Interviewer: We know it's been another busy month, with a lot going on, so we thought an interview with PETT archivist Craig Fees would save him writing a report and I could ask specific questions to help to keep it brief. Among everything else, Craig, I understand since the last newsletter you turned 65. Congratulations.
Craig: Thankyou. I'm not sure it's an accomplishment, although I know millions of people never make it. Like many many service men and women, my father didn't. And millions around the world at the moment are desperate for their children simply to survive childhood: just look towards the Mediterranean. Life at any point is a privilege. Handling archives every day reminds you how transitory and precious everything is.
I: You sound as if you're in a reflective mood!
C: 2018 will mark 30 years since PETT asked me to prepare the report which led to the founding of the Archive and Study Centre, and we are in the midst of a Transition Project, with a new Assistant Archivist; so in the sandbox of time and the Archive, I guess a great deal is running through my mental fingers. One builds up a great many undischarged obligations in that period, apart from anything else.
I: Undischarged obligations?
C: For example, I visited Maxwell Jones in Nova Scotia in 1990, when he had a dream about a sailing ship and its captaincy, which he interpreted from a Freudian point of view and I from a Jungian. As he had decided to give his personal and professional records to the still-nascent Archive, I interpreted the ship in terms of the Self, and of handing on the helm, so to speak, and feeling positive and fulfilled in it. He died a few weeks after I left. The bulk of those archives still haven't come, so I still don't feel I've discharged the obligation I took on. Things like that.
I: It sounds as if it could be a deep conversation.
C: An archive as a living thing is always taking on new obligations, and there are major obligations built into the materials it already holds. One of my background tasks, for example, is digitising VHS, SVHS and other obsolete video formats; and audio - from tapes, but also ripping digital files from the CDs and DVDs which used to be the "preservation" storage media...getting them into our digital storage system, with its multiple automated back-up copies, where they will be relatively safe and accessible for years to come. So, in the last month I've digitised, I think, ten video files, and something over a hundred audio files - 20 reel to reel tracks, a hundred or so audiocassette sides, a dozen or more CD/DVDs ripped. And then the equipment itself throws up obligations - weekend days with a great volunteer while he solves problems and replaces discs in the digital storage system, for example. Or other weekend and out of office hours spent with the new computer in the Trust's office, provided thanks to the HLF Transition Grant - migrating out of the old XP into the new Windows 10; failing, and starting again. Learning to be less afraid of technology. But there are other obligations: The material we hold cries out to be known, to be used, to be out in the world, for example: The people whose lives we hold here have a right for their work and their contributions to be seen and heard. And with that in mind there have been three trips, I think, up to Nottingham to record and collect archives from Old Red Hillian and long-time friend and supporter Ralph Gee, who is seriously ill; although with more stamina than I have. I also went up to London to chair Tom Harrison's presentation at the Institute for Historical Research oral history seminar; and I spend a little bit of time helping to look after the British Records Association website.
I: And - thinking of the day-to-day work of the Archive - I presume archives are still coming in?
C: And researchers and volunteers. But archives, Yes: Through the initiative of Tom Harrison I picked up a suitcase of materials from Cecilia Clemental-Jones which are related to the Ingrebourne Centre; she was at a meeting at Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre in Birmingham, and I picked them up on my way to see Ralph in Nottingham, and had an excellent if brief conversation with her - she is deeply involved in Italy with migrants and refugees. There have been a total of nine, I think, archive accessions since the last newsletter. One of these - photographs and audiocassettes from Margaret Sheppard, relating to her aunt Elizabeth Wills - a very early pioneer of occupational and art therapy, and later in residential work with her husband David Wills - is crying out for a blog post which I still haven't completed. Stay tuned. Both Elizabeth and David are reading poetry.
I: And you've also done some oral history recording?
C: A little bit, but not enough. I'm acutely aware at the moment of important things I'm not getting done. Dennie Briggs, for example, is a phenomenally creative and productive individual, with experiences in therapeutic community practically and historically which are unparalleled. He'll be 90 next week, for goodness sake. I don't understand why others aren't beating a path to his electronic door. Diffidence, perhaps, which I could understand because I suffer from it. But at the moment I'm failing Dennie and all the people in this generation and the next who could and should be learning from him. I've also been building various website and web-facilities - for the Oxford Project, for example, and PETT's Stakeholder Forum. And madly listing an uncatalogued collection to help with a police historical abuse inquiry. And less madly sorting, for cataloguing, an extensive and mammothly mixed collection for which we have some funding. And other things. Is this interview turning out the way you expected?
I: Not as I expected, but I think it's okay.
C: It's difficult, because I find writing is like heaving on a heavy backpack and heading up the side of a mountain, especially with so much unfinished work around. I apologise, but I'm grateful for your help. And I apologise because, as soon as we're done, I will remember all the things I should have said.
I: And the questions I should have asked. That sounds like the cue for a Robert Frost poem.
C: As long as you throw in The Pirates of Penzance.
