Craig Fees, "The Archivist Speaks", Joint Newsletter 8 (2003), p. 38
When I lived and worked in a therapeutic community for children, it was the custom among the adult team to give each other considerable warning of major events and changes which were or might be in the offing. If you were planning on leaving the team, for example, you would try to give at least a year’s notice. If you were hoping to change your role within the team, you began the ground work months before.
From where I’m standing at the moment, and I’m actually sitting, I ought to have written this piece about two years ago, before the stock market began its relentless dive, taking the Wellcome Trust’s endowment from £15 billion down to £9.3 billion (billion?!), and in 2001-2002 wiping £5.8 billion off the endowments of the top 500 US universities. From a considerably smaller starting point, the PETT has suffered losses to its investments on a similar scale, with inevitable repercussions. From 2 ½ staff in the Archive and Study Centre last year (including myself), we are now down to just the one; and my budget has necessarily been cut by a third.
We’re not alone. A fellow charity archivist tells me she no longer has a budget; if she needs something, she needs to argue for it on a case by case basis. Indeed, that is how this Archive started out. In the early days, if I needed something, I would pay for it out of my own pocket and apply to be paid back. In this way, when I went over to interview Maxwell Jones in 1990 and to talk about his archives, the Trust and I ended up sharing the costs.
The shadow of this downturn, even if it is slowly beginning to turn around, will be a long one. Those who have money to give have less; those who need it need more. It will take time for the reserves to build up, and the demand to go down. If the current trend continues without change, about this time next year the Trust will put into execution the safety plans that I have referred to in earlier issues of the Newsletter: The archives and their secure and environmentally-controlled storage will be protected, and a part-time archivist will be employed to continue working on and making them available. My job, except perhaps as a part-time or honorary consultant, will go. As far as costs are concerned, expenditure will be minimised, commensurate with the needs of the archives themselves, and the ongoing need to provide a good home for new archives coming in. I would guess the oral history programme would largely go on hold.
Personally, there is an element of déjà vu to all this. The Trust went through a similarly stringent time in the 1990s, when the project was still in its infancy. I was earning the equivalent of a single person’s residential child care salary, which, at that time, was not large. We then, in quick succession and before the Trust’s finances became vulnerable (as now, through no fault of its own), took on a mortgage, lost one of our salaries, and had a child; and to keep the project going over the next four or five years, when a raise of any significance was out of the question, borrowed substantially from our families to make ends
meet - a five-figure debt which we finally cleared about two years ago - as well as selling, for example, a swathe of my books, and some of my camera and other equipment. The alternative would almost certainly have been a very long hold on the development of the Archive and Study Centre at a critical developmental time.
The difference now is that the Archive and Study Centre will survive, and within a few years the PETT’s Conference and Training facilities should be well enough established to begin to make a contribution to the costs of the Archive and Study Centre. The question is whether in the short term it will do more than survive. Over the next year my main task is to see if it can. If each group member of the ATC, and each community within CHG, tithed annually to the tune of about £750, the question would not arise; we could continue on at this same level, and perhaps even grow. But in fact we want to do more than that. We have only begun to scratch the possibilities of an engaged Archive and Study Centre, and to contribute to the strength of the field in the way in which I think we can, we need to enter into a major fundraising campaign. We need to do a concerted survey of the archival sources for the field, for example, and an equally concerted, comprehensive and systematic oral history campaign. We need to ensure that all our collections - archival and library - are fully catalogued, and the catalogues available online. We need to do what we are in the position to do best: to generate information of all kinds, while holding the primary and secondary sources here for public study. We need equipment. We need people.
The fact is, however, that Archives are expensive, and from a grant-seeking point of view are not terribly sexy. If you sit on a charitable board, when was the last time you gave money for archives? Nor do they make money. Over the past fifteen years the Planned Environment Therapy Trust has invested something in the order of half a million pounds in the Archive and Study Centre, and holds almost that same amount in reserve to ensure the Archive and Study Centre’s survival. That is a rare and massive commitment. Very rare, and remarkable.
Over the past year I have been working hard not to become too aware of the task at hand. Without an assistant, and with a massively increased workload, I have tried to solve it the old way, by making sacrifices and working harder. But that is not a good long-term strategy (especially when you’ve got children), and I have disappointed myself and others in a variety of ways. Archives can not be left to fend for themselves, but there will be things that have to go. My current role in the Newsletter is one. If the money comes in quickly, then that will be a good thing, and everyone reading this is welcome to share in making that happen: The creation, much less the existence of a facility like this is rare, and well worth supporting. But in default of money pouring in quickly, the change in my role, which I am flagging, is the shift from doing the work, to helping more to make the work possible. Or, I’m tempted to say to myself, else.
Craig Fees