Working in the archive on Saturday, my son and I fit in a bit of ersatz-golf in the Field, having discovered a half-chewed golf-ball in the woods, and then drive up Church Lane through what looks like a crowd of pilgirms (but not the Father kind), and wait with open window discussing events with a local couple walking their dog while an immense fairground lorry tries to make a very tight turn out of the gates to Toddington Manor. Apparently Damien Hirst puts on an Event for the children and people who work for him each year, and this is the third of three huge trucks departing in convoy. They take the turn towards Cheltenham. Puts me in mind of the disparaging remarks which C.R. Ashbee made about the fair put on for his people by Lord Gainsborough on his estate in Chipping Campden, back at the beginning of the 20th century; to which Harry Osborne, writing as a former child who actually attended that fair and enjoyed the heck out of it, responded with unascerbic point back in the 1980s, his memories, an ordinary person, a useful counter to the better-known memories of a famous man. Perhaps that's the meaning of the shark in the formaldehyde.

Spent the day here at the Archive with Ruth Crocket, Richard Crocket's daughter. (Who was Richard Crocket? Founding Director of the Ingrebourne Centre therapeutic community, and founding member of the Association of Therapeutic Communities? See brief biographical article). Going through trunks of material which came out of the house in Oxford after Richard died, and stored here until Ruth had had a chance to go through and set aside material not intended for deposit. Not so much of the latter, as it turns out, at least on first viewing; but while going through objects and manuscripts some interesting and exciting things emerge. A plan for a cottage sharing scheme which he realised later is sketched out as early as 1960, a working out of psychotherapeutic community processes in an everyday environment. Tuning forks and a variety of knee hammers from his neurological testing days. A reconnection letter from Bonn, immediately after the Second World War, illustrating in one life the immense destructiveness of the Nazi regime on German citizens who did not wholeheartedly support it. Material on his visits to Germany before the war, as a boy. Personal and family correspondence, pre-war and post. Research material from his time as tutor in psychiatry at the University of Leeds, 1950-1954. Drawings and paintings. Published and unpublished writing. An immense amount of material, now waiting to be catalogued.

Among the manuscripts there is a four page sketch that begins:

"On the use of the word 'enemy'

Sutherland [this will be his friend and colleague Jock Sutherland, with whom he trained before the war] remarked on Wednesday that the question 'What would your worst enemy say about you if asked?', included in that battery of tests given to officer candidates, elicted the reply "I have no enemies" in a moderate proportion of cases. Miller has therefore modified his question to 'What would a severe critic say about you.' But Bion concluded that the question ought to be left unaltered as, he said, a man without enemies was immature and not qualified for officer status.

It is a matter involving a delicate nuance of meaning..."

The whole of the manuscript is reproduced with Ruth's permission in pdf format here

"The past six months have been hurry up and gets, and in an archive, where researchers and accessions are coming in all the time, and the world stands nowhere still, that leaves a lot of catch up time to doing" he said in that peculiar Western dialect, part Texas, part California, part Cache de Poudre and trout wriggling in the stream. "Boy for some mountain air, and summer smell of pine", he said, and then rang off.  I knew what he meant. It has been a rare old start to 2008 here as well. Hence this first diary entry in so many months.

Isaiah 28:23-29

23. Listen to what  I am saying; pay attention to what I am telling you.
24 No farmer goes on constantly ploughing his fields and getting them ready for sowing.
25. Once he has prepared the soil, he sows the seeds of herbs such as dill and cumin. He sows rows of wheat and barley, and at the edges of his fields he sows other grain.
26. He knows how to do his work, because God has taught him.
27 He never uses a heavy club to beat out dill seeds or cumin seeds; instead he uses light sticks of the proper size.
28 He does not ruin the wheat by threshing it endlessly, and he knows how to thresh it by driving a cart over it without bruising the grains.
29 All this wisdom comes from the LORD Almighty. The plans God makes are wise, and they always succeed!

Lessons (please feel free to add)::
1. Archives are made to be used, not simply prepared for use.
2. If you see someone using a heavy club to beat out dill - no matter what they tell you - they have not been taught by God.
3. Where do you turn when you forget the inventors and originators of ideas, practices, tools?

12 October 2007

The Trust's AGM is coming up at the beginning of next month. They must wonder from time to time what I do with their 20 hours per week. Not keeping an up-to-date online diary, that's for sure. A lot at the moment going into grant applications, and the IHWTE Conference coming up (see http://www.ihwte.org.uk). But archives - the work of archives - requires a surprising amount of labour and attention, and even with the "elastic hours", as they are locally called, and even when nominally there might have been forty, there has never been enough time. There are basics that have to be done, however unglorious, and however little related in any obvious way with income generation. Not made easier by one of our key databases being locked away on a hard-disk sent off for repair: recoverable, I'm pleased to say, but blackwalled somewhere in the fast recesses of the postal strike. With thousands of archival CDs/DVDs, how do we find that One; that needle; that one object which is needed by an enquirer.

Found it. The database merely reflects a structural logic, it doesn't create it. Know your structures; know your archives.

Secure your backup.

And wonder about the inability to describe: The silence of the limns.

September 28, 2007.

Have just added 2007.065 to the Accessions folder of the blog. I was introduced to Richard Crocket through Malcolm Pines, who came to the Archive and Study Centre in 1998 while working on his research for the first Maxwell Jones Lecture, set up to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Henderson Hospital. The 60th anniversary is being celebrated this year, amid the uncertainty introduced through the new NHS funding method.

Dr. Pines borrowed a tape recorder, and with David Millard - who I also met through this encounter, and is now a valued Fellow of the Institute for the History and Work of Therapeutic Environments - recorded a discussion with Richard Crocket on Trigant Burrow. This tape is in the oral history collection, (T) MP1. I followed in their footsteps, and over the course of the next four years recorded 20 tapes. Richard died last year, and the set I gave to him, with the transcripts, have come back with the most recent accessions.

Tom Harrison and Ravinder Kaul in the Archive, listing the Harold Bridger archives and carrying out digitisation survey: Will use the information to apply for grant to digitise archives.

Elaine Boyling, University of Birmingham PhD studentship recipient researching Quakers and Therapeutic Community is in cataloguing MacGregor Hall Archives.

I've hoovered the Archive and edited, formatted and uploaded articles to the Archive and Study Centre blog, and the IHWTE blog.

Musn't forget to turn off fan helping to air the Richard Crocket Collection (were stored in metal trunks - one his own, S/Ldr Crcoket, WWII) - in damp places. Only one trunk badly affected by mould. Remembered I'd left the fan on while walking the dog on Friday night. Didn't realise there would be a group here. Arrived about 11.45, totally dark building, loud meditational music coming from the Common Room. No one stirring. Took off shoes and made as little noise as possible while navigating around the building in the dark. Found fan. Turned off. Home just after midnight.

Packing up hard disk of failed computer to send for data retrieval. Thought it was being automatically backed up on our Back-up system, but not. Came in over weekend to complete copying of CDs of Maxwell Jones Lecture for Henderson Hospital, ten sets of 2 each, plus one set for speaker Anne Aiyegbusi and another for respondant Gary Winship. Managed to get everything but programs off my old office computer before it finally died at the end of last week. That's three computers (three old computers, two were still Windows 95) in the space of about a month. Interesting dependence one develops. Interesting time-devouring disturbance when they die.

Videozilla downloaded, to prepare videos for output; but video-to-computer device also died last week, limiting what we can do. Interestingly time-devouring....