"IT WAS HELL", RECALLS FORMER CHILD
Very few people are privileged, as I was, to establish something like an archive and study centre from scratch. There is a rarity value to the experience. My cartoon mind brings up B. Kliban's wonderfully adept oral history observation "It was hell..." all in caps, as per the original. Humour and truth in one observation. Or, in Bullwinkle Moose's famous words, "I take a seven and a half."
The experience was special, and never to be repeated. In sharing of it what I can there may be something I can learn. Why did I do it? After I collapsed to the floor sobbing following a long phone call with still another therapeutic community closing - a grown man, for goodness sake, who was very fortunate in that instance to be the only person in the building, as was often the case; and that perennial question, "Is now the time to resign?" - what made those 30 years so self-perpetuating? Well, maybe, in this dedicated section I can find out, and maybe there's a we out there that can find something useful in it as well.
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A short explanatory for those who may be coming into this not having had a chance to read earlier chapters of this website/ "book":
Towards the end of 1988 I was commissioned by a small charity called the Planned Environment Therapy Trust to scout out the implications of a set of scenarios for looking after records concerning planned environment therapy/therapeutic community. During 1989 I was tasked to begin to realise the most ambitious of these. It was for a full-blown, active and activist Archive and Study Centre - archives, library, oral history, outreach, engagement, and ultimately even museum. The core subject matter was effectively intense human suffering, and what could and had been done historically through group work and relationships to ameliorate and resolve it. In other words, it was to be and become an Archive and Study Centre wrapped around trauma, and what can be done about it.
Thirty years after receiving the original commission, and more precisely on December 18, 2018, my role came to end. The Planned Environment Therapy Trust, a small charity at the best of times and envisioning a kind of financial armageddon, passed its baton to the Mulberry Bush Organisation, transferring to the wealthier and larger Organisation its assets, including the Archive and Study Centre, as part of a process of winding down and winding up. With some last minute tying up of threads in the morning of the 18th, and after some hugs and goodbyes mid-afternoon, I handed in my keys to the Archive and went home to sleep.
Seven years later, in mid-October 2025, the Mulberry Bush Organisation called time on its stewardship of the renamed Planned Environment Therapy Trust Archive and Special Collections and the campus and facilities on which it stood, renamed MB3, for Mulberry Bush Third Space; by May 31st 2026 everything would have to have been cleared, and anything still in the Collections after that would have to be disposed of. This announcement came out of the blue, taking even the archivists who would have to implement it by surprise. Personally I was blown away. It took some time for my thoughts to begin to knit, and then it was in response to reading for the first time Robert Graves' immense memoir of World War I and the world which immediately preceded it, Goodbye to All That. There were many moments of recognition and identification. Thoughts became written words. Not in a flow, but in pieces of a jigsaw whose shapes and outline I could vaguely feel. It began when it seemed possible that something positive could be done; but we are now past May 31st 2026, and the jigsaw has taken on a new element: Looking back at the experience of establishing, developing and sustaining the original Planned Environment Therapy Trust Archive and Study Centre through 30 years of international crises - 9/11 and the serial financial crises which followed, wiping huge value off investments and investment incomes and shrinking disposible and research incomes - and of course internal responses to those, notably austerity before the word became mainstream, and other crises closer to home. Basically, archives are personal.
The first chapter: "Archives are Personal: The roots of practice in an archive wrapped around trauma (and what has and can be done about it). Craig Fees interviewed by Jennifer Douglas (2019)"
Section V opens with an interview recorded by Skype in July 2019, some seven months after I left the Archive, when those 30 years were still alive and fresh in my mind, giving it a special character. I had only recently emerged partially out of a kind of long shock, as if thrown backwards into an intensely cold sea, and in this emerging I reached out to Jennifer Douglas at the University of British Columbia. Jennifer was the Principal Investigator for a research project based in the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies at the University called “Conceptualizing Recordkeeping As Grief Work: Implications For Archival Theory And Practice – Interviews With Archivists”, which I had learned about through the MIRRA project at University College London. I got in touch with a long letter indicating what I might have to offer, and Jennifer responded positively. She sent me the project information, and I sent her an even longer personal and professional background paper I had written two months earlier for the 2019 “Archives of Change, Archives for Change” event. Then we Skyped. I have withheld this interview, and indeed originally released it for use by the project only anonymously, because it is in so many ways a complete statement of being and becoming an archivist in an archive wrapped in and wrapped around trauma (and what can be done to address it); and hence has always felt intensely and at points excruciatingly personal. But it feels as if, in the context of this book and events, its time has come.
It is not an oral history interview. The recordings were to be destroyed at the end of the project, and the transcripts were to carry the responsibility of being the authoritative document of record. Consequently we were given permission, and even encouraged, to prepare a finished version which could stand the test of time as a stand-alone statement of what we had said, or had intended to say. Anyone who has worked with an oral history transcript knows how many ambiguities and irrecoverable uncertainties of interpretation there can be, and anyone who has read an unworked transcript of an oral history interview with me will know how many of these there are. Generally I tend to write with some clarity, but speak in confusions, with odd streaks of surprising articulation. I have not changed anything I actually said, but - without the hesitations, convolutions, and my general infelicities of oral style - it doesn't say anything that I didn't mean or intend to say. In bringing it to the website I have shortened it as a reading document by reducing the oral history element, and largely doing precis rather than fully quote Jennifer's interlaced comments. This hopefully doesn't obscure the skill with which she encouraged and developed the opening up of what was said.
The research eventuated in at least two papers, directly, and others as the work out of the University of British Columbia moved forward and outward. One of the direct papers incorporated something I said as the anonymised CA1 into the title. This was Jennifer Douglas (2023) "On ‘Holding the Process’: Paying Attention to the Relations Side of Donor Relations", Archives & Manuscripts 50(2): pp23-42. The second direct paper was the earlier "‘These are not just pieces of paper’: Acknowledging grief and other emotions in pursuit of person-centered archives", Jennifer Douglas, Alexandra Alisauskas, Elizabeth Bassett, Noah Duranseaud, Ted Lee, and Christina Mantey (2022) Archives & Manuscripts 50(1): pp. 1-25.
The second chapter: "Archives are Physical: The Adventure"
In discussion documents for Trustees over the years I regularly likened the Archive and Study Centre to a business, and particularly to a start-up, in which the budding entrepreneur could expect 24 hour days initially and a return on investment only after, say, five hard-working years. It's a perspective I picked up in part from long conversations with Marvin Osband, who was one half of Brothers Foods in Los Angeles, for whom I worked first as a delivery driver for their Chicken Delight fast food place in Eagle Rock and then for their Joe's Italian Foods restaurant in South Pasadena. Marv was a gentleman, whose work ethic and considerate treatment of employees made his understanding of what starting a new business involved worth listening to; and gave me a sense of on-the-job training and insights which, for better or worse, I took with me as the founding archivist for something which, at the time, back in the early 90s, had no natural competition and very few models, locally or around the world. And probably sat uncomfortably, from a business point of view, within a small charity whose entire background was around the Work as Vocation, in which, seen strictly from an employment perspective, we were expected as a matter of course to work more than we were paid for, for less than folks outside were paid. I got into real trouble when, in putting in the bid for the 'Therapeutic Living With Other People's Children" project, I budgeted secretarial and transcription at going rates, which outstripped by some margin what the Trust paid internally. I had to explain that we would not get the grant if we did not put in realistic market figures. Perhaps fatally from a financial spreadsheet profit-generation point of view, Work as Vocation suited my personality and culture, and fulfillment in service-to-others orientation; as did that 24-hour-days, five-years-for-returns energy; and the obvious and self-evident "profit", evidenced in non-financial terms in the way the Archive and its work grew and flourished. All of which translated into and was a partial outcome of, as per this chapter, and in the context of the tight resources available to the Archive, a lot of physical labour.
In some respects this chapter is more oral history than the previous one. I really do prefer to be able to anchor memories to contemporary documents of one kind or another - personal diaries if nothing else. There is an exquisite feeling as the memory bends to the gravity of the original record and fills with a kind of sap of "Yes", of change and then confirmation, or perhaps conformation. One conforms more to the self that lived the time and the experience originally, highlighting the distance travelled and the scenery on the way, and the very different who of who you are now. It is a rebirth and a renewal. But this chapter is one entirely of memory. Everything in it is real - it all happened. The Harold Bridger memory, the slippage on the driveway, is real: but have I blended the occasion when I picked up his library with the day I wrestled around the contents of the garage to retrieve the archives as such? Or were they the same day? Was the van rental company really called Avon? It's a small detail, which has not yielded either to a certainty of memory or to searching the British Newspaper Archive; a small detail which feels decisive. But why? What challenge, what bending, what unexpected horizon of confirmation or rebirth and renewal would a simple ad with the hire company's name in it make? That's the adventure, of being changed in the present by who you were, as liberated and chllenged by the immutable, archival then. The experience of a former child in care, encountering their care file for the first time.
