...before disappearing into the physical business of putting this Newsletter together, I was able to move about 350 boxes
into the new archive stores...(Joint Newsletter 4)
If relationships and listening and their enactment in building and realising the purpose and meaning of an Archive wrapped around a traumatic core, and suffused with loss, was the first thought and hence chapter to come up in this new section on the Archive as Personal, then the second thought and chapter is the sheer physical demand of building and realising such a thing. Archives are Physical.
And the first memory to come up there was of my 50th birthday, when I got up and went early to pick up a van at what might then have been Avon Self-Drive Hire, before the Avon, which flowed along Evesham’s Crown Meadow, meters away across Waterside, overflowed and drowned it one too many times. The manager was Alan, who had checked out many vans for me over several years, and checked them back in.
I was bound for Southampton, and Harold Bridger’s house, some two and a half hours away. The house was downhill from the road; with a short but surprisingly steep concrete driveway when the van was fully loaded. It really was mere yards from the road to the garage to which I backed the van, and in which, along with many other things which fill a garage, the main body of his records were stacked. He was about to move into managed accommodation. The house inside was not in disarray, but everywhere was in movement: piles of paper through the living room and into the bedroom; things looking like bereft islands in the absence of things already given or thrown away, small survivors. And furniture.
This will have been the visit when, to my surprise, he gave his glass-fronted bookcases, which he’d bought for his first flat in London; special only because they were his, and had been among his first purchases in civilian life after the War. They will have been the first things I carried by myself and hoiked into the van, securing them against the back of the cab wall, and protecting them with blankets. I would then have begun the process of sorting through the many things stored in the garage to identify and liberate his Tavi and other boxes - highly structured, and suffering to one degree or another, although not to the point of mould or infestation, the sad effect of things stored in garages. In visual memory it was not only a small garage, but wooden, post-WWII vintage when British cars were still small. A shed.
It is hot work, with much lifting and replacing of boxes, and of carrying and setting boxes, like laying bricks, dry-laying bricks, in the van; building a self-securing matrix several layers deep. Far more than I had anticipated, ultimately testing the load-bearing capacity of the van, and taking far longer than I had imagined. It may have rained or been raining. The van certainly, even in first gear, refused the slope up to the road on the first asking, and was not happy to be forced to regroup and reconsider. The spectre of offloading something to lose weight was appalling. Finally making it up and to the main road was a huge relief and part of a longer and slower return drive, in a van whose weight gave it a life of its own. Southampton’s confusing motorway system - I‘ve never been and not got lost somewhere, and had to backtrack and try again. Aiming for a 5 c’clock return to avoid an extra day's hire charges; in February darkness.
Arriving late to the Archive, and backing up to the patio doors which were closest to the Archive proper. Reversing the loading process, carrying boxes into the User’s Room. Hoiking in the hardwood-skinned plywood-based and hence fairly light book cases, but with awkward cupboard doors and sliding glass fronts. Locking up. Setting alarms. At some point I must surely have phoned Alan, even though it was in the days before I had a mobile phone. I hope I did.
It was very late when I finally got back to Avon Self-Drive Hire. Alan was still there to check the van back in. He had waited because he knew it was my birthday. And then I drove home.
One of life’s pleasures was running into Alan in Evesham soon after he’d retired, thanking him, and talking about his grandchildren. He was revelling in them.
*
In the Archive, and serving the wider constituency, I found a happy conjunction between my earlier life as a (theatre) carpenter, electrician, sound man, stage manager, director, and even set designer and scene painter, with a fondness for physical labour, and the demands of a financially tight but needing-to-be done job of building, in some cases quite literally, an archive and its collections, involvements, and profile.
There is a photo that Gary Winship took of me at the end of the conference at the University of Essex honouring Bob Hinshelwood on his retirement in 2009, before I had begun packing away the various devices, microphones, cables and equipment involved in recording the event. It was traditional for me to be the last person in the room after recording events, as well as one of the first ones in at the beginning of the day, to scope up room usage and speaker placements and set up before the panels and audience arrived. The trip to the University of Essex for Bob’s Festschrift, theoretically a three and half hours from home, with probably a ten o’clock conference start, meant a very early start to the day. The car park was miles from the venue, or so it felt, manually packing everything in by hand, and even farther packing it all back out again, followed by the long drive home and processing the recordings before going to bed. A full day with a conference in between.
But this is what it was like recording events generally, those which weren’t held in the Archive. Early morning train to London, to SOAS say, to arrive when the doors opened, to ascertain the lie of the land before committing to cabling and gaffer-taping everything down, and putting mics and machines in place. Humping everything from devices and tripods and extras for every foreseeable contingency in a well-packed large backpack on my back and equally well-packed day-pack on my chest, balancing one another.
It’s no wonder that in Gary’s photo I looked blitzed.
My favourite was an ATC conference at Cumberland Lodge in Windsor Great Park (I loved how the gates to the Park just opened automatically, and majestically, to let me through) which had something like five or six groups spread around the buildings meeting simultaneously, and I got to dash around covering myself in sweat to set up, record, retrieve and conclude. For these events and others with multiple simultaneous groups I had to pull together a range of devices - my old Uher Report 2000 L reel-to-reel from my PhD days, digital video cameras run as audio recorders; mini-discs; and of course my own digital audio recorder and hopefully the Archive’s back from loan. It was an adventure.
But actual building as well - all of the Archive’s shelving, initially in 2x2 and 1x3 planed but unvarnished pine timber for the original Archive and Archive store (see here), some of which was carried over into the new and was still in use up to the time of closure, forty years later. Then the metal racking - the Canadian-based company E-Z Rect out of Oxford gave me cut-price on colour-mismatched seconds and for picking them up myself on my runs into Oxford to interview or to pick up boxes and other conservation materials from Conservation Resources, again to hold down the cost. Building the work-surface in the restricted work-room area using the offcuts of a kitchen counter installation; drilling the wall and installing and wiring an extraction fan to circulate air out of the room and into the outside, getting the polarities right, and helping with the movement of air through the Archive generally. And then the bulk of the Archive shelving, acquired under pressure as the new construction neared completion and sourced from a Society of Archivists’ recommended supplier, which took days and days to assemble, whose apparent lowest-bid price ballooned, and whose utility for the purposes of archive storage and the free circulation of air was not a patch on E-Z Rect.
*
And then: through lack of communication no provision had been made for the (ultimately fateful) air conditioning ducting for the new Archive stores, and once everything was built and signed off in 2002, I hired a rotary hammer drill and core drill bits for twenty four hours to put the necessary holes through external and internal walls and steel-reinforced floors. Far too big a job, really, and I worked late into the night having started early, messing up my shoulder (awww...), but getting the holes drilled in time for the installation of the ducting, and the hired drill and bits back within the 24 hours. The ducting and air conditioning were installed by a local company called Broughton Electro-Air, owned and run by Charles Round, who did much for the American and UK forces during the Iraq War when specialist air conditioning was needed for military vehicles operating in sand and severe desert conditions, and who had adopted us as a good cause in the early 90s, with our earliest environmental control system in the original archive store.
*
The lack of resources, financial and in people to help, was a kind of blessing, in that it collapsed any distance between the Work and the work involved in realising it; it made it more personal, and it meant innovating and working-around; and in the case of building websites, which I did as a largely unpaid service of encouragement and support from the Archive for a number of communities and therapeutic organisations and institutions - which was very time and labour intensive back in the late 90s and 2000s, when more was manual html, and perhaps more so in the days before people understood websites generally, and would ask for exceptional things, like an entire change in livery for a just-finished site - required exploring and sourcing tools and approaches which required little if any money, while giving a professional result. I used to say to people working in larger and better-resourced organisations that if we could do it, they could, which was true. In the first decade or more of websites it was also a wild west in the world of Internet Service Providers, with smaller but responsive and resource-and-facility-generous firms being gobbled up by larger and still larger and more distant ones, creating real problems in continuity and retention of agreed tools and resources; with the additional problem of websites being taken over by organisations and then abandoned by their builders, and having to go in to try to rescue hostings and sites in this strange and shifting environment.
But it was fun.
As were the early days of hosting events at the Archive, when there was everything to do - preparing bedrooms, cleaning, setting up, running, recording, taking down, plus paper work and communication. Or in putting together the Joint Newsletter, editing, writing, compiling, type-setting, late into the morning - 3am, 4am - and then taking the pdfs into Cheltenham to Jeffrey Thoroughgood and RapidPrint, as it was then, to be printed; then picked up; then - with the help of the children sometimes, and probably others - stuffing, addressing and putting stamps on the A4 (or foolscap?) envelopes and then stuffing them into the few post boxes in either Evesham or Bishops Cleeve with wide-enough mouths for a hundred and more. It was an adventure.
Less of an adventure was the sheer physical labour involved in moving boxes: archive stores may seem static, and perhaps in more established archives they are, but in one which is perpetually growing and being added to, there was constant movement. Once we established a hosting relationship with the Mulberry Bush School during the Therapeutic Living With Other People’s Children project, a school van would sometimes arrive unannounced and unplanned for, and disgorge - well, between us the driver and I would haul everything into the User’s Room, where I would scratch my head and wonder where it could go. During one August holiday season, when I could count on few distractions and could catch up on the Archive backlog, it meant first putting away all the copying and recording equipment and all the carefully laid-out piles of tasks to be done, before tackling the new arrivals. The Mulberry Bush files had to be readily accessible, because they were still from time to time being used - a court case would come up, or a need for information on or a reference for a former staff member. They also needed to be together and in order. This led on that occasion to completely repurposing a side-workroom, turning it into a dedicated Mulberry Bush store; and on other occasions, meant major relocations of other collections upstairs to enable newly arrived boxes to be with existing Mulberry Bush boxes. Entire weeks could simply disappear in lifting and carrying; and certainly that August did. But that is just one glimpse into the perpetual restlessness in the archive stores, and a hint of the brute manual but fine mental and logistical labour involved in managing space where there often seemed, and often was, no obvious space. It was, to go well back into my college theatre days, a case of continuous and creative, and therefore rewarding, improvisation.
