In the last published "Where are Collections going" spreadsheet before the Archive was fully cleared at the end of June/early July 2026, the destination for David Wills' Collection is given as "Likely MB storage for now": This means that the records of one of the most senior and influential British residential social workers of the 20th century, a prominent Quaker with an annual lecture established in his honour and an OBE for his services to the nation, had not found an archival home by the time MB3 shut down, and will be stored temporarily, because one assumes the Mulberry Bush Organisation will not want to fund storage in perpetuity, at the National Conservation Services facilities at Upper Heyford, Oxfordshire, where its own archives are going. What on earth is the world thinking?
Ironically, on the other hand, the Q Camps archives, which were originally part of the David Wills Collection, have gone to Quakers in Britain, presumably under the mistaken belief that the "Q" in "Q Camps" stands for "Quaker". Which it emphatically doesn't. As the Q Camp Organisation's Hon. Secretary Marjorie Franklin explained, in her 1968 'Appreciation' of the 'The Work of W. David Wills on his retirement':
The reputation and fame of Q has grown with the passing of years and though Mr Wills has spent more years in working with maladjusted children, many people still remember his leadership of this unique adventure. The double nomenclature - Q and Hawkspur - probably needs explanation. "Q Camps" was the official name for publicity purposes (Q for Quest or Query, and the still to be unravelled enQuiry) [emphasis mine]; Hawkspur Camp was the private name for their home, named after the hamlet of Hawkspur Green nearby.
Or from an earlier and more contemporary source, page 15 of the 1944 information booklet "Q CAMP FOR BOYS. A HOSTEL AND SCHOOL FOR BOYS BETWEEN THE AGES OF ABOUT 11 to 15. AN OUTLINE OF PRINCIPLES AND METHODS COMPILED BY THE Q CAMPS COMMITTEE" (shouty caps in the original, for which see the booklet here, in a pdf download):
Name. The letter Q has been chosen as a convenient term for publicity purposes. It is variously interpreted as "quest," "query," etc. A descriptive title has been avoided on account of the possible stigma involved.
This explanation occurs in other contemporary sources as well.
The Q Camp organisation had no affiliation with the Society of Friends, unlike Barns Hostel and School - to which David and Ruth Wills went immediately after leaving the Q Camp project for unbilletable evacuee boys in Oxfordshire at the end of 1940 (for which, see here) - which was a war time project of the Edinburgh Society of Friends.
The Hon. Secretary of the Q Camp organisation was Jewish, and apart from David Wills and his wife Ruth, and Cuthbert Rutter who were Quakers, the Q Camp Committee members appear in aggregate to be non-Quaker. And although Christine Trevett has written "Quakers were very significant in its creation", having first written "The Q stood for Quest and not Quaker", I would challenge the "very", and question "significant" vs. something closer to "important" or "supportive". (Christine Trevett, "'Mildred Said She'd Do It': A Quaker Child Psychiatrst and Autism Pioneer", Quaker Studies 18/2 (2014) pp. 211-255. Quote from p.221).
But whatever one might think, the Q Camp Collection has gone to Quakers in Britain, while the Quaker involved in the first Q Camp itself, the warden who made it work and wrote the book ("The Hawkspur Experiment" - and "The Barns Experiment", the latter about the Quaker-established hostel and school in Scotland to which he and Ruth went after Hawkspur) - and the person who saved the Q Camps archives and shepherded them safely through a war and a series of moves of home and work, and who is the reason we still have any Q Camps archives at all (see their history here) - has gone into indefinite interim storage, where access will be limited and expensive, and then who knows where.
In part I am to blame, as I will explain in the next episode of Winnowings.
