavement, had burst, and the water had risen to the height of 2 feet 3 inches (more than half of the height of the Vault in some places), so that numerous chests and boxes were flooded and soaked; some were floated, and others overthrown. I immediately represented to Mr. Trevelyan the inevitable destruction to which the contents of the chests and boxes were exposed, if permitted to remain in the wet Vault; and although these Records were not expressly included in the terms of the transfer, I was charged by Mr. Trevelyan to remove them to this House for their preservation, as soon as might be; and I made immediate preparations for their removal, although no rooms were yet finished for their reception.
Report by William Henry Black, at Rolls House, to the Master of the Rolls, 15 March 1847. Catalogue reference: PRO 43/8
A fierce storm had hit central London in the summer of 1846, wreaking havoc in the spaces housing the African companies’ records at the Treasury. Bound volumes stored in the loft found themselves exposed to the elements from above. Worse still, loose papers – among them the Detached Papers – housed in the basement vault were soaked from below via a drain. Despite officials’ subsequent attempts to dry the records outdoors under covered walkways, this chaotic and destructive episode left its mark.
West African researchers and the Detached Papers
Not all researchers were deterred, however. In the first decade or two after the Second World War, more than a century since the Detached Papers’ move from the wet basement in the Treasury, a few scholars accessed these papers. These users of the PRO saw the records in this subseries as a resource for writing histories of Africans.
Bust of Francis Lodowic Bartels at Mfantsipim in Ghana. Source: Wikimedia Commons
The first such researcher was Francis Lodowic Bartels, part of a prominent Euro-African family in late colonial Gold Coast (present day Ghana). Bartels quoted from an item in T 70/1559 in a 1955 journal article. This research on African Christianity centred on Philip Quaque, an employee of the Company of Merchants and the first African ordained in the Church of England.
We can be quite certain that the subseries was again consulted in the early 1960s, this time by PhD student Isaac Adeagbo Akinjogbin from newly independent Nigeria. Akinjogbin cited them in his thesis, which sought to challenge many ideas first put forward in print in 1793 by a leading officer in the Company of Merchants.
PASSAGE
Today, PASSAGE hopes to connect more researchers – particularly those from West Africa and the Caribbean – with The National Archives’ collections.
In our work on the Detached Papers, we are attempting to remove certain accessibility barriers. Some of our efforts are quite conventional and physical, involving reuniting fragments and preserving fragile documents by using specialist sleeves.
But accessibility also means discoverability for users of the online catalogue and search engines. We can achieve this by ensuring accurate and detailed catalogue descriptions of items, involving careful transcription of names of people, places, and things, keeping our global audiences in mind.
Ensuring this quality requires finding creative ways around the damage and illegibility wrought by time and the environment. Though still a time-consuming task, the work of making handwriting legible today is much quicker thanks to a variety of resources. We can identify plausible variants of spellings by searching, for example, genealogical or slavery databases, or our very own Discovery catalogue, or OCR-searchable copies of relevant published texts such as trade directories and travelogues.
If we can make out only part of the name of a ship trading enslaved people but know the name of its captain, we can quickly identify likely candidates by searching databases such as SlaveVoyages.
The SlaveVoyages database, a way to research the history of the transatlantic slavery.
It must be underlined, however, that these quick checks are only possible owing to the combined painstaking efforts of researchers and cataloguers over many years.
Records about records
Understanding records’ custodial histories can be extremely illuminating and useful for those engaged in cataloguing projects today. At The National Archives, we are in the relatively unusual position of being able to trace such histories by consulting records about records. Such histories remind us of the precariousness of our records and the importance and relevance of past efforts – often long forgotten – to make them known and knowable.
