One’s inexperience, and one’s lack of knowledge can have unanticipated consequences far down the line. This is as true of me as it is for the staff of the Archive at MB3-as-was. Much is destroyed in the process of learning, not always immediately, and not always in a straight line. Nor has what one has done necessarily been a "mistake" or "wrong" in and of itself or in its time.
This is something I came face-to-face with thanks to a Winnowing in the MB3 Archive’s transfer of files from a “Craig Fees Collection” to Craig Fees himself at the end of June 2026 (as discussed in Winnowings 1); in this instance, in the contents of a re-used acid-free archival file folder, re-labelled on its front face in pencil in a rushed handwriting I don’t recognise; which is slightly mysterious, because I was the only archivist around in 2007. When was the folder actually labelled?:
“2007.052 CF NOTES ON HISTORY OF Q CAMPS + PET”
I can’t vouch entirely for the “2” in “52”, which might conceivably be “7” (more clearly in life than in the scan), nor can I vouch for the accuracy of the accession number, as I have not written it, and don't know the source. But if it is accurate, or even if it's not, it is (or was) a legacy accession: it formally brought into the Archive a set of notes which were already there. Although these notes are undated, I can see from internal evidence that they go back to the early 1990s, and possibly even to 1989, the year the Planned Environment Therapy Trust Trustees said "Yes" to an Archive and Study Centre, and I began cataloguing, and researching the background to the Trust and the work behind and ahead. The notes themselves relate to the first collection I catalogued, the David Wills papers, as they came to me.
(On the folder’s straight cut tab, that sticky-out part which is generally used for labelling, earlier uses of the folder are indicated by a crossed out U/P in pen (my interpretation - this could stand for Units and Places in the Wellcome-based naming scheme the Archive used) on the left, and, also in pen, a crossed out “USER FEEDBACK FORM” on the right.)
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What I did in the early 1990s, and how it played out three decades later: The Dave Wills Papers
It was the first collection I catalogued, and it was mammoth. David Wills had that impulse one seems to find among Quakers, to document and preserve. I said of it later, in 1997,
When he died in 1980 the Q-Camps/Hawkspur archives were still among his voluminous personal and research papers [of which more in a moment], part of an immensely important collection which documents a significant part of this century’s pioneering therapeutic community work particularly with children and young people, whether it be surviving documents of the Little Commonwealth, reflections of the early Donald Winnicott’s work for the Bicester Q-Camps (Marjorie Franklin to David Wills, 24/12/1940: “I doubt if Winnicott is replaceable. Psychologists are common - geniuses rare!” SA/Q 35.2), or his own diaries, photographs, unpublished manuscripts, and letters containing references and reflections from an extraordinary range of friends and workers in the field. [This quote comes from here. For the purposes of what's coming, note that Marjorie Franklin's comment is catalogued "SA/Q 35.2"].
It was the foundation collection for the Planned Environment Therapy Trust Archive and Study Centre, and came following the death at the end of 1987 of David's widow Elizabeth, putting all David's papers in the hands of his Literary Executor, Robert Laslett. For a more detailed history see here.
When they came to the Archive and Study Centre the David Wills papers were in a highly organised state, almost certainly because David Wills was highly organised, and I assume they came in their original order, although Robert himself had begun a process of assessing and cataloguing before he realised the magnitude of the task. I don't remember asking the question at the time; I simply took the collection as I found it, named it "DW", and named everything within it with a DW designation. The Q Camps archives in which Marjorie Franklin's letters to David Wills appeared was designated "DW 50", for example, and then broken down into subcategories - 51 and 52 were clearly Q correspondence, for example. It was only as I became more sophisticated (?) in my understanding of cataloguing, and came to know the Wellcome Trust/Wellcome Library naming scheme for collections that I separated out the individual groups of records in the David Wills papers into discrete collections, so that "DW 50" came to be replaced with the Wellcome-like "SA/Q" ("Societies and Associations/Q Camps").
I was reminded of this system, and I know of this detail, thanks to the notes in the file folder.
When I first catalogued the David Wills papers the Archive was still in what had been my bedroom [see here]. I labelled each of the grey-white clamshell boxes with their DW numbers in big white marker letters. I had not yet discovered Conservation Resources UK's Melinex label holders and replaceable paper labels, and I wanted to be able to quickly and easily read the labels of the boxes stacked high on the wooden shelves. Having discovered these discreet Melinex holders and their acid-free paper inserts and their utility prior to recataloguing the David Wills Collection in the early 1990s, the discrete collections that came out of the recataloguing retained the indelible white DW numbers, beneath or alongside the new PP/WDW, SA/Q, SA/HLS and so on names.
I will have had no reason to re-box the collections when I recatalogued, and there is unlikely to have been a reason to re-box the collections as they went from MB3 into storage or to new archives (these boxes cost a bit, and in aggregate the cost mounts up. The boxes themselves also came from Conservation Resources UK, a high quality supplier of archival and conservation materials, and should not have deteriorated), so that the new stewards should be able to see from the boxes themselves, once it's explained, that the "DW" on the boxes they've taken-in speaks of their having been part of the original David Wills papers.
Without a proper hand-over to the new MB3 archivist back in 2019 (about which, see here), and without the question arising and being asked ("Craig, what, if anything, does 'DW' on this box of original Little Commonwealth material stand for?"), this information will not have been passed on to the new stewards: Dorset Archives in the case of the Little Commonwealth Collection. A reasonable familiarity with the various components of the David Wills papers might have alerted the archivist going through the "2007.052" folder of this association, as it did me: but in the rough and tumble of its seven active years as an Archive, there will not have been the time to gain that famliarity; and in the closing and furious activity of the final months, there won't have been any time to study these notes, beyond deciding they should come back to me.
As per the label the notes do, in fact, pertain to the history of Q Camps and PET, and a number of other things as well: I was making my way through the various components of the DW Collection to understand what it was I was heir to and responsible for, in order to share that story - those stories - with others. Manuscript drafts of history sketches are among the pages in the folder (e.g, see below).
The notes are written primarily on the backs of re-used print-outs from the early computerised Archive Library catalogue (also see below), and on photocopied Introductions to the Archive and Study Centre (both on archival A4 paper - the re-use of rare and expensive stuff), so are themselves archivally useful. Indeed, I wish there were more and I'd taken more notes. If Wellcome and others who took books as MB3 closed, including the final secondhand book seller, wonder what the catalogue-style markings inside the front covers stand for, I can tell them a) this system was the first and was superseded by later work, including that of Trustee Helen Frye as librarian, and b) that C3 stood at this point as the umbrella category for Youth Work, with several subcategories within that (perhaps you can begin to see an archiving approach to library cataloguing), and C4 for Education. C2 was clearly for Delinquency and Youth Offending; and imagining backward and by analogy with C3/1, I think C1 was probably for government legislation, reports, and other official publications. Imagining forwards? Bring me the book, and I will aim to explain it.
The notes themselves range through several subcollections within the David Wills papers, as well as the core David Wills Collection itself. From the notes, and reconstructing (it would be lovely to have access to the collections themselves, as they are now, to connect these across time properly):
DW 8. The notes for DW 8/3 are references to Howard League Newsletters for 1969 to 1978. I may have taken these into the library.
DW 11/5. These are bibliographic notes for an unpublished typescript by the American academic Ronald Swartz on "John Dewey and Homer Lane - The Odd Couple of the Educational Theorists" and "Homer Lane's Lost Influence on Western Educational Thought", which he had sent to David Wills, and may indicate a David Wills core correspondence file.
DW 20. Appears to include the Homer Lane Society, the Homer Lane Trust (not the Homer Lane Trust Ltd), and possibly the Homer Lane Trust Ltd., as separate subcategories. The notes labelled 20/4 are correspondence from David Wills by and from the Homer Lane Trust. Those from 20/5 and 20/6 are Homer Lane Society. 20/7 concerns the merger of the Homer Lane Trust (not Ltd.) with the Planned Environment Therapy Trust. The Homer Lane Trust (Ltd.) appears without its own annotation (some other DW 20/X?) before another which is for the Homer Lane Society.
DW 24. The notes for 24/2 record a PETT Committee meeting, which is suggestive. Was DW 24 dedicated to PETT?
DW 50. Q Camps records.
DW 62/39. This note references a series of articles by David Wills in volume 64 of the Hibbert Journal on "The Influence of Homer Lane". Not available online, unfortunately. The article apparently spanned three issues: 64:252, pp. 25-29; 64:253, pp. 58 - ; and 64:254 no pages given).
I was not as fastidious in my annotations I would like in retrospect. In the 15 pages of notes there is an entire page devoted to the Lanercost Community, from which the Homer Lane Society and subsequent developments emerged. The Lanercost Community does not appear in the MB3 spreadsheet of where collections have gone.
- The Homer Lane Society and the Homer Lane Trust (not Homer Lane Trust, Ltd., which the MB3 Archive didn't recognise: see this Appendix) have, like the David Wills Collection, gone into storage at Upper Heyford, with the Mulberry Bush's archives, and several other collections which did not find a home before MB3 closed.
- The Planned Environment Therapy Trust archives have gone to the Modern Records Centre at the University of Warwick.
- The Q Camps Collection has gone to Quakers in Britain.
SO: What were once parts of one collection of papers have been sundered, their connections severed, their provenance and histories lost or obscured: All things one tries to avoid in archives. And my re-cataloguing as a young archivist in the early 1990s laid the groundwork.
Draft skech for a history
Print out of page from the computerised Library catalogue
